Bitcoin Clowns, page 11
part #3 of Master Shanghai Series
“You’re stepping on my hand!”
“Don’t fight with an old man!”
People around me clambered over each other to catch the falling Gold Cows.
Why, you may ask. Numbers ticking up in a bank account is nothing compared to actual, tangible dollar bills that one could touch and smell and even geeks obsessed with everything digital occasionally fall for this trip. To be honest, I might even have elbowed a couple of people in order to grab myself a few to compensate for my attendance at the boring conference, and I couldn’t care less.
Eventually when the flying bills settled and the last stray ones got snatched up by the closest contestants, Terry got into his speech.
“I have to admit, that because Damon’s speech is always a tough act to follow, I have to resort to extreme measures.” Everyone laughed, not really at his joke, but at the sweet thought of the free moolah. “I think my tactic worked very well. — Even our beloved Cryptocurrency expert Jong He from Max Venture dived for them!” I quickly stuffed the dollar bills into the inner pocket of my overcoat and gave a weak smile of contempt for his tackiness.
Terry continued, “Jong demonstrated a very important fact today, that money today is better than money tomorrow! Money in hand is better than money in a bank! — Which is why, we are going to let everyone who signed up to our HYBIT88 today a 20,000 Yuan reward! Take out your phone and scanned the code on our staff’s hands now to participate! The offer is only valid until midnight tomorrow so do it immediately or you will miss out forever!”
I was still gawking at the mention of a 20,000 Yuan reward, when Terry, as if the commander of a military unit, waved his arms towards the MCIC staff each carrying a big ass billboard of a QR code linking to the HYBIT88 Fund registration site, and the faithful soldiers poured into the rows.
“And I’m not done yet! HYBIT88’s secret weapon, is that the more people you invite, the more you’re going to receive. Max Venture offered 2% commission for their TandemShares, right? — We’re going to add 5% to their meager 2%!”
“Awesome!” A young man exclaimed to his neighbor, who lamented that he should have introduced his friends into the world of Crypto-funds after the offer came out.
Terry continued to hammer in his message, “Do you know what that extra 7% means? It means an extra car, it means an extra bedroom, it means extra stability in your life! For sure you’re going to make a decent profit from HYBIT88, but on top of that, for every new member you introduced, you are going to make 7% of what he or she purchased in HYBIT88 shares. So sign up yourself, and when you go out there, tell your friends to sign up. Now, instead of listening to me speak, let us hear what my customers have to say.” One by one, Terry introduced a circus of men and women who came up on stage and explained in a few sentences how much they had earned in the past months via HYBIT88 and what they had bought with the money made. He even played a short documentary about how a young man from the village got married to a Shanghainese woman to puff up the attraction of monetary success.
All around me, people pulled out their phones to scan the QR code on the billboards in a mad frenzy like bees on honey. Terry had stopped talking, and he too, took out his cell phone. But unlike the audience, he was filming the mania that he had proudly created. “Jong, come over here!” He beckoned me over and grabbed me by the shoulder as if we were long-lost friend. Before I knew it, he had taken a selfie video with me while holding up a victory sign, grinning from ear to ear. “Brother, this is how we make it rain! Ha!” Terry mumbled then pushed me back towards my seat in the first row.
***
XPCoins, HYBIT88, TandemShares Fund and ETF4CN200 were essentially a collection of different kinds of cryptocurrencies, some well-known, some lesser known, like PissCoins, that were managed by each respective issuer. Whether PissCoin was worth purchasing was debatable if you intend to hold it, but for speculation, it would serve the purpose, despite greatly discouraged, I must stress, and for people who wanted to get rich quick, it seemed like the funds with PissCoins in it was just as legitimate as any. To put simply, a fruit seller would not stop buying fruits from the farm just because he or she knows that one day the fruits would rot eventually, because he, or she, would have resold them for consumption already.
“Not good enough,” Lt. Wu commented after hearing my report on the phone some hundred meters outside of the Hilton where no one should be able to hear me.
“What do you mean not good enough?!” I hissed, then hushed myself again for fear of someone overhearing. “I have just uncovered their multi-level marketing schemes! I could send you the voice recordings if you want. I have lots of them!”
“No, that’s not it. I’m sure. Get yourself invited to the after-party. There’s always an after-party. That’s probably where you can pick up the most dirt. — Look into the flow of their money. Get your hands onto the records.”
“Roger…”
Reluctantly, I walked back towards the Hilton that I had only recently snuck out of. My watch said it was four thirty-five, and I thought perhaps I could just get Miss Cleavage to tell me where the ‘big bosses’ were going to schmooze afterward, get to Bilious to find Rebecca and still show up in time for the after-party. It was then, at about fifty paces from the swivel doors to the Hilton hotel, a man with a familiar figure and hoodie covering the upper part of his face sprinted out of the hotel, and looked searchingly left and right as if he had just lost sight of someone he had been following. I continued to walk towards the entrance.
At about thirty paces, the man spotted me and our eyes met. I suddenly felt a chill down my spine out of realization for who he was — he was the man that rummaged Paula’s wardrobe at my apartment the other day! Before my mind could register the movements, my feet broke into a dash towards the man who was now trying to escape, and that was when someone kicked me from the back real hard and pinned me to the ground, chucking my phone out of my hand. I heard it smashed into the ground with a heavy heart.
“Blindfold him and put him in the car! Hurry!” A man said, as I felt my wrists were bonded together by a cable tie. Whoever invented cable ties, I prayed now, would burn in hell for all the pain and suffering his or her invention had caused to generations of kidnapping victims.
“What about the phone?”
“Pick it up and bring it with us of course, idiot!”
“Yes, brother Axe! Ouuuch!”
“How many times have I told you not say my name out loud in public, dumbass?!”
Ignoring the pain in my sprained neck muscle, I turned my head to look at the face of the man whom I had only just put in jail not too long ago. To my utter horror, it was really him. “Axe?! It’s that really you?”
“Shut up and get in the car, everyone! The security guard spotted us!”
Axe, the swarthy-skinned old man who claimed to be Paula’s father but turned out to be a gang leader, whom I was so sure had been sentenced for decades in jail for kidnappings and attacking police officer at the Chuannan Prison in Yibin thousands of miles away, was now sitting on the front row of the car beside the driver, barking orders in dialect. “Drive faster! Eyes on the road you piece of shit!”
“Can you tell me what’s going on?” I screamed from the backseat as my body smashed against the left car door and then the right car door as the driver swerved his cars around. “How’d you get out of Chunnan?” Chuannan Prison was infamous for its security and harsh living conditions. Putting him there and letting him go again meant at least some serious physical injuries to a few sad prison guards and a bullet in my head in the imminent future, if I didn’t get killed in a traffic accident first.
“Don’t worry, my ‘son-in-law’, I’m not here to hurt you,” his words were followed by a cold laugh, which at no circumstance could be a good sign. “I’m actually glad that we could catch up again! It’s been, what? Almost a year?”
“Why the hell did you tie me up?! Where are we going?” I tried in vain to wriggle my hands out of the damned cable tie which was cutting into my skin.
“I’m taking you to see my employer. There’s no saying of course, what he would want to do with you.”
“Brother Axe, should we take the highway?”
“Of course, Dumbo!” Axe barked. “Do you want to get stuck in rush hour traffic with a man tied up in the passenger seat?!”
“But our car doesn’t have a Shanghai license plate! We can’t be on the highway after 5 PM.”
“We’re fucking criminals, alright? We don’t care about traffic rules, okay? Just take the fastest route out of here recommended by the GPS!”
After about a minute of Dumbo fiddling with the GPS, it announced ‘Destination, Old Beta Paper Factory, Pudong, Shanghai. Distance, twenty-two kilometers. Estimated driving time, forty-five minutes,’ loud and clear.
I heard Dumbo got an earful again by his big brother Axe, and basked in the last bit of consolation that I could derive out of the ridiculous kidnapping situation. “Why didn’t you turn off the fucking sound? The guy knows where we are taking him now!”
“So…do we still go there then?”
“Where do we go if we don’t’ go there?!” Axe hissed at his less-than-protégé, “We’ve made an appointment there with the customer! We will just have to move him to somewhere else after the meeting.”
“Hey, you know, the Lupu Bridge is probably better than the Nanpu Bridge at this time of the day,” I chimed in, my helpful tip was not as well received as I thought it would be. I was knocked in the head by something hard and completely blacked out.
Chapter 21: Bitcoins
“Wake him up!” A man who sounded positively South American spoke in English. It was then I received two slaps on the face and felt that the blindfold around my eyes had been lifted. I assumed that when I opened my eyes I would find myself sitting on a broken wooden stool in the middle of the abandoned aforementioned paper factory in Pudong, but instead, I was brought to a dock by a frozen lake. It was only in the late afternoon, but the sun had already started going down, staining the sky and its reflection on the lake a mysterious, ominous blood red.
Directly in front of me, I saw the silhouette of the South American man in a business suit. To his right, Axe was leaning against the railing of the dock, smoking a cigar. “This is good stuff, my amigo!” He said to the foreigner in English.
The fact that Axe could speak English took me aback, yet there were more shocking things to consider at the moment. The South American man had a gun in his hand, he was presently walking towards me with the gun aiming directly at my face. I dodged.
The cold steel of the gun slapped me twice on the face. “Ey, chico, don’t worry, Mr. Salamandar here is not going to blow your fucking brains out.” A gold tooth glimmered from his mouth when he laughed at his own cruel words that he did not look like he could keep.
“What do you want from me?”
“Mi amigo Axe, tell him what I want!” The man straightened himself once again and waved at Axe, who came forward and squatted in front of me. The ashes from the end of his cigar fell precariously close to the crouch of my pants. I wriggled my bump backward against the cold pave stone.
“Jong, you’re a clever boy, but too clever sometimes for your own good,” Axe said.
“Where’s Paula?” I took the opportunity (which probably would be my last opportunity before my execution) to talk to Axe. “Where’s Jessie? Are they safe?”
“Funny that you should ask about them,” Axe chuckled. “I told you when you visited me that I would only tell you if you get me out of that hellhole. You did not accept my offer.”
“You’re now out all the same! How did you do it?!”
“I have friends,” Axe gestured in the general direction of Dumbo and the South American, “and friends with the right tools — there really is nothing in the world where guns and money can’t fix, my boy.”
“Fine. So where are my wife and son? Whatever that is that you two want from me, I won’t cooperate unless I get the assurance that they are safe.”
“Ey man, what’s he talking about?” The South American shouted. “Did you kidnap his wife and son as hostages? You’re a fucking daredevil, Axe! Respect!” He thumped his chest with his fist.
Axe swallowed hard. Despite the implosion of fears inside me, I could reasonably analyze that Axe did not disclose the fact that I was his son-in-law at some point to his employer. Oops.
“Anyway, let’s get to the point. It’s freezing out here!” The cold had caused the South American to fidget, his gun shaking in his hands ever more vigorously. I ducked slightly under Axe’s shadow lest it should go off without any warning.
“Jong, look me in the eyes and tell me where did you guys hide Mr. Salamander’s money?”
I suspected already that he would ask me something like that. The only reason why gangsters ever tie somebody up and threaten to shoot them in the head was never to ask them if they had eaten dinner. It was always ‘where did you hide my money’ (or guns and drugs. Just fill in the blank.) Still, expecting something did not make it sound less cliché. The only appropriate answer to give in return that would match its cliché-ness in good, old predictable Hollywood action movie storyline fashion, was to say, “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Skip the pretense! You don’t want to end up like Philip Zackary if you know what I mean.”
“Did you kill Philip Zackary?! Gosh, my cousin Cao’s took the rap for what you’ve done!”
“He’s much safer in the prison house, Jong. You can trust me on that.”
“Stop blathering! Where the carajo are my Bitcoins?!”
Bitcoins? Now that was getting interesting.
“I have twenty thousand Bitcoins in my account at Max Venture, and poof, they were all gone three days ago. So don’t make me ask another time. — Where the carajo are they?”
Twenty thousand Bitcoins, at about a thousand US Dollars a piece, would make the missing amount a two hundred million dollar loss! My eyeballs fell like they were about to burst out of their sockets from heightened cranial pressure.
“Return them and I will ask Mr. Salamander for leniency on account of our acquaintances,” Axe murmured under his breath to me. “You don’t wanna mess with the South American cartel, Jong — if you don’t give him back his Bitcoins, his men will come to Shanghai, and more people will get hurt until they get it back.”
Somehow I felt the genuine concern for my safety from the way he spoke, despite him being the one who got me here in the first place. He reminded me of the way Paula spoke to me just before her disappearance at our wedding banquet.
“Where’s Paula and Jessie?” I repeated my unanswered question again, pushing my luck now that I spotted an ounce of benevolence in him.
“They’re safe!” He whispered, then increased the volume of his voice so that those words would have gotten lost in his rumblings, “You piece of shit!”
“Your name is on the management of Max Venture. How can you still say that you know nothing of my money, He Yuan Zhong?”
“We’ve scoured every record in the Lujiazui office and did not find records of the transactions.”
“Well, of course not, if you’re really looking for Bitcoins,” I had to correct their ignorance, “who prints out cryptocurrency transaction details anyway? Just look it up on the Blockchain Explorer.”
For a guy who killed Cao’s business partner and appeared to want to blow my brains out anyway regardless of whether his money was found or not, I felt like my helpful tip was a bit unnecessary. Now the bad guy was going to get his money and kill me all the same. Yet, being just naturally incapable of seeing people conduct themselves stupidly around computers and everything digital, I agreed, before I shit my pants, to give it a try if they could just both put away their guns and gave me access to decent computing power and internet connection.
Old-school criminal Axe actually did not prepare for that and Dumbo, who looked like he hadn’t graduated from nursery school, did not know how to arrange that either in such a short time since the best option, the Max Venture office was now sealed off by the police and was under monitoring by security guards 24/7, I managed to talk them into letting me go to Bilious instead, where I still supposedly work, and use the ‘extremely powerful’ computer there to do the job. Actually any modern computer would do, but of course, none of the idiots around me know that.
Chapter 22: Bilious
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Rebecca caught me as soon as I came out of the elevator. She had likely been watching the live security video feed of the elevators from her office again, as one could expect from a micro-manager. “Oh, you’ve bought…friends.” She looked skeptically at the three men following me out the elevator and said.
“Mahjong buddies,” I said as casually and convincingly as I could to explain why we came in quadruplets.
“Okay,” Rebecca waved off her curiosity for my gaming friends and cut to the chase immediately. “Simon and Ted are waiting for us now in the big conference room.”
“You have to brief me better about the fork. Is it a hard fork or soft fork? What’s the aim and benefit of doing this?”
“Would I have asked you to come and ask Ted himself if I could understand it?” Rebecca dragged me quickly by the reception hall. “Jong, I am putting a lot of trust on you on this, so don’t screw with me. Whichever way you’ll vote, I’ll vote the same.”
“I am glad you recognize my contribution to PissCoin,” I framed my sarcasm as positive as it could be, since Confucius said something once in the general direction that a true gentleman should compete without being competitive, and fight without fighting. Big fan of Confucius.
