Bitcoin Clowns, page 24
part #3 of Master Shanghai Series
There were better ways how an administrator could disable internet access while keeping the LAN network alive, but since I was immobilized, the only way how someone without professional training like Dumbo could do this for me as I was having an unnecessary moral debate with the Norwegian was for him to power down all our servers. That should be easy enough. But Dumbo ran out for a second then doubled back into the office, asking where the server room was.
“It’s inside the computer lab we were in last time! Do you seriously don’t remember?!”
Axe walked towards him and said, “I remember. Let me show him!”
Thank God Axe was here, I thought to myself.
I focused my attention back to Mr. Olaf. “Why would you have something to hide from China’s SEC?” I asked. Pardon my geo-economic judicial illiteracy. I couldn’t for the life of me understand the reason why from Mr. Olaf’s cryptic messages.
“That’s the thing. Hmm…Jong, I can tell you but you can’t tell anyone else. I can give you a part of the profit...”
“I don’t want any of your money, Mr. Olaf, but I will help you as much as I could. This is likely the last time I could help you though,” I said, thinking about my imminent jail time. I supposed I could help a guy while I was still free.
“I can’t find the Start menu button!” Dumbo ran back towards the office and screamed. I sighed. At least he ran and screamed, that showed that he understood the urgency of the situation, despite his technical ineptitude. Axe walked in behind him, the expression on his face one of annoyance. “I can’t find it either…”
I put the speaker of the phone on my chest for a moment. “It’s on the right lower corner!”
“Lower right?!” Dumbo repeated. “Are you sure you don’t mean lower left?!”
“Just do as he said!” Axe yelled at Dumbo for me and got rid of him.
I heard Mr. Olaf said to me through the speaker, “the program manager thought it’s such a viable business model he went and built another one in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.”
“What about it?” Now I felt like a total idiot. I should have been reading up Bloomberg News and Financial Times in my free time rather than gobbling up juicy entertainment news about Marvel’s movie plans and watching Dumpert videos. Too much time had already been wasted for my mental well-being.
“If the authority finds out, they are going to seize all of our equipment. We might get a huge fine and perhaps even revoke our banking license in China. The consequences are unknown. I mean, things are not so clear in your country to us,” Mr. Olaf said.
“Hey, hey, hey…there’s no need to go there. We’re very reasonable people.”
“What happened to the network? I can’t update my emails!” Mr. Olaf sudden noticed. I could hear him clicking his mouse repeatedly.
“Of course you can’t. I shut down the network. No more emails and malicious accesses from now on, until we fix the problem.” I was happy to know that Dumbo and Axe didn’t disappoint me, despite the small hiccups, but why hadn’t they come back?
“We have been ambushed,” Axe suddenly scrambled in and backed to the far side of the room by the window against in the intruder.
“Hi Jong,” it was the voice of the raccoon. Dumbo edged into the room slowly, his body fidgeting, as his eyes darted around the sockets nervously. I cranked my neck and found Cao holding up a gun behind his head and urging him to walk faster. “Why do you always have to work against me, my very own brother?”
“Stop calling me your brother. When did you treat me like your own brother?” I let go of the speaker and shifted myself quickly next to Axe. Somehow it felt safer.
“Shutting down the servers, huh?” Cao laughed at the end of his question. “I can’t believe you have sunk so low in order to stop me. But no matter, I have already downloaded everything I wanted. Usernames, passwords, personal details, bank accounts information. We have made quite a bit from Bilious’ customers.”
“So what more do you want? Turn around and leave. If you hurt him,” I looked at Dumbo, whose legs were now shaking in two different frequencies out of nervousness from the gun to his head, and said, “you’re not going to be let off so easily like you’d think.”
“Ha! Don’t be so naïve, Jong. I’m always a step ahead of you, haven’t you noticed? You’ll never beat me. I’m always gonna be the smarter one in the He family,” then he put down his gun with a smirk on his face. In that moment of confusion, I witnessed the creepiest change of emotion in Dumbo’s eyes. They were from clouded to clear in a blink of an eye. His slight stoop was gone, and his legs no longer shaky. He straightened himself and pulled his dirty jeans jacket straight. Cao passed him his gun and went to sit down on what was my swivel chair. He looked triumphant at us and crossed his arms and legs, as if an emperor looking down at his subject in a royal tribunal.
“What’s going on, Dumbo?” I asked, and turned to look at Axe who was equally confused, and perhaps not only confused, but disappointed. It was apparent that his young protégé had betrayed us.
Dumbo pointed it at me. “I have a name. It’s Jia, like the word for Home in Chinese. My English name is Homie.” I rolled my eyes.
“I don’t care.”
Dumbo cocked his gun in an exaggerated and elaborate gesture and said, “You don’t have a choice, because Homie is going to be the last person you’ll see on this earth.”
“Hold on, hold on…” Cao said to his underling with the fakest smile. “Let’s give Jong one more chance — hello, Mr. Olaf!” He picked up the speaker of the phone I left on the table and said, “Who am I? It doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that I mean what I said in the email. There’s a Bitcoin wallet address in there. I’m sure you know what I want.”
There came a few seconds of silence where Mr. Olaf replied him.
“Jong? You want to know what happened to Jong? He can’t save you. There are only two choices for him. He could either join me, or join the saints in your Christian heaven.”
“Don’t listen to him!” I shouted so that Mr. Olaf could hear me.
I felt Axe scowled at me, demanding an explanation, “I have principles!” I blurted, not knowing where the strange sense of righteousness came from really. And at Cao, I shouted, “Whatever you’re doing won’t succeed. I have a team of people working against you this very moment,” I threatened, thinking of my 9-year-old who was playing Bitokitties at the moment in the back of my head. Very soon they were gonna clear his account out completely by frantically breeding cats.
“How?” He squinted at me nervously.
“If you think I’m lying, go check your wallet! You’ve underestimated me.”
I rarely joked, and Cao realized that quality of mine, and hence he didn’t hesitate. He pulled up his phone and checked his balance in his Bitcoin wallet right away. And when he saw the diminishing balance, the vein on his head looked like it was about to pop any time soon.
“How did you…” his banged his clenched fist on the table.
“I have my ways,” I taunted. Well, I couldn’t possibly just tell him it was because my son memorized his passphrase. It seemed all so anti-climax when cats were mixed into the story. Cao ignored us and typed feverishly on an app, likely trying to transfer whatever that was left to another wallet address that we won’t have access to. When he was done, his eyes were reddened from anger and perhaps even shame. Did he finally realize what his mistake was?
“I don’t like this at all, Jong. I don’t like this at all…” He stretched his neck uncomfortably and sighed.
“Should I?” Dumbo shook his gun at us. It was clear to see that he looked way too trigger-happy to wait for the permission to kill anyway. I found myself flexing the muscles in my legs and bending my knees waiting for the moment where I had to dodge incoming bullets to come, as if an athlete waiting for the referee to fire his pistol.
Cao nodded and mumbled his farewell, “Goodbye, my brother.”
I looked with my mouth agape haplessly at Axe, who looked back at me with a vacant look. If your family wanted you to die, there was really no escaping, although I would like to try.
PEWWWWW!
Suddenly the glass of the floor-to-ceiling window behind us shattered into a million pieces. It seemed that Dumbo hadn’t managed to shoot straight. You could trust me when I said that no one was really surprised. Many international ball games were won by the opponent making mistakes and the winner’s lack of, and not by scoring points. To win, you only need to be less of an idiot sometimes. I squatted and braced myself instinctively from the rain of broken shards of glasses as I ruminated the strategy to win that I had learnt from studying Ping Pong games.
An unexpected heavy blast of wind swept into the floor and almost knocked me over, but Axe grabbed me by the arm just in time.
The wind was so strong and loud I could hardly hear anything, but I could make out what Axe was telling me by observing the movement of his mouth. “We need to jump!” He decreed. By this time I was already so disoriented by what was happening around me to protest against the request to jump out of the 72nd floor. I let him dragged me to the edge of the window as he jogged up to there in increasingly larger steps and we leaped through the opening together.
“AHHHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHH!!!!”
I could hear my wimpy cries in parallel to Axe’s much more manly “RAAAAARRRRR!” that reminded me of battle cries of men running towards enemies that ravaged their village, but I was too preoccupied with flashes of my life’s memories going through my head moments before my imminent death to worry about how I looked, because I was so sure I would certainly not look pretty when my body hit the pavement.
Chapter 43: Stench
And yet something caught Axe’s arm, or Axe caught something in his hand. It was too fast for me to tell. In any case, because, bless his soul, the old Jet Li did not want to let go of me even in such a desperate time, I felt my arm being pulled out of my socket as we experienced a sudden jerk, and lived to feel the pain that came with it, or the pain that I should feel with it but didn’t even though I was practically dangling off a few strands of muscle fibers and a roll of skin in the air because of the adrenalin rush.
A helicopter appeared above our heads, shielding the sun from our visions. I looked up and saw a South American-looking man in a full-body flight suit slowly pulled Axe up into the helicopter. I clambered in after him and the man shut the door immediately.
Still panting on the floor of the chopper, the man lifted me off and put me on the seat next Axe.
“Are you guys okay?” He asked.
I was out of breath and was not able to speak, Axe made a grunt for both of us.
“Muchas gracias por venir!” I heard him said to the guy eventually, coughing in between.
“Mucho…mucho…gracias!” I followed suit with a shaky voice, still in shock about what just happened, and thanked the man with the only words I could say in Spanish which was probably grammatically incorrect. I never had any talent for human languages. Just ask Marvey.
“¡No se preocupe!” The man waved off our thanks in Spanish, then he switched to English for my sake. “I’m glad we came in time. It was very close.”
“Who is he?” I whispered to Axe in Chinese. “Is he one of the good guys or the bad guys?”
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” Axe laughed tumultuously. “Am I one of the good guys or one of the bad guys?” He asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “This is Mr. Armando. He’s the right-hand man of the head of the Argentinian Tortoise gang I was telling you about. It’s an honor that he took my call for help.”
“Did you…how did you??” I was confused. Then I recalled that moments ago while I was on the phone with Mr. Olaf, Axe was standing by the window playing with his watch.
“This is Jong,” Axe pointed at me to Armando, “my son-in-law!”
“Son-in-law, huh?! So he’s one of us!! Amigo!” The man patted me so hard on the back I slid two inches down on the leather seat. “He doesn’t look anything like you. He’s so skinny, and pale! There’s not enough sun in Shanghai, huh?”
Axe laughed at his friend’s assessment as I sat terrified, trying to contemplate how I had just broken off relations with Cao the sneaky raccoon but immediately gained new relations in the criminal underworld.
“John,” he called me, as most foreigners did, “You’ll love it in Buenos Aires. Lots of steak and wine. You’ll recover from all this very quickly!”
Buenos Aries? Did the guy say Buenos Aries?
“Nooooo, noooo,” I spoke up against the man who looked like he could snap my arms in two like a twig if he wanted, “We can’t go to Buenos Aries.” I looked imploringly at Axe for help.
“Don’t worry. Mr. Armando has arranged transports for Paula and Jessie. You will see them there.”
“That’s not…” I just realized that perhaps among the three of us I was the only one who would worry about what I was going to say next, “The police is going to think that I eloped.”
The sudden mention of law enforcement seemed to irritate Mr. Armando. He pursed his lips to one side and asked, “This is your first time, ey? You’ll get used to it. The police is nothing to worry about when you’re out of their jurisdiction. And I promise you won’t miss here a bit when we get to Argentina, especially now you’re with Axe. — Do you know he’s the king of Chinatown in Buenos Aries? It will be like heaven on earth for you there. All the comfort of your country and the best from mine!” He spoke as if remembering the taste of good wine in his mouth.
“But…but there are still people whose lives depend on me in Shanghai. I need to go back.”
“Hahahaha! You? What are you gonna do? Shoot someone? Can you even use a gun?!” Mr. Armando said, half chuckling at my preposterous talk. “I thought guys like you have better brains than walking straight back into the lion’s den! Look at what you just did!” He jabbed his finger at the receding Bilious building. One could still see the gaping hole on the 72nd floor from here. In it, Dumb and Dumber were standing in disbelief, one of them kept firing shots at the helicopter. Guess which one it was who didn’t learn his physics in school.
“Mr. Armando is right. Forget about everything that happened in Shanghai. We have a narrow escape…” Axe peered at the vague silhouette of his protégé who turned out to be a covert agent of our common enemy in visible disappointment. “I can’t save you a second time, Jong. Listen, I have established a very good network over there in South America. We could use someone with brains like you over there in our organization. You could live out your life there with Paula and Jessie happily ever after. You’ll see I’m not lying to you when we’re there.” Axe assured me, and I was too nervous to tell him that in fact I had another girlfriend (and future wife) in Shanghai, notwithstanding my aging parents who would be devastated if I just up and disappeared.
I sat sullenly in the helicopter as we flew further and further from the city that I had lived all my life. The magnificent Shanghai Tower gleamed under the sun in the distant. It was hard to grasp the concept of never setting feet in this place again. Not two weeks ago I had arrived back in Shanghai from my management training in Norway so full of hope and ambition for the exciting opportunities that had opened up to a loser like me. In a blink of an eye, I had lost everything. I think they need to remain Murphy’s Law into Jong He’s Law in honor of how everything that could go wrong almost always goes wrong in my life.
My phone vibrated. It was a spam SMS, but that reminded me of the fact that I still had reception. I could deal with some unfinished business while I still have access to the Chinese telecom network. Braving the pain my dislocated shoulder, I pulled out my dad’s phone and called Marvey.
“How’d it go?” I asked as soon as my call was picked up, but instead of Marv’s voice, I heard Lt. Wu’s infuriated voice boomed from the speaker.
“Jong, I know what you’re trying to do, and I am inclined to trust you, that the hackers were trying to set a trap for your bank, but I need proof,” she said.
“If I have my phone with me, we might have something, ‘cause I have installed a spying app on it. But I have to say that I have dropped it some time ago,” I explained, “the only proof is now in my head.”
“Wait, I have your phone!” Axe exclaimed, and from the depth of his vest pocket he fished out a phone with a smashed screen that had a pinkish plastic cover. There was no mistaking. It was my very own phone. Yes, it was pink, from plastic denaturing. I hadn’t bothered to change it, since I found the process of plastic denaturation so endlessly fascinating.
To my surprise, there was still a mind-blowing 21% battery on my Huawei phone and the Haven app had generated a bunch of new log files in the last hours. I think the world had found another Nokia.
“You’re my savior!” I didn’t know whether Axe realizes what he did, but he did great.
“Oh, wait, I can’t hear you. It’s really loud in here!” I shouted, setting the scene for what I was about to say, and I huddled to the corner and bracketed the phone with my hand, such that Axe and Mr. Armando wouldn't be able to hear me, “I will shoot over a bunch of files to Marv and she will forward the appropriate ones to you — if the app did what it was supposed to do, there will be proof enough for a lot of things.”
“Good. I’ll get some guys to comb through them. But you’ve got to find a way to stop the Bitcoins from the hackers from arriving at the address in Simon Li and Teddy Wang’s control. Once the coins arrived in their accounts, it will be hard to extricate them. How confident are you that you could block the transfer?”
Sitting on a helicopter that belonged to a South American cartel, I had to say my confidence that my fate was within my control had dropped to an all-time low, but I tried to sound as optimistic as circumstance allowed, “It would work theoretically. All we needed to do is to make the system so slow that his transaction timeout. Once it timed-out, the system will refund his coins to his account.”
