Which is how Stapleton came to be sitting in the jump seat across from me and Mahoney, his wrists in handcuffs, and an FBI SWAT medic working on his head wound.
“Talk,” Carstensen said.
Stapleton didn’t stop talking as we picked up speed, and the pilot attempted to call the air traffic control tower at the Atlantic City airport. I admit to being fuzzy on that flight, but everything the security director was saying fit with what we’d suspected.
The pilot called out, “Are they in a Gulfstream?”
“Yes,” Stapleton said. “Don’t let them off the ground. They can fly more than six thousand miles in that thing.”
“That’s them,” the pilot said. “They are taxiing toward the runway and ignoring air traffic control orders to turn about.”
“Move!” Carstensen shouted.
The pilot juiced the chopper to its limits, one hundred and forty-five miles an hour. Then he dropped speed and swung the bird past the airport tower.
The Gulfstream was just making the turn onto the runway when the pilot flew over the top of the jet, passed it, and hovered broadside over the runway. The jet kept coming. Carstensen slid back the side door of the chopper. Five FBI SWAT agents aimed automatic weapons at the cockpit and the pilot.
The jet stopped. The engines died. The jet’s pilot put his hands up.
We landed. The SWAT officers surrounded the jet.
“This is the FBI; open the door and come out with your hands up,” Carstensen said over the helicopter’s loudspeaker. “Now.”
Two minutes later, the airplane door slowly opened and let down the staircase.
Austin Crowley came first, blinking nervously behind his thick glasses, the fingers of both hands interlaced on his head. Crowley’s partner, Sydney Bronson, had his hands up but was openly defiant.
“What the hell is this?” he cried after agents grabbed Crowley and slammed him facedown onto the tarmac. “Why are you—”
Two agents dragged him off the staircase, threw him down beside his partner, and restrained his wrists behind his back.
I looked at Carstensen, who nodded and said, “All yours, Dr. Cross.”
“Austin Crowley, Sydney Bronson,” I said. “You are both under arrest for conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.”
Chapter 103
At ten o’clock the following morning, outside the northeast gate to the White House grounds, Bree and I met Mahoney, Carstensen, and FBI director Sanford. After presenting our credentials, we were waved in and soon found ourselves standing in the hall outside the Oval Office.
“You good?” Bree whispered to me.
“Slight headache.”
“I didn’t mean your head.”
“I know. I’m good.”
I don’t know why, but I was good, strangely calm when the door opened and we walked in. The room was fairly crowded with people I recognized. Some were cabinet members. Others were leaders from both houses of Congress and from both sides of the political aisle.
All nine Supreme Court justices were there as well. And Secret Service special agent Lance Reamer, and Lieutenant Sheldon Lee of the Capitol Police. Bree went and stood by them.
President Talbot was on his feet behind the Lincoln desk, looking grim.
“What the hell happened in Atlantic City? No one will tell us anything.”
“We’ve been sorting that out all night, Mr. President,” Director Sanford said. “It seemed easier to brief everyone who needed to know at once.”
“Well, then,” Talbot said, irritated, as he sat down. “Get on with it.”
Sanford glanced at Carstensen, who said, “Two of the assassins are dead.”
That set off a hubbub that lasted several moments before she continued, “They were killed on the boardwalk in Atlantic City last night.”
Chief Justice Watts said, “Who were they?”
I said, “One was a notorious Hungarian contract killer named Kristina Varjan. The other, who we believe was President Hobbs’s killer, is as yet unidentified.”
The Senate majority leader said, “Explain how you caught up to them.”
“A fluke, Senator,” Mahoney said. “We were up in Atlantic City following a different thread of the investigation, and we spotted them.”
“Doing what?” the House whip asked.
Carstensen said, “They were shaking down their employers.”
“You mean whoever hired them to do the killings?”
“That’s correct,” the FBI director said.
“So who are they?” the secretary of the interior asked.
“Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, co-founders and owners of the largest e-sports company in the world.”
That set off another animated reaction in the room. E-sports? What?
“You’re sure about this?” the Senate majority leader said.
“Yes,” I said. “When I spotted the three assassins in Crowley and Bronson’s skybox, they evidently were there demanding payment for the killings. They got Bronson to transfer millions of dollars in Bitcoin to so-called hard wallets — small, densely encrypted thumb drives — that the killers took with them.”
I could see skepticism on the faces of many in the room, including the president.
“They told you this?” President Talbot said. “They confessed?”
Sanford said, “No, Crowley and Bronson tried to tell us the three were just sophisticated robbers who’d heard about the purse for the tournament being in Bitcoin and taken advantage of the situation.”
I said, “That was nonsense. Stapleton, their director of security, was beaten by the assassins, and he overheard the conversations that occurred in that skybox. When we hit Crowley and Bronson with what Stapleton told us, they denied it and said they’d sue us and him.”
Carstensen smiled. “Until we showed them that Stapleton had recorded almost the entire thing on his iPhone. Then they caved, admitted they were the masterminds.”
The chief justice said, “Why in God’s name would they do such a thing? These are video-game people, right?”
“Sophisticated video-game people,” I said. “Expert coders. MIT- and Harvard-smart. And arrogant about it. I think they thought they’d never get caught, that they knew enough about the dark web to get away with playing behind the scenes, anonymously hiring assassins to topple the U.S. government.”
“But why?” the chief justice said again, growing irritated.
Carstensen told him that Bronson and Crowley said that they hadn’t planned to kill the president. Not at the outset, anyway. They had been spending more and more of their time exploring the dark web, doing research for future games, and they’d come upon a site that offered killers for hire.
“They claim they got on the site to see if a game they were designing was plausible,” Mahoney said.
“I’m confused,” Talbot said. “This was a game? A goddamned game to them?”
“At first, sir,” I said. “Then President Grant died. And someone made them realize they had a unique opportunity.”
“What opportunity?” the House whip said.
“Ultimately?” I said. “The opportunity to make Bitcoin, lots and lots of Bitcoin.”
Chapter 104
Most of the people in the Oval Office that day had vaguely heard of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but we gave them a crash course in the so-called block-chain technology that underlies digital money and keeps trade in it relatively anonymous.
“A lot of very smart people think this is the radical future of money,” Director Sanford said. “So ask yourself: What would you do if you were Crowley and Bronson, two of those very smart people who think Bitcoin is the future, and you owned a huge e-sports company? Being entrepreneurs, you’re looking to the future, trying to tie your company to potentially radical change. What business would you want to be in? What business would it make sense to be in?”