The A23 was running smoothly. They had beat the afternoon rush despite the long, sweaty hour it had taken them to transport Wint down in the apartment building’s lift and lug his unconscious person into the back seat of the app-rented Prius. Rob wasn’t a confident driver, he kept his eyes glued to the road despite the navigation system telling them there would be no turns for another thirty miles. Every now and then he glanced at Wint Webster in the rear view mirror. Wint was strapped into his seat with the seatbelt, and his head lolled to one side. He looked peaceful, asleep, with a big shiny strand of drool running out of the corner of his mouth.
Ada was engrossed by her iPhone. Methodically, she kept swiping left.
“Find anybody you like?”, Rob quipped.
“Ha-ha”, Ada said, absent-minded.
“…”
“Wait… Rob. Are you jealous?”
“No…”, Rob said. But maybe he was. He knew it didn’t make any sense. They had an agreement, and jealousy wasn’t within the acceptable parameters of their relationship. Furthermore, he knew Ada wasn’t on Tinder looking for a date. But still, somehow, seeing her swipe past one man after another made him feel insecure about himself. With this buffet of men out there, why would Ada choose him?
“Explain to me again, how does this work?”
“Lukas is not exactly the type you can just message. He doesn’t even use Telegram. He’s way too deep into Starr’s paranoid fantasy land to the point he doesn’t even have an email address, as far as I know. There are… encrypted ways to reach him, but I don’t have the signing keys with me.”
“So…”
“So, the only way I know to get in touch with him is Tinder. That’s the one app he can’t get rid of… he has his basic needs. He calls it Tail Call Optimisation.”
“…”
“Booty call. Get it? I thought it was pretty clever.”
“You’re just browsing every man in London until you find him, and then what… pretend to be some random skank and set up a date with him?”
“No”, Ada said and pushed the phone into Rob’s face. The screen displayed a fake name, but the profile picture was a selfie she had just snapped. “I’ve made a profile that fits Lukas’s… type. Statistically speaking, I should be able to match with him pretty quickly.”
“Ada Loveless”, Rob read out loud her chosen alias, bemused.
“Stop being so grumpy!”
“So let’s say you get matched with him. Then what?”
“And then I’ll swipe right. And hopefully, he’ll see it, and we can talk.”
“That doesn’t seem very secure.”
Ada shrugged. “Security by obscurity. Who would care to monitor somebody’s pick-up lines?”
Annoyingly, it made sense. It’s not something Rob would have thought of, but it might just work. Personally, he would have just preferred opening the rear door of the Prius and pushing Wint Webster out the door of the moving car, dumping him amongst the crisp packets, McDonald’s cups, and the rest of the motorway jetsam. But for whatever reason, Ada still had a soft spot for the guy, and Rob didn’t have a choice but to go with the plan. Besides, she did have a way of being right in the end, even when Rob couldn’t see it. She had clued onto the tracker inside Wint’s head.
“And he can help us get the bug out?”
“Yeah… I hope so. You saw the thing yourself, the wires were going deep into his skull. It’s not like we can just rip the thing out.”
Rob shuddered when he thought of what he had seen. People’s faces bleed so profusely. But what he saw was undeniably there. A small chrome plate, with thin blue fibers protruding and disappearing into his head.
“Even if we could get it out, we need to find out who put it in there. I think Lukas can help us find them.”
Rob had met Lukas once. He was an old friend of Ada’s, from the Tartu university in Estonia. He was a strange guy, but they had gotten along well enough. They both believed in what Starr was trying to do, and as the saying went, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
Rob drove in silence, keeping his eyes peeled on the road. Ada swiped. Miles of English countryside passed by their windows, signs reading English village names that Rob might have found amusing on a better day: Hickstead, Cuckfield, Warninglid, Slaugham.
“Ha! Look, here he is!”, Ada exclaimed. “Super Like! Now we wait.”
“Do you think Lukas can help us get a message to Starr?”
“Maybe. But I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”
“We need all the help we can get. If whoever bugged your friend back there knows about Struct, you’re in huge danger.”
“…”
“Have you heard anything from the Hub?”
“No.”
“I hope they got away in time.”
“Even if they did”, Ada said, “I’d be surprised if they weren’t waiting for them at the other end of the tunnel.”
“There’s a hatch halfway in the tunnel.”
“Wait — what… really? I didn’t know about that.”
“Yeah, it leads to a fork in the passage. The other end is a basement of a chip shop in the Lanes.”
“I had no idea!”
“Yeah. I discovered it by accident. I hope someone else had too. I think Mohammed might. He went back and forth to the city a lot.”
“I hope so too. Those didn’t sound like rubber bullets…”, Ada said, referring to the rifle fire they had heard from the commando team that dropped onto the platform when they were speeding away.
“If they’re gone… we need Starr. This needs to stop.”
“So let’s say we find him. What can he do?”
“He can buy us out of this.”
“I don’t think they’re in it for the money, whoever they are.”
“I mean we can sell the Struct to him. If he has it, it’s no longer our problem.”
“Yikes.”
“What?”
“That’s… I’m not sure that’s an improvement. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”
“You really think he would use it to do something bad?”
“I know he would use it to do something bad. Don’t forget, Rob, unlike you, I actually know Starr.”
“I know him too. You don’t actually have to meet somebody in person to know them, you know? I used to talk to him a lot.”
“That’s the problem. Starr can talk you into anything. He’s really, really good at that. He’s got half of the scene convinced he did Mt. Gox, and the other half doesn’t believe that only because they think he’s Satoshi.”
That hit a bit close to home for Rob. He didn’t believe in the Satoshi story, but he could have easily been behind the biggest Bitcoin heist in history. It would explain his virtually unlimited resources.
“What if he is? Satoshi.”
“Case in point! I can guarantee he is not. Starr is a good programmer, but that’s not his style. The Bitcoin white paper is way too mathy for Starr. If he’d written it, it would have been a fucking screed.”
Rob had no response. He knew she was right, but still…
“Besides, if you want to see Starr, you can just take the next exit and we can go apply for an official visit. I’m sure Her Majesty’s Prison Service would be more than happy to listen in on our conversation.”
Aron Starr, the progenitor of what was now known as the Org, was in the system, but nobody knew exactly where. Five years ago the government had raided his house and indicted him under the Official Secrets Act for his participation in an attempt to hack into the GCHQ, the government’s surveillance arm. He had promptly been sentenced behind closed doors and thrown into prison. Though the Org operated as a distributed graph of completely independent nodes, many of the newer joiners still viewed Starr as their leader. Rob was one of those people. The group needed a North Star, and Starr was a shining figurehead. He was a martyr for the cause: the only person to have been indicted, and people like Ada owed their freedom to Starr who had refused to collaborate and name names. Yet, Ada didn’t seem to see it that way. Rob would have given anything to have been part of the original crypto-punks, to have had the opportunity to work directly with Starr. If they had had more people like himself, Rob thought, they would have succeeded in their plans. And now, Ada had the keys to the kingdom, the weapon that could help balance the scales, but she was afraid to use it…
“Hhhhhhhh.”
Rob swung his head back. “Did you hear that? I think he’s waking up?”
“I don’t think so. He’ll be out for a while still.”
“We should give him another dose, just in case.”
Ada scrunched her face. “I don’t think so. I don’t want to cause any permanent brain damage. Besides, it looks like Lukas has liked me back.”
Rob took his eyes off the road to peek at the screen.
They waited for his message, breathless.
“new phone who dis”