There were little bank accounts, shell companies, and trusts registered there, no doubt every last one of them money-laundering vehicles, but Jack didn’t see any obvious connection to Limonov, nor did he see why a Russian private equity manager and the ex-FSB goon shadowing him would have any reason to go down physically to move money there.
On a whim he ran the rest of Frieden’s contacts, looking to see if, perhaps, Limonov had met with Frieden to find information that led him to the Caribbean. This wasn’t an easy endeavor, because only a portion of Frieden’s contact list had physical addresses for the contacts listed. Jack threw these known addresses into a spreadsheet and searched for BVI references, and then, after finding none, he looked up the phone code for the British Virgin Islands.
Seconds later, he ran a search of the number 284 in the database.
He got two hits. The first was a business registration firm on the island of Tortola. The second, Jack saw, was a man named Terry Walker.
Jack didn’t recognize the name, so he ran it through his database of people involved in the world of international finance. He found no hits on a Terry Walker of the British Virgin Islands, so, assuming there were probably fifty thousand references in Google for both men and women named Terry Walker, he simply typed in the phone number.
Nothing.
With nothing else coming to mind, Jack typed the name into Google, ready to refine it by adding “British Virgin Islands” after his initial search, but he didn’t have to.
The first reference to the name in Google was the man Limonov had gone down to the BVIs to see, Jack knew this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
The flight attendant leaned over him, distracting him from his computer. “Can I get you anything?”
Jack looked up. “Yeah. Scotch. Neat.” And then, “Better make it a double.”
38
Jack sipped his scotch, reading about Terry Walker on the Internet. The Australian was the inventor and owner of BlackHole, the world’s largest and most notorious Bitcoin exchange. Jack found a recent article about the man, and learned his company was registered in the British Virgin Islands, and Walker was a resident of Tarpon Island, an exclusive beachside resort popular with millionaires and billionaires.
Jack knew about Tarpon Island because it was a famous retreat for famous people, and he knew about BlackHole because it was, without exaggeration, a nightmare for those in the world of anti — money laundering. It was something referred to as a hopper, or a tumbler, where all virtual currency transactions could be jumbled together to completely disguise both the buyer and the seller of the currency.
Bitcoin was difficult to trace on its own, Jack knew, but if someone used BlackHole, the best forensic accountants in the world couldn’t trace the transactions back to their origin.
Jack wasn’t certain why Limonov would physically need to meet with Terry Walker to use BlackHole, but he’d obviously gotten the name from Frieden, and he’d obviously made the BVIs his next stop, so Walker had to be the reason for Limonov’s trip.
Jack Ryan suddenly felt his entire operation slipping away from him.
Jack thought for a moment, then pulled out his mobile phone. He was on a European airline, so there was no prohibition against making a call in the air. It was two a.m. in Maryland, and Clark had clearly been asleep, but he answered quickly; a lifetime of never being far away from a crisis meant he knew how to flip his “on switch” at a moment’s notice. It took a second for him to say anything, but Jack knew that was just because John was stepping out of his bedroom so he didn’t wake up Sandy.
“You okay, Jack?” Clark finally asked.
“Yeah. I’m over the Atlantic, inbound to Dulles. Sorry for the late call, but I think I’ve got some actionable intel.”
“Not a problem,” he said, and then, “We’ll get to your intel in a second, but first… I’m glad to hear you got on that aircraft.”
“You ordered me to. It’s not often I don’t follow orders.”
“I just know how you feel right now. Trust me, I do. As soon as you get home you can start looking for the men who attacked Ysabel.”
“Actually, I’m calling about something else. Gavin has tracked Limonov and Kozlov to the British Virgin Islands.”
Clark took a minute to change gears. Jack figured Clark was surprised he was working on something other than finding Salvatore and Ysabel’s attackers. But finally Clark asked, “What are they doing there?”
“I think they are going to meet with an Australian national named Terry Walker. He is the world’s leading trader of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin and others like it.”
There was a pause. “Jack, I’m old. I understand the financial markets, more or less, but I haven’t been keeping up in this computer-currency stuff. Sounds like a bunch of nonsense.”
“I can explain it to you in a couple of minutes.”
There was a slight pause. Then, “Clock is ticking, kid.”
Jack said, “The first way to buy things was trade, right? I have a cow, I want your wheat, so I give you milk for the wheat.”
Clark chuckled. “For the record, I’m not old enough to remember that part firsthand, but yeah, I’m with you.”
“Somebody had to come up with a way strangers could trust each other to give them something else of value. Otherwise everybody would be lugging their yak or whatever to the market.”
“Right.”
“Money came along. Coins at first, but there was no known, specific intrinsic value in the metal. Intermediaries had to insure it. Middlemen — banks, who were like referees. They said, ‘This guy you’ve never met is going to hand you a little chunk of metal for something of value, but you can use that chunk later to buy something of value. It’s okay, it’s legit, we’ll cover it.’ Of course, the banks took their cut for this service, and of course the banks had to have a little information about you if they held on to your chunks of metal for you or loaned you other chunks of metal so you could exchange them for goods or services that you wanted to pay back over time. Borrowers and savers.”
“I’m still with you,” Clark said.
“And it’s been like this for a thousand years. Works pretty well, unless you don’t feel like paying someone in the middle, and unless you don’t want anyone to know who you are.”
“And I guess there are a lot of people who fall into that category.”
“Damn right there are,” Jack said. “World economic output is ninety trillion a year. Think about how much of that goes to middlemen. Banks are necessary and extremely powerful. So along comes cryptocurrency. It cuts away the middlemen. It removes centralized financial institutions and replaces them with self-directed computer networks, decentralizing the process. Once someone figured out how to ensure transactions without recording any identity data about the payer or payee, the system began to grow quickly.”
“How does that work?”
“It’s an independent network-based ledger. It’s called a blockchain. It automatically tells one party that the other party in the transaction is legitimately paying for a good or service. It’s completely computerized, completely peer-to-peer. No third party involved.”
Clark said, “And no real regulation.”
Jack said, “It’s complicated, but yet it’s awesome in its simplicity, and its potential. It reduces fees in doing business, and it completely eliminates the corruption in intermediating institutions, because there is no one in the middle who can misuse information or steal money.”
“So how do you get the little coin into the computer?” Clark asked.
Jack assumed he was being sarcastic, but he explained anyway. “Bitcoin is not a physical coin. It’s digital cash — a long number that you enter. It’s not tangible, not issued by a government, it’s not a semiprecious metal with a dead person’s face on it. It resides nowhere, but it can be accessed anywhere.”