At eight a.m. a showered, shaved, and fed Terry Walker walked around the breakfast table, kissing his wife and child as he went. He waved good-bye to the cook, then headed down the steep hillside pathway to the beach, just fifty yards from his back door. He wore a suit and tie today because he had a meeting, but on most days he just wore board shorts and a polo. Even with the suit, Terry carried a backpack over his shoulder, a particular affectation of his because his large collection of electronic gadgetry wouldn’t fit into a regular briefcase or messenger bag.
A candy-apple-red Robinson helicopter landed on a beachside road promptly at 8:05, as it did every day, and Walker climbed aboard as the aircraft’s only passenger. He chartered the helo every day to cut his commute time down from what it would have been if he had taken a launch, and this gave him a little more precious time in the mornings and evenings with his family.
As he did virtually every morning, Walker sat in the back of the helo and looked out at the villa as he lifted into the air. Then, when he could see it no longer he regarded the resort below, and the rest of the hilly island. And then, when the island twisted out of view, he gazed across the blue-green water that shot below him.
Terry was blowing nearly ten grand a day on the house, the office, the helo, the food, and the rest of this operation, so it was a good thing he was averaging about $75,000 a day in profit from his work. He was making too much money to shut this temporary gig down yet, but, he told himself, the day was coming.
This bit of paradise would not be theirs forever. He’d promised Kate they’d spend no more than one year here in the BVIs. After that they would return to Sydney and then they would do… well, Terry wasn’t sure yet.
He was only certain of one thing: They wouldn’t do this anymore.
Kate didn’t understand exactly why Terry had to work here, and he’d done his best not to burden her with the details. It wasn’t that she wasn’t smart enough to understand her husband’s work. No, Terry Walker did not want his wife to know the ins and outs of it all, the reason he really had to stay here in the BVIs to do his job, because the truth was that in virtually any other place, what he was doing would get him thrown in prison.
Twenty minutes after lifting off, the Robinson dropped him at a helipad just a block from his office in Road Town, on the island of Tortola, and he walked the rest of the way to work. Unlike his rented home, his rented office was utterly nondescript. It was a suite of rooms on the second floor of a two-story glass box building on Lower Estate Road. It might have been the nicest and most modern non-hotel structure in Road Town, but that wasn’t saying a hell of a lot.
Terry’s operation only used a couple local assistants to serve as file clerks and, when clients came in, something of a fake secretary to sit at the desk in the lobby and pretend to do real work. It wasn’t that Terry didn’t have work that needed doing. It was just that Terry didn’t trust anyone else to do it, so he did it all himself.
Walker found it necessary to work here in the BVIs to get around money-laundering laws that he didn’t feel rightfully applied to him. BlackHole was a Bitcoin exchange, and in most every other country his company was considered a financial institution. With this designation came all sorts of regulations, the most important of which was that if he had doubts about the source of income of a client, he had to report it to local financial regulators.
In the BVIs, however, he was able to skirt this restriction, as well as a number of others. He merely had to establish his business here, pay his taxes — plus a few bribes — and then he and his young business were left in peace.
It wasn’t that Terry wanted to dodge the laws of other lands, he simply did not agree with them. He felt the British Virgin Islands was one of the few countries that understood his business, understood that he wasn’t trading, he was merely purchasing something on the Internet for a client, and then selling that something on the Internet to another person.
Of course he was trading, of course BlackHole was a financial institution, and of course Terry Walker knew this, but his moral compass had been knocked out of alignment by the fact he was making half a million dollars a week managing his company, and handling trades for large investors.
He was in a different boat from most people who had to concern themselves with the financial reportings of their clients, because Walker’s clients were temporary. He’d work with a person who wanted to buy a few hundred thousand, or a few million — in some cases tens of millions had been traded — and he’d manage the transaction for them, putting their purchase in his computerized hopper, where it was rendered invisible to anyone who might have the ability to track Bitcoin transactions.
And for a premium, Terry offered another service, one that was not advertised on the BlackHole website or promotional material. For a few well-heeled clients he had arranged their travel here to Road Town, and then he’d structured their transaction in a way that made the movement one hundred ten percent invisible. Even Terry had no way of knowing where the proceeds of these special sales went after the trade was made, since BlackHole automatically wired the money received for the sale of the hopper-hidden Bitcoin into an account entered on the physical computer at Terry Walker’s office. He simply executed the buy of Bitcoin, threw it into the hopper, sold it, then left his office for a moment. His client sat at his desk and entered routing information for the new money, sending it anywhere in the world he wanted it to go with a few keystrokes. The record immediately erased itself from the hard drive.
The perfect move for a money launderer.
This necessitated face-to-face meetings, of course, but normally the person showing up at his office was a cutout a dozen times removed from the beneficiary of the money, so Terry never knew who was profiting from his services.
Obviously Terry Walker was no fool, he understood these special transactions were likely being conducted by criminals, corrupt government officials, or other ne’er-do-wells, but again, Terry Walker was making seventy-five grand a day.
Walker was not concerned about the occupations, habits, or predilections of his clients, but he was obsessed with not getting hacked. It was the terror of everyone in the cryptocurrency market, but for a man like Walker, who dealt with powerful clients with regularity, he knew that losing either money or information that belonged to someone else just might mean a death sentence.
To keep his data ultra-secure, he had something called a cold wallet, a completely offline file kept on a computer in a room with no Internet access of any kind, and he moved his Bitcoin information to it with handwritten sheets of paper from another room in his office, this with computer access. Once he received a new wallet of valuable coins on his computer, he would register the information on his pad, check it three times, then rip out the page from the pad and walk it into his “cold room.” Here he would input it in the file, then immediately slip the paper in a crosscut shredder next to the desk.
When he needed to transfer the Bitcoin from the cold wallet to the network to make a transaction — depositing funds into an account owned by a private trust set up on Mauritius or Dubai, for example — he would merely reverse the process, taking the information off the cold wallet and walking it into his room with Internet access. Here, again, he had a fingerprint scanner, a retinal scanner, and a voice scanner, all of which had to be satisfied that he was, in fact, Terry Walker. He then entered his twenty-digit alphanumeric code, which he had memorized, combined with double-factor authentication.