Maybe there was a way that Krakatoa could bypass the password protection?
Perhaps there was. But there was nothing that Dísa could do about that now. Best to assume the password held and that the twenty million dollars of bitcoin were still there, untouched.
She had her back-up. The paper cold wallet that was buried next to her mother’s beneath the stone at Blábrekka.
She needed to change her plans. It would take her all day to drive Kata’s car to Dalvík if she set off right away. She could grab the cold wallet, send the messages to the Thomocoin investors and then drive off again, either west to the Westfjords or east, before Krakatoa realized she wasn’t going to pay him.
It would be difficult to explain to Grandma and Grandpa at Blábrekka what she was up to, but she would think of something.
She packed a small suitcase, grabbed Kata’s keys and left the apartment for the long drive north.
Forty-Five
It was shortly after 1 a.m. when Krakatoa realized what an idiot he had been. The password-cracking program was still chugging away. It operated in parallel using two different methodologies. One was brute force: checking every letter, number and punctuation mark in every combination. This worked well for short passwords, but not for longer ones — the number of combinations of truly random characters increased exponentially. The other was to combine numbers and letters from a host of dictionaries and lists of place names and proper names. It was almost impossible to memorize, say, twenty random characters; much easier to recall them if they combined words or dates or places.
If someone wrote down the twenty random characters and used that as a password they could beat the program, but why do that? You might as well just write down the private key itself. Yet it was beginning to look as if that was what Dísa had done.
Until Krakatoa realized that his program didn’t speak Icelandic. Whereas a fifteen-year-old Dísa would have used Icelandic words for her password.
Shit!
Krakatoa thought, spoke and wrote in English. His online world was all in English and he kept it that way. He didn’t want anyone to suspect that he was, in fact, Icelandic. Yet he really should have guessed that his own sister would pick Icelandic passwords.
He spent a frustrating hour trying various Icelandic words Dísa might have used, blak for example, which meant volleyball, but he didn’t get anywhere. In the end, he gave up and went to bed.
He didn’t sleep well.
When he got up at nine and logged on, there was plenty going on in the Thomocoin world for him to deal with. And not all of it bad.
Lindenbrook and Dubbelosix were safely ensconced in Panama. No one else in his globally dispersed network of employees had been bothered by the police. And, most surprisingly, Thomocoin seemed to be living on, at least in the eyes of some of its investors.
Thomocoin believers in India, England, the Netherlands and Iceland wanted to fight back against the haters. They were pleased to learn that Sharp had evaded the FBI and the CIA, who were trying to catch him and shut him up. The big banks wouldn’t win! They would never shut down Thomocoin!
Tubbyman suggested posting prices again, at a much lower level. A price low enough to tempt the believers to invest more: $298 perhaps?
Krakatoa told her to give it a whirl.
These people! Really.
Krakatoa was more worried about his own situation. And his twenty million in bitcoin.
He was going to have to action his own evacuation plan as soon as he could. He held the key to a safety deposit box on a small Caribbean island in which was stored a new passport in a new name. He had opened associated bank accounts. It was a name no one would know: not his father, not Sharp, not Jérôme. Not even Petra.
Krakatoa would live on. Jói would be gone. Forever.
Krakatoa had wanted to avoid this if he possibly could. He liked his life in Iceland. He really liked Petra. But he had to face facts. All that was over.
It had been over when he had decided to kill his stepmother.
At the time, it had looked as though he had no choice. She had flown to Reykjavík to see Dad to ask him about Thomocoin’s prospects. One of her investors, Gunni Sigmundsson, was being difficult about the delays to the promised exchange. Helga had somehow got Dad to admit that Jói was involved; not only that, but Jói was Krakatoa, the guy who called all the shots.
So then she had come right across town to Jói’s place in Gardabaer and confronted him, threatening to expose him. Jói had promised to pay her and all her investors back if things went wrong with Thomocoin.
The following day, Helga had called Jói from Dalvík and said she would go to the police if Jói didn’t transfer the funds right away.
What bothered Jói wasn’t just, or even mostly, that he would be identified with Thomocoin; he was still hopeful that Thomocoin might work out in the end. It was that he had got word from his man in the FBI, Goodmanhunting, that the police in Charlotte suspected Krakatoa of ordering Cryptocheeseman’s murder. Until that point, only Sharp and his father knew Jói was really Krakatoa. He could trust them to keep quiet; Jói knew he couldn’t trust Helga.
He would have to ensure she kept quiet himself.
So he had pleaded for a few days — enough time to activate Tecumseh and get him to Iceland.
Jói. Krakatoa. They weren’t the same people. The only way Krakatoa could operate was by keeping them apart.
Jói was a mild-mannered, laid-back Icelander, a games developer with a girlfriend he liked, a few friends with whom he mostly communicated online, a father he loved, a mother he loved less, and a stepfamily who accepted him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. People who knew him knew he was clever. But they didn’t respect him.
People respected Krakatoa.
In real life, Jói was never assertive. He had a low-grade craving for people to like him. He didn’t want to offend.
Online, Krakatoa was ruthless, aggressive, decisive, effective. He had started messing around on the dark web in his late teens, getting involved as an intermediary in minor drug deals. By watching others, he learned to flex his online muscles, to earn respect, to lead.
And he liked it. No, he fucking loved it.
He wanted to build up his own online empire. At first, he had thought of drugs. Then of hacked personal details.
Then a cryptocurrency.
He had come up with the idea of FOMOcoin and through his father had approached Sharp. He had insisted from the outset on his anonymity as Krakatoa, claiming it was for security reasons, but actually because he knew that Krakatoa could do all sorts of things that Jói Ómarsson would never have dared. Krakatoa had outmanoeuvred Sharp and his friend Jérôme to retain 50 per cent of the profits of Thomocoin and, more importantly, to call the shots.
It was Krakatoa who had been ruthless enough to do what had to be done with Cryptocheeseman when he had tried to rip off Thomocoin. Sharp had noticed. The dozens of people who worked for Thomocoin online had noticed.
They never asked questions. But they knew not to mess with Krakatoa.
Killing Helga as Krakatoa had been difficult, but Krakatoa had managed it. Through Tecumseh. Just as he had ordered Cryptocheeseman’s death before her. But to go to his stepmother’s funeral as Jói, to see his father and his sisters Dísa and Anna Rós so upset — that was hard.
Which was why, although he would miss Iceland, he wouldn’t miss Jói and his scruples and his guilt.
Krakatoa had none of that. Krakatoa would live on. Krakatoa had a bright future, even if Thomocoin blew itself up. He had the skills, the reputation, the connections to build up something new, something bigger. He had some ideas already. A new angle on ransomware looked promising.