Cold Wallet, page 23
That first night when Murray broke down my door, I had a secure job at Vaultange, an income, a place to live, girls, money, you name it. I was living the dream. Even better, I had someone I cared about. Even more amazing he cared about me in return. I was happy. I didn’t want it to blow up in my face. Andrew might have understood. He might not have cared. He might have said he believed in the right to privacy. I couldn’t take the risk. I was ashamed. It was easier to help Murray.
Then Andrew met Jess and Murray sniffed opportunity. He already had motive. I was the means. You know the rest. Andrew fell in love and married Jess. Andrew went away. Before he left, he changed the codes to the wallets. The cold wallets I was going to hack in his absence and make it look like an outside job. Was Andrew being security conscious, or did he suspect something? I was surprised. Annoyed. Angry. But I didn’t panic. Not then. Andrew died. Then I panicked. Murray panicked. I don’t like my chances when Murray panics. I had to buy time until I could figure a way out of the mess. Jess was to blame for everything. That much is clear. I saw no reason not to tell others what she’d done. She could take the heat, not me. I think Parker bought it. Murray certainly did. He told the gang who already had their noses out of joint. Without the cash to pay for the goods, the big shipment had to be diverted to Australia. It wasn’t the money, or the lost profits on the consignment which made them angry, it was being seen as an unreliable supplier in a highly competitive market. Not only that, but they had lost face with the cartel. The gang weren’t bothered with apportioning blame, they blamed everyone. Me, Andrew, Murray and Jess. They put the word out on all of us.
Murray and his goons went to ground. So, did I once I’d tidied away my computer. Being in hiding was no help. I could feel them watching me, following my every move. Sooner or later, they’d come for me. If the gang didn’t get me first.
Forty-three
Jess opened her eyes and focused on her surroundings. Damp sheets wrapped around bare legs, her clothes scattered across the floor, a mug of cold herb tea on the bedside table — all testimony to her restless night — and sunshine. Too much and too bright. Annoyed that she hadn’t closed the curtains before collapsing into bed, she groaned and rolled away from the smell of cold cranberries, away from the brightness, and buried her head in the pillow where Andrew’s head should have been. He should be here, warm, breathing, smiling in his sleep when she touched him, his arms holding her safe. All she wanted to do was to go back to sleep and not wake up.
Damn his mother. How could she have seen Andrew? He was dead. He died in Fiji. She had carried his ashes home, and they were in the box beside the bed, the box she reached out and touched now. But someone had brought the old lady toiletries and perfume. And someone had given her a brooch and told her to give it to Jess. These facts were indisputable. A man had visited her and either he’d told people he was Andrew, or the staff had made a mistake, and assumed it was him. Either way, it was hard to take these explanations seriously when his mother had only recently attended her son’s memorial service in the company of a staff member. Maybe the notice of Andrew’s death had not been as widely circulated as it should have been, and the nurse yesterday didn’t know. Maybe she was new. Maybe the blame for the mix-up started and stopped with her. The toiletries could be explained. The brooch less so. Jess looked at her phone. Seven-thirty. No self-respecting manager would be at work yet. She put the call at the top of her to-do list, ahead of worrying about Murray Chambers, ahead of the meeting in Ross’s office and ahead of calling Carole. But not ahead of calling the Prof to talk about when she could come back to work.
Not since being sent to the care home, had Jess had so little control over her life. Those years of being told where to sleep, where and what to eat, where to live and where to go, had dragged by. Day after day of conforming, watching injustice pile on injustice and saying nothing, had been how she had coped then. Silence, keeping her head down, fitting in and doing what she was told. Silence. And being too smart to get caught. Not marked as a troublemaker meant she had been left alone and given the time and space to read and study — until she could escape — which she did. In the time and manner of her choosing Jess resumed control of her life, fiercely guarding her freedom until Andrew wooed it away from her.
Now her life was not just in tatters, it was under threat. Henry and his leaks to the press had all but destroyed her reputation. Hence the need to talk to the Prof. A friend as much as her mentor, she trusted his counsel. He would help her. He would back her up, as not only trustworthy, but as an asset to the profession. He could rehabilitate her. He had to or the last fifteen years had been for nothing.
She was less concerned about Murray Chambers. Mainly, because there was nothing she could do about him. She wasn’t going to search him out. If he wanted to find her, he would. It was simple. If and when he found her, he’d understand she had nothing to tell him. She’d deal with what came next, when the situation arose. Worrying about it served no purpose.
When she heard her phone vibrating on the counter in the kitchen she hoped it was Ross with news of the properties. Knowing she could sell them and pay Johnny back was the one positive among a sea of negatives, yet it was still not enough to motivate her to get out of bed. She listened as the phone rumbled against the marble, waiting for the call to end. No follow-up ping, no message. Ross probably wanted to tell her the good news in person.
Sooner or later, she would have to get out of bed and sort out her problems. She had to be at Martin Derbyshire at ten. Hiding was no more a solution than running away. She groaned, rolled over and off the bed, landing on the floor with a bump hard enough to hurt.
Once she was showered, dressed, and the coffee made, Jess checked her phone again. There were missed calls from Henry, Carole, Ross, Carole again and Ross. No messages. No texts. Nothing from Green Trees. And no reply to her call to the Prof that she’d made yesterday.
Forty-four
The meeting was in full swing when Jess pushed open the door to the boardroom. Lee Smith from the bank was at the front — ginger haired and freckled he suited his Irish accent. He was talking through his power point presentation when he saw her and stopped mid-sentence.
‘Sorry I’m late everybody.’ Jess walked around the table to the chair next to Ross and sat down. They were all there, Parker, the accountants, Adam Heath, Guy Harding, Lee Smith plus two people she hadn’t met. No one looked as though they’d had any sleep since their last meeting, stubble and red eyes, the norm rather than the exception — apart from Henry. Freshly shaved and wearing a snow-white shirt and jaunty pink and green paisley tie, he smiled at her so broadly, so openly, she couldn’t help but smile back before she caught herself. Maybe it was because he was the only friendly face in the room.
Ross saved the day by welcoming her matter-of-factly then telling Lee to carry on.
A screen had been set up at the far end of the table, a stenographer was sitting off to one side. Water jugs and glasses sat at regular intervals along the table, as did small bowls of cellophane-wrapped peppermints. The light on the central microphone was green.
Lee drank from his water glass and placed it back on the table, away from his laptop. ‘We decided it would be best if I started with everything I have in chronological order,’ he explained for Jess’s benefit, his eyes on the screen and not on her. He tapped a button and the presentation came back to life. ‘These are the transactions in the Vaultange current or trading account opened eighteen months ago by Mr Turner on instructions from Mr Cullinane.’ The red dot of the laser pointer zoomed up and down the columns. ‘In total eight million dollars.’ He tapped another button. By the time the red dot reached the bottom of the next column, the balance, which should have been $8,000,000, had been whittled away to $176,000. ‘Efforts to trace the missing $7,824,000 have led us to conclude that it has been split up and sent to different overseas accounts. Hard to find, especially so long after the event. In the worldwide scheme of things, because it’s only a small amount of money there has not been a lot of co-operation.’
‘Can you confirm the bank’s insurance company will make good the loss?’ Ross asked.
Lee flushed red under his freckles as he considered his reply. ‘Naturally, we hope to find the money, but if we don’t then, yes, insurance will cover the loss.’ He sat down and closed his laptop.
‘And the AML team at the bank are aware of the irregularities in the account?’ Ross asked.
Lee shifted in his chair. ‘They are.’ He replied as he reached over for a peppermint, popped the wrapper and put the sweet in his mouth.
‘AML team?’ Jess whispered.
Ross put his hand in front of his mouth. ‘Anti-Money Laundering. Banks are supposed to pick up this sort of thing early.’
Money laundering. Guy had told her that was what Murray had been doing for the consortium. Guy didn’t look up, his face steady and unmoving as the conversation proceeded.
Parker stood up next. She had spent time on her presentation. Instead of figures, she displayed a diagram in which arrows fired off in different directions from a number of blank squares. ‘This,’ she said, waggling the pointer in a circle around an empty square, is the trading account. The words trading account obligingly zoomed in, with whishing sound effects, and inhabited the box. At that point Jess switched off. The arrows and boxes were all over the place. Parker must have spent hours on her little display, and it meant nothing. The money was still missing. The client records were still missing. And the passwords to the cold wallet were still missing. Vaultange was fucked and all the power point presentations in the world weren’t going to change that. Jess wished she hadn’t come.
‘Without the client records which we think were on Mr Cullinane’s laptop, we can’t track down who owns anything,’ Guy Harding said. ‘One of the contractors in Russia who processed the transactions told us Mr Cullinane bundled everything together at his end, sent it over for processing then unbundled it when he got the crypto back presumably to assign the correct amounts to the different clients. A less than optimal system in this day and age. Some, but not all clients have supplied us with their records.’ He sipped from his glass of water. ‘As far as we can tell there should be US$9 million in different cryptos attributable to these clients and held offline in the Vaultange cold wallet.’
Guy sat down and Ronald Barton stood up. ‘As Mr Harding states, not all clients have come forward. An additional thirty-seven million in deposits remains unclaimed. This was deposited from overseas accounts, which interestingly have all been closed, most in the first week of February.’
Jess shook her head as the words sank in. Vaultange, the company she owned was a crime scene. Seven and a bit million would likely be covered by insurance — the rest was as good as gone. Johnny’s face, pale against the pillows, flashed across her mind.
Ronald adjusted his tie and continued. ‘We now know complaints about Vaultange were being made to the regulatory authorities as far back as the beginning of last year, but other than sending emails requesting a response, nothing was done.’ Ronald sat down and tidied the papers in front of him into a neat pile. The stenographer stopped typing.
Jess pinched the soft flesh at the base of her thumb as the import of what she’d heard sank in. This had happened while she and Andrew were enjoying themselves on their desert island. He had to have known there was a shitstorm waiting for him when he got back. She put up her hand to ask a question. Ross pulled it down and leant towards her. ‘Say nothing,’ he whispered.
‘I knew Andrew,’ Henry said breaking the silence. ‘He was a careful guy. He would definitely have kept back-ups.’ He paused. ‘Jess?’
One by one, the people in the room turned to look at her. ‘I … I’ve looked. We both looked. You looked too Henry. We searched the apartment together and we found nothing—'
‘Where did you say the USB drives were again?’ Parker’s voice cut through Jess’s protestations.
‘They were in Andrew’s backpack. The manager of the resort packed it and sent it on after Andrew died. They were at the bottom of a side pocket.’ Jess fixed eyes with Parker just as her phone rang. Damn she hadn’t turned it off. She had to fumble in her bag to find it, the cheery tune filling the awkward silence until she did — Carole.
She tapped the screen, Can’t talk now, leave a message, and turned it off. ‘Sorry.’
‘That doesn’t make sense. Why would Andrew take the back-ups away when he could have left them with Ross or me?’ Henry blustered. The others murmured. They could see his point.
‘You’d have to ask him,’ Jess said. ‘Until I found them, I didn’t know they existed much less that he’d brought them on our honeymoon. I assumed he would have left anything like that with you, Henry. You worked together. You were left in charge. He trusted you.’ Jess paused. ‘Didn’t he?’
‘Seems he didn’t.’ Henry stared at her. ‘Not after you came along anyway.’
Ross raised one hand. ‘This isn’t taking us anywhere. I suggest we take a break to gather our thoughts. I know our stenographer would like a rest. Ten minutes, everybody.’
Ignoring the protests, he stood up, pulled Jess to her feet beside him, before, with his hand on her back, he guided her out of the room and into his office, shutting the door firmly behind him.
Forty-five
‘Don’t you see, that’s exactly what they want,’ Ross said as soon as they were alone. ‘They want dissension. They want someone to lose their temper and blurt things out that they shouldn’t. They’ll have someone to blame then. It’s better for them if they can implicate one of you. Preferably both. This is an expensive and complex investigation. I’m guessing they don’t have the time or the resources to see it through properly. Henry and you blaming each other, takes the pressure right off them. They can put out a press release stating there are irregularities at Vaultange, but there is insufficient evidence to proceed with charges. Their honour and reputations are saved. They make a strategic withdrawal and hey presto, they leave it to your creditors to take civil actions.’ What he was saying made sense. Ross really did have her interests at heart.
‘Well, I’m not going to stay quiet and have Henry make me the scapegoat.’
‘Granted that’s exactly what he was trying to do. Think. Is he succeeding? Or is he making himself appear not only foolish but guilty? Everyone knows the Andrew-Jess timeline. They know you’re a doctor. Not a crypto wizard, whereas Henry had access to the whole shebang. Stay quiet. Let him hang himself. If you try and back him into a corner, who knows what he’ll say.’
Jess sighed. ‘I see what you’re saying. But what about the other thing? He’s been leaking stuff to the press. I know it was him.’
‘You’re referring to your mother’s death—'
‘They’re implying I killed my mother so I must have killed Andrew, ergo, I took the money,’ she said by way of interruption.
‘That’s a long bow to draw without evidence. It was a long time ago and there’s been water under the bridge since then. Don’t let them use it to bait you. If they see they’ve hit a nerve, they’ll think there’s something to it and they’ll go after you — the police, Henry, the clients, all of them. They’ll stop at nothing to bring you down. That’s why you have to stay quiet and let me do the talking.’
Jess bit her bottom lip and nodded.
‘Ready to go back?’
She nodded again and they returned to the boardroom.
‘Moving on to the issue of the cold wallets,’ Parker said as she took the floor. ‘I’m going to ask my colleague, Toby, from the DTCU to speak.’
‘Kia ora katoa,’ he said, puffing as if he’d just finished a run. Toby looked as if he should have been in school, not working for a crime unit. His face was baby-bottom smooth, he was wearing Harry Potter glasses and his suit was too big for him. He bent forward and tapped the keys on his laptop. A diagram appeared on the screen. ‘We know Mr Cullinane transferred the client’s private keys into the Vaultange cold wallet which he kept on the hardware wallet — this.’ He held up the Ledger Nano S. ‘Mr Turner confirms this. This was developed and manufactured in France. Offline, it’s more secure than Fort Knox.’ He picked up the stick and tossed it from hand to hand much as a baseball player would toss a ball. ‘The cold wallet is most likely in here.’ He tossed the USB into the air and caught it overhand, as if he was catching a fly. ‘There are two things we need to open it. The first is the eight-digit PIN number, and the second is a list of twenty-four seed words in the correct order. Not all twenty-four are needed every time you open it. That,’ he laughed, ‘would be painful. To prevent someone just having a go, entering PINs and words at random to see if they work, the manufacturer installed a mission impossible type self-destruct code. Three attempts and if the correct PIN and correct words haven’t been entered, then poof. Not actually smoke but as good as. The stick is rendered inoperable. It’s useless.’
‘Which means the keys to the cryptos stay in the cloud?’ Lee asked.
‘Correct,’ Toby replied.
‘And no one can access them?’
‘On this particular Nano S, no, they can’t.’
‘Not even the people who make them?’ Lee asked.
‘Not even them,’ Toby confirmed.
There was a moment’s silence.
‘How many times have you tried?’ Ronald asked.
‘None. I connected it to my laptop and ran the programme to see if it’s operational. It is. Without the PIN and seed words I see no point in ruining any future chances there might be to access the wallets and thus, the keys.’
