At ten o’clock the following morning, outside the northeast gate to the White House grounds, Bree and I met Mahoney, Carstensen, and FBI director Sanford. After presenting our credentials, we were waved in and soon found ourselves standing in the hall outside the Oval Office.
“You good?” Bree whispered to me.
“Slight headache.”
“I didn’t mean your head.”
“I know. I’m good.”
I don’t know why, but I was good, strangely calm when the door opened and we walked in. The room was fairly crowded with people I recognized. Some were cabinet members. Others were leaders from both houses of Congress and from both sides of the political aisle.
All nine Supreme Court justices were there as well. And Secret Service special agent Lance Reamer, and Lieutenant Sheldon Lee of the Capitol Police. Bree went and stood by them.
President Talbot was on his feet behind the Lincoln desk, looking grim.
“What the hell happened in Atlantic City? No one will tell us anything.”
“We’ve been sorting that out all night, Mr. President,” Director Sanford said. “It seemed easier to brief everyone who needed to know at once.”
“Well, then,” Talbot said, irritated, as he sat down. “Get on with it.”
Sanford glanced at Carstensen, who said, “Two of the assassins are dead.”
That set off a hubbub that lasted several moments before she continued, “They were killed on the boardwalk in Atlantic City last night.”
Chief Justice Watts said, “Who were they?”
I said, “One was a notorious Hungarian contract killer named Kristina Varjan. The other, who we believe was President Hobbs’s killer, is as yet unidentified.”
The Senate majority leader said, “Explain how you caught up to them.”
“A fluke, Senator,” Mahoney said. “We were up in Atlantic City following a different thread of the investigation, and we spotted them.”
“Doing what?” the House whip asked.
Carstensen said, “They were shaking down their employers.”
“You mean whoever hired them to do the killings?”
“That’s correct,” the FBI director said.
“So who are they?” the secretary of the interior asked.
“Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, co-founders and owners of the largest e-sports company in the world.”
That set off another animated reaction in the room. E-sports? What?
“You’re sure about this?” the Senate majority leader said.
“Yes,” I said. “When I spotted the three assassins in Crowley and Bronson’s skybox, they evidently were there demanding payment for the killings. They got Bronson to transfer millions of dollars in Bitcoin to so-called hard wallets—small, densely encrypted thumb drives—that the killers took with them.”
I could see skepticism on the faces of many in the room, including the president.
“They told you this?” President Talbot said. “They confessed?”
Sanford said, “No, Crowley and Bronson tried to tell us the three were just sophisticated robbers who’d heard about the purse for the tournament being in Bitcoin and taken advantage of the situation.”
I said, “That was nonsense. Stapleton, their director of security, was beaten by the assassins, and he overheard the conversations that occurred in that skybox. When we hit Crowley and Bronson with what Stapleton told us, they denied it and said they’d sue us and him.”
Carstensen smiled. “Until we showed them that Stapleton had recorded almost the entire thing on his iPhone. Then they caved, admitted they were the masterminds.”
The chief justice said, “Why in God’s name would they do such a thing? These are video-game people, right?”
“Sophisticated video-game people,” I said. “Expert coders. MIT- and Harvard-smart. And arrogant about it. I think they thought they’d never get caught, that they knew enough about the dark web to get away with playing behind the scenes, anonymously hiring assassins to topple the U.S. government.”
“But why?” the chief justice said again, growing irritated.
Carstensen told him that Bronson and Crowley said that they hadn’t planned to kill the president. Not at the outset, anyway. They had been spending more and more of their time exploring the dark web, doing research for future games, and they’d come upon a site that offered killers for hire.
“They claim they got on the site to see if a game they were designing was plausible,” Mahoney said.
“I’m confused,” Talbot said. “This was a game? A goddamned game to them?”
“At first, sir,” I said. “Then President Grant died. And someone made them realize they had a unique opportunity.”
“What opportunity?” the House whip said.
“Ultimately?” I said. “The opportunity to make Bitcoin, lots and lots of Bitcoin.”