Seattle, Washington
It was a feature of the brave new world that, unless you lived in an RV in the middle of the desert, your face was captured on video nearly continuously. One camera kept watch over every ten citizens in the United States.
Benevolent watch, the camera owners were quick to add. But that was before the US Federal government co-opted their hardware, rendering their intentions irrelevant. It was in this way that Bill Fredericks discovered that one Domingo Mondragon, aka Sabot, had it in his mind to fly the coop.
Fredericks liked it when they fled. It triggered his pursuit instinct. He was fat, bald, and recently castrated, from a career perspective, but he still fancied himself a hunter, an alpha male. He ran field agents, and he wasn’t really a field agent himself any longer, but changing times brought their own demands.
His quarry had taken along two boat anchors, in the form of a girlfriend and her mother, which made his job roughly three times easier. It was hard to travel light and unnoticed in a gaggle, particularly when nobody in the gaggle had the slightest notion of how to stay under the radar.
Fredericks had been to the warehouse where Sabot had set up the Bitcoin operation. He had been to the looted apartment where Sabot lived. He’d even been to the old lady’s place, where Fredericks had correctly diagnosed the problem with the spyware. It hadn’t sent a report in half a day, and Fredericks discovered that the virus’ host had died a violent death, evidenced by the trash can full of crushed laptop parts in Connie Fuentes’ garage.
So, in this case, Fredericks figured that two and two likely summed to four, and he had promptly enlisted the help of a computer-savvy agent who he knew would be utterly unruffled by the current economic kerfuffle. He knew this was the case, because the unwashed, unkempt recluse of an agent rarely emerged from his three-bedroom apartment, which he shared with two and a half bedrooms full of computer equipment and a powerful funk. The agent generally avoided opening the door, except to accept delivery of food, prostitutes, or computer gear, and he didn’t care much who paid him for services rendered.
All of that made him pretty much the ideal asset.
Two Bitcoins and thirty minutes later, Fredericks hopped back in his car and pulled away from Connie Fuentes’ residence, heading north, geo coordinates in hand, Canada his destination for the second time in as many days.