Smart Contract
Angus McIntyre
Dayne doesn’t answer, her attention fixed on the screen in front of her. It shows a three-part view of the interview room, two cameras focused on the faces of the girl and her mother, the bottom half of the screen showing a wide view from above the interviewer. Dayne would rather be in the room, where she could see the body language firsthand.
The interviewer is a motherly woman from the Bronx named Leticia, a regular on cases involving minors. “Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt you, Luisa?” she asks.
Luisa gives a tiny shake of her head, not looking up. Her black hair is drawn back in a ponytail. Her dossier says she’s sixteen, but traces of puppy fat in her cheeks make her look younger still.
“She’s lying,” says Dayne. Webb scowls at her.
The interesting question for Dayne isn’t whether the girl is lying or not, but why. Chances are that it’s just something the girl doesn’t want her mother to know about. If they can get her alone, maybe she’ll open up. But that may take a while. The chief is all about proper procedure, which means handling minors with kid gloves.
“She’s a good girl,” the mother says. “She’s not mixed up in anything.”
The interviewer turns her head. “Señora, I’d like to hear from Luisa first.” The mother settles down, hands gripping her empty plastic coffee cup like a lifeline.
“Could someone be angry with you? A boy, a girl?”
Another tiny headshake. No hesitation this time, which is interesting. Dayne has been assuming that this is most likely just some teen romance drama, albeit with a crazy price tag attached. But maybe not.
“And who found out about… the thing?” asks Leticia.
The girl licks her lips. “Eddie,” she says after a moment.
“Mi cuñado,” the mother puts in. “Luisa’s uncle. He’s good with the cyber.”
There, Dayne thinks. She mentally puts him top of her suspect list. Not that she has any suspects at this point, beyond ‘persons unknown’. But it sounds like they’re going to need to have a word with Uncle Eddie.
It probably wouldn’t help anyway. “For two hundred and fifty thousand, would you shoot a couple of cops?” she asks Webb.
“There’s some I’d do for free,” he says. “But I still don’t get how this shit works.”
Dayne thinks for a while. To be honest, this isn’t her area either. She once dated a woman who, as Señora Valdez would put it, was good with the cyber. Every time she tried to explain something about her job, Dayne’s eyes would just glaze over. Still, she thinks she has a handle on the basics.
“Suppose you want someone dead,” she says. “And you don’t want to do the job yourself. The obvious thing is to hire someone to do it for you.”
“Sure, but that’s risky. Good way to get arrested.”
“Not if you make the payment untraceable. You use cryptocurrency, and write what they call a smart contract.”
“Contract like in a hit?”
“Yes, but also no.” This is the part Dayne always has trouble with. “The contract is a piece of software, a program that says, ‘If this person dies, then send all this money to this address’.”
“What address?”
“An electronic address. A digital wallet. But this is where it gets clever. When you write your program, you leave that part empty. If someone wants that money, they come along, fill in their address. If the person dies, the money goes to them.”
“So why can’t I just put the address of my wallet in there?” Webb asks. “Maybe I get lucky without doing a thing.”
“Because the program says that if you want in on the contract, you have to pay. And there’s a time limit too. If you run out of time and the person’s still alive, you have to pay again for another chance. Or you back down and let someone else try.”
Webb thinks it over. “And it’s really untraceable?”
“If you’re smart about it.”
“And whoever takes out the hit never needs to meet the hitman.”
“Nope. Remember when that Russian got droned on the BQE? Feds pinned it on the Jamaicans using wiretaps, but even the guy who ordered the hit couldn’t say who actually carried it out. They still don’t know.”
“OK, I get it.” Webb shakes his head. “But what I don’t get is why someone would pay a quarter of a million to ice some teenage girl living in public housing in Queens.”
“How did you find out about the contract?” she asks.
“They call it a ‘note’,” Eddie says. “You write a note on someone. Like Death Note, you get?”
She doesn’t, but she nods anyway. “And?”
“I keep an eye out. Smart contracts, it’s all kinds of stuff, you know?” he says. “Crypto-turking, they call it. I do some sometimes. But I only do the legal ones. I don’t need trouble.”
Sure, thinks Dayne. She’s looked up Eddie’s record. He has one, but it’s kid stuff that should probably have been expunged by now. He’s either clean or he’s smart enough not to get caught.
“So, anyway, I’m looking for local stuff, and this comes up. Claro, it’s not something I’m gonna do, but it’s big money, so I’m curious. Quarter of a million payout, and a ten percent buy-in fee gets you exclusivity for one week, which is way too rich for most people around here.” He looks from one cop to the other. “See, you wanna bid on the contract, you gotta pay twenty-five grand up front—”
“Thank you, Mr. Arias, we know how smart contracts work,” Webb says. Dayne bites her tongue.
“Yeah, well. Like I said, big money. The coin it’s written in had a spike just recently, and it’s still trading hot. So I take a look, just to see, and I find out it’s my own fuckin’ niece.”
“And that’s when you talked to Luisa’s mother?”
“Yeah. And she called you guys in.” His eyes flicker aside just for an instant, and Dayne senses that he’d have been happier without the police getting involved. “So what you gonna do? You gonna take her into witness protection, or something?”
Dayne doesn’t point out that Luisa isn’t a witness to anything. She hasn’t asked about protection but she knows the answer will be ‘no’. Legal isn’t sure that a crime has even been committed yet.
“What else can you tell us about the note?” she says.
“You know what you could do?” Eddie says, ignoring her. “Here.” He pulls out a tablet – expensive-looking, nicer than anything they have in the department. “Look at this.”
It’s the same cryptic scrawl of glowing code she’s already read three times. It means nothing to her.
Eddie taps and pinches on the tablet. “Look here. It’s using public record APIs for the fulfillment check.”
“English, please,” says Webb.
Eddie gives him a look. “The contract doesn’t pay out unless she’s dead. So this bit”—he touches the screen—“looks up her record in the state databases. So what you should do is get her marked as dead already.”
“And then?”
“Then the contract fires, the motherfucker who set it up has to pay out, and Luisa gets her life back. Problem solved, no?”
There’s anti-drone netting and tangler wire strung between the buildings, there to frustrate drug deliveries, peeping Toms and artisanal gang aviation alike. Dayne doubts that it would do much to stop even an off-the-shelf war drone, but it’s something.
“City says ‘no’,” Webb tells her, pushing his earpiece back behind his ear.
“Why?” Dayne asks.
“They can’t just change her record. It’s a whole big thing. And it would be like she just stopped existing. She’d be off social, tax, the lot. Shit, she couldn’t even go to school or ride the bus.”
“Well, it was a nice idea.”
“Yeah.”
“So what did you think of Eddie?”
“I thought he was gonna be the creepy uncle. Maybe he put the moves on her, got knocked back. Maybe worse than that. Put a hit on her out of spite or to shut her up. But I think he really cares about her.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Dayne’s attention is only half on what Webb was saying. “You think those kids have made us as cops?”
Webb follows her gaze. “Oh, definitely. Have you seen us?”
“Good,” said Dayne. She catches the eye of one of the teenagers, gives him a slow wink. The kid flinches and turns away.
“Lookouts?” says Webb.
Dayne shakes her head. “Not like you think. I think they’re Luisa’s friends, watching out for her.”
Webb’s cell buzzes and he swipes up a message. “Well, fortunately Luisa isn’t the only one who knows streetwise juveniles with an ear to the ground.” He catches Dayne’s wince of incomprehension and grins: “One of my CI’s just checked in.”
“Nice to meet you too,” says Dayne.
The girl wrinkles her snub nose. “You wanna ask me something?” she says in English.
“Sure,” says Dayne. “Do you know a girl named Luisa Valdez?”
The girl looks as if she was expecting the question. “The chick that got a note written on her?”
Dayne nods.
“I don’t know her, but I know her friends,” the girl says.
“And?”
“They in strife with a crew from Bloomberg. Maybe the Bloomies write her up.”
“Any idea why?”
“Buncha kids from Bloomberg went over to De Blasio a couple months back. All tooled up, like they was going to war. They got jumped, got the crap knocked out of them. They still mad as hell ’bout that.” Her grin makes it clear where her loyalties lie.
“And you think Luisa was involved?”
“Her? Nah. She’s a nice girl. Church girl. Model student. Like me.” Her sweatshirt turns entirely white, and a loop of light glows for an instant above her head while she assumes an expression of exaggerated innocence. “But maybe her friends.”
“Do you know the names of any—”
The girl shakes her head quickly. “I see them around. I don’t talk to any of them.” She glances down at her wrist, where a stick-on watch face is pulsing. “Anyway, gotta go.” She jumps to her feet. “See you, man.” As she scurries out the door, her sweatshirt reverts to its rainbow pattern.
Webb waits for the door to close behind the girl. “What do you think?” he says.
“Doesn’t add up,” says Dayne. “If Luisa wasn’t involved in the beatdown, why take out a contract on her? When the contract was written, the payout was already more than five thousand. That’s too much money for a bunch of kids to spend just to get even.” She sighs. “Your informant’s right. Luisa doesn’t fit this picture. We’re missing something.”
Webb nods. “Probably,” he admits. His face brightens. “Maybe we should start digging at the other end. Wanna go talk to one of the kids that Luisa’s friends beat up?”
“You’re in bad trouble,” Dayne tells him, talking around the subject enough to let implications do the heavy lifting. “Serious note to be putting out on someone. I hear they’re gonna put that on you.”
“But I didn’t—”
“Don’t try to pull that shit,” she says. “We know what happened.”
He must have taken a pretty bad beating, because she can still see traces of bruising under his brown skin. A pink scar bisects one eyebrow.
“I can understand,” says Webb, good cop smooth. “I’d be mad too. You must have wanted to get back at them pretty badly.”
The boy shakes his head. “But we didn’t,” he says.
“You think a judge is going to believe that?” Dayne snaps.
“It wasn’t us. We don’t have the money. And if we did—”
This is the weak point in the case Dayne has been trying to build. She doubts very much that these kids could have put together the cash for the original contract, even before the coin started taking off. As far as the records show, none of them are dealing drugs in any serious way. And most of them probably don’t have any other sources of income.
“So you’re telling me you didn’t take out a smart contract on Luisa Valdez?”
“I’m telling you, it’s not us, man. There’s someone else, someone really hates them.”
“Them?”
“That chick and all her friends. This isn’t the first time.”
Dayne has the sense that she’s on the brink of something very important. “You’re saying there’ve been other contracts.” He nods. “Against Luisa.” Headshake. “Against other friends of hers?” Nod.
A light dawns. Part of the answer is there.
“You saw one of these contracts. And you put in a bid. And you went over to De Blasio Houses with your friends to try to fulfill the contract. But they were waiting for you.”
He won’t meet her eyes, which is as good as an admission.
“How much was it for?”
He mumbles something.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Two thousand.”
“Two thousand dollars?” says Webb, sounding disgusted. “You were going to murder someone for a lousy two kay?”
The boy finally wises up. “I want a lawyer.”
“Help yourself,” says Dayne. “We’re done here.”
Despite that, she does learn a few things. The cryptocurrency involved is called SerenityCoin. Last week, it was worth almost nothing. This week, it’s suddenly much more valuable. Next week it could be worth thirty times as much, or nothing at all. But for right now the contract is live, and someone spent twenty-five thousand dollars to buy a chance at a serious payout.
She tries to put herself in the hitman’s shoes. If it looks like the coin will keep going up, it’s in his interest to let Luisa live a little longer. But if it goes all the way to zero, the girl’s safe for good. The danger is that if the coin starts to fall, he might decide to strike first to protect his investment. It’s a hell of a thing, she thinks, a child’s life dependent on the fluctuations of imaginary nerd money.
She’s still thinking about that when her phone buzzes. She glances at it, taps the screen to connect. “What can I do for you, Mr Arias?”
Eddie’s face in her wrist display is tiny but very sharp. “The contract’s been terminated.”
“Well, that’s great. Luisa’s safe then.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not how it works. There’s an active bid. If they kill her before time’s up, they still get the money. But now they know the clock’s ticking. It’s piss or get off the pot time, and they’ve still got three days to make it happen. You need to keep her safe, detective.”
She can hear the tension in his voice, and decides to press her advantage. “Did you know this wasn’t the first note, Mr. Arias?”
“What?”
“There’ve been multiple notes, just like this one. Going back more than six months.”
Eddie looks aghast. “They’ve been trying to kill her for months?”
His surprise seems genuine, and Dayne relents. “Not contracts on Luisa, on her friends. Other kids in De Blasio Houses. None of the other notes were as big as this one, though. A month ago the payout was just a couple of grand. Not enough to make it worth risking a murder rap, unless you were desperate. But the payout kept going up, and then when SerenityCoin spiked…”
Eddie nods. “Whoever set up the contract staked their SerenityCoin when it wasn’t worth shit. They couldn’t have known it was going to take off like it has.”
Webb grunts. “Then they’ll probably be happy to have it back, if someone else doesn’t earn it right out of their account before the end of the week.”
“Do you know where Luisa is right now, Mr. Arias?” Dayne asks.
“No idea. Listen, I gotta go,” he says. He cuts the connection before she has a chance to protest, leaving her staring at a screen gone suddenly blank.
“So,” Webb says. “You think we can keep her alive for three days?”
“Not unless the chief will let us kidnap her and lock her in a bank vault until Sunday.”
“That’s not such a bad idea.” Webb keeps talking, but Dayne has stopped listening. Things are finally clicking in her head. A big-time fee for an insignificant target…
“Wait,” she says, cutting across whatever Webb was saying, “what if we’ve been looking at this backwards? We thought it was all about the contract, about the killing. A quarter mil is a major incentive, so someone offering that much must have a big motive too, right?”
“Right,” says Webb, sounding uncertain.
“What if they don’t? It’s only big money by chance. If it wasn’t for a bunch of crypto bros around the world pumping their own coin stock, we’d still be talking petty cash. This could all just be dumb kid stuff after all.”
Webb blips the siren to get a carter’s truck to move out of the way. “Like the dumbass back there who got his ass beat down for nothing.” he says.
“Exactly like that. You know, I’ve been going round and round, trying to work out who would want her dead. Nice girl, quiet, hard-working. But all that money! It didn’t make sense.”
“It still doesn’t.”
“So turn it on its head. Stop thinking about how much someone would pay to see Luisa dead. Think about how much they’d need to pay for a chance at the money.”
“Not following you,” Webb says, frowning.
“Think about it. Dumbass and his crew had to bid for the rights on that two grand contract. Ten percent, that’s only two hundred bucks, even they can cover that. And if they couldn’t do the job, whoever wrote the contract kept their money. What if someone’s been putting out contracts on nobodies, teasing small-time gangbangers with the promise of easy digital money and pocketing the down payments when they fail?”
Webb pulls a face. “That’s a dangerous game to play.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I think these kids are taking turns being the target. They post the contracts, bids come in, and then whoever’s this week’s target just gets out of town for a few days. Goes to stay with an aunt in Yonkers, or goes to Florida or something. When the contract deadline passes and the threat’s over, they come home again.”
“And,” says Webb, “if anyone does come looking, they have enough friends around to see them off.” He shakes his head. “They’re doing it themselves.”
“But then it all goes wrong,” Dayne says. “The penny ante shitcoin they scraped together for the latest contract suddenly goes to the moon, and before they can cancel someone heavy bids on it. And anyone who can cover a ten per cent buy-in on a quarter million payout is gonna be more dangerous than a bunch of kids from Bloomberg Houses.”
Webb opens his mouth to say something, but his radio vibrates noisily. An instant later, Dayne feels her own radio buzz against her hip. She taps her earpiece.
“Shots fired at De Blasio Houses,” says the synthetic voice in her ear. “EMS requested on a rush. All units respond.”
Dayne catches a glimpse of Eddie Arias in the crowd and she guesses he’s probably tooled up. His eyes meet hers, but she doesn’t want to speak to him now, because she’d end up having to arrest him. She has other things on her mind.
“Luisa’s apartment,” she says.
“Shouldn’t we wait—”
“No time.” She flashes her badge and the fence parts to let them through. She draws her service weapon as she sprints across the courtyard toward Luisa’s building.
Inside the unit, the corridors are eerily empty. The self-healing paint of the walls is faintly etched with traces of old graffiti, and the white LEDs overhead are muted by accumulated dust and grime. Somewhere up above she can hear doors banging and someone shouting. She motions Webb to stay close.
They find the first body two floors up, slumped in the corner of a stairwell. It’s a man, not anyone she recognizes. Someone who had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, she guesses. There’s a fist-sized hole in his chest, and a widening pool of blood spreading across the corridor floor.
She keeps moving, her gun held out in front of her, the brilliant red dot of the guide beam dancing over the walls. Somewhere in the distance she can hear sirens, but she knows that any backup is going to get there too late.
There’s another body on the fourth floor, and this time it’s a girl. For a heart-stopping moment, she thinks it’s Luisa, but then she sees that it’s an older girl in jeans and a leather jacket, her black hair cropped short and spiky. The dead girl lies on her back, open eyes staring up at the ceiling. There’s a gravity knife on the floor by her hand. She looks enough like Luisa that Dayne guesses they must be related. The last line of defense, she thinks.
She takes the final flight of stairs two at a time, hearing Webb panting and cursing behind her. She catches her foot on the top step, stumbles, recovers, keeps going.
There’s a dark figure halfway down the corridor, face hidden by a mask. In place of eyes, it has glittering faceted lenses, like the eyes of an insect.
Dayne opens her mouth to yell a warning before she fires, but the assassin is already turning toward her, a gun appearing in his hand as if by magic. She doesn’t know what it is, but she can guess: something 3D-printed, untraceable, firing caseless ammunition, a weapon for a professional killer. He’s frighteningly fast, and she knows she’s outclassed, knows she’s going to die, just as the dead girl on the floor below must have known. She is too slow, and much, much too late.
Red and white light flickers on the walls of the corridor. The window at the far end implodes inward, fragments of glass shining like diamonds. The sound of the shot is curiously muted, a soft thud almost inaudible above the sudden buzz of rotors.
The black-clad man is slammed heavily against the wall. Dayne watches him slide down, loose-limbed, those glittering eyes seemingly still fixed on her. He comes to rest in a sitting position, his head bowed on his chest, the gun across his lap. The last shards of glass fall from the window frame as the police drone slides into the corridor and takes up station, hovering above the man it has just killed.
“The girl?” says Webb.
“Her cousin,” Dayne says. “Rosa Madryn. Twenty-two years old.” Her earpiece had whispered the information to her as she waited for the investigators to come and take her gun and bodycam.
“You think she tried to stop him?”
Dayne nods. She wonders if Rosa was one of the kids who thought up the whole scheme, or if she’d been no more than muscle. And when it was Luisa’s turn to be the bait, did Rosa promise her she’d look after her? Don’t worry, cuz. I got you. I’ll keep you safe.
She gets to her feet, feeling tired. “Let’s go talk to her.”
Her mother clears her throat. “So what happens now?” she asks.
“That’s one for the lawyers to figure out,” says Webb. “I don’t even know what they’d charge Luisa with.”
Dayne catches Luisa’s eye. “When all that crypto went big, you panicked, right?” she says. “And you dropped a hint to Eddie, knowing he’d tell your mother?”
Luisa nods.
“So whose idea was it? Not yours, I think.”
Luisa shakes her head. “It was Rosa’s.”
“Ah,” says Dayne. And then they sit in silence, listening to the slow dripping of the tap in the kitchen and the distant whisper of a television through the walls.
At last, Dayne gets to her feet. Luisa is safe now. The contract is closed, the bidder zipped up in a bodybag in the back of a Fire Department ambulance. Their job is done. But in a few days, when the contract terminates for good, a lot of very valuable crypto is going to be released back into the wallet it came from.
Dayne thinks about the dead girl on the corridor floor and decides that isn’t going to happen. No one should get rich out of this. She wants that money gone forever.
She has no idea how to do it. But she knows who she can ask.
Maybe it’s time to find out just how good with the cyber Luisa’s uncle Eddie really is.
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