“So we can empty this wallet?” Ryan asked.
“The crypto isn’t directly in the wallet. It’s on the blockchain.”
“What the hell is a blockchain?” Leon demanded.
“It’s like a public ledger. Decentralized. And holy shit again.” Declan ran a hand over his bristly dark hair. “This has to be part of that last big Bytecoin hack. Some hackers targeted a compromised cross-chain bridge and basically looted at will.”
Leon frowned. “Try using English.”
“Cross-chain bridges are vital for moving currency from one blockchain to another, but they’re vulnerable. Exploit the bridge’s code and it’s like cracking open a safe.”
“Filled with imaginary money.”
Declan shot Leon a scornful look. “It’s currency when you exchange it for dollars or Euros or whatever you want. It’s as ‘imaginary’ as what the bank tells you your account holds.”
Leon turned to me. “From the look on your face, you had no idea what you were carrying.”
“How the hell did it get there?” I replied, shaking my head. “Andwhy? I was leaving on vacation and taking this luggage.”
“Where were you going?” Declan asked.
“Aruba, at first.”
Ryan’s brow knitted. “At Christmas?”
“I was going to vacation with some friends from med school during the holiday break. We wanted to escape the cold and blow off steam somewhere tropical. Then we were supposed to fly to Jamaica for a week. We’d finish on a beach at a resort hotel in the Cayman Islands.”
The three brothers all shared a look.
“What?” I demanded, hating the “missing the joke” feeling I had right now.
“The Cayman Islands,” Leon answered. “It’s one of the best places to hide stolen money.”
“That can’t be a coincidence,” Ryan said.
I stared at the computer screen, still staggered by the amount of money in a thumb drive hidden in my carry-on luggage. But it was all starting to make a horrifying kind of sense to me.
I shared a look with Leon. “That’swhy there was a tracking device.”
He nodded slowly.
“So the real question is,” Declan said, “who hid this in your suitcase?”
Everyone was staring at me.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t there the last time I cleaned it out. It had to be Jimmy or Anthony—the guys who were with me last night. They were there to drive me to the airport…”
I couldn’t believe it. I’d wondered why my father had insisted on having two of his men drive me to the private airport. Not only that but to have them stay in the penthouse overnight like bodyguards. I’d questioned it, but he’d deflected my questions, and I hadn’t pressed the issue. The truth was, I hadn’t wanted to know. I was getting a ride, and I was bound for a tropical paradise with my friends, all on my father’s tab.
But had my father feared that someone like Leon might be coming after this USB drive? If so, why hadn’t he told me I was in danger? But that didn’t make any sense, anyway, because Leon was just as in the dark about the thumb drive as I was. It was blind luck that he’d even ordered me to take the carry-on when he’d kidnapped me.
“Your father has to know about this USB drive,” Leon said as if reading every thought shooting through my mind. “A haul this big. The guy at the top is going to want as much of it as he can get. He was using you to get it out of the country.”
“How was he getting it through customs?” Ryan asked. “That seems risky. Some light-fingered baggage handler could find it. Or the luggage could get lost.”
Declan was shaking his head. “I doubt they’d check a thumb drive unless you came up on some kind of list.”
“It’s not even that,” I said quietly, feeling a chill seep into my bones. “I was taking a private plane to Aruba. I was flying out of Teterboro Airport. They don’t check VIP carry-ons. Not like they do on commercial flights.”
