Page 42 of One Last Stand

“We’ll hide you.”

Shep frowned.

“The Black Swans,” she said, probably seeing his frown.

And she probably didn’t mean for the words to send a fresh spear through him, either. She wasn’t planning on staying.

“I knew you’d say that,” Tomas said. “So before you go thinking I’m going to take the money and run off to Argentina, or maybe the Seychelles, my plan was to destroy the wallet.”

She set her mug on the island. “You can’t destroy a wallet. You can only lose the login. Which I’ve done.”

“No. It only takes your eye scan and your DNA to get another card. Easily obtained by a successful assassin.”

Flynn drew a breath. Nodded. “That makes sense.”

“They still need the seed code.”

“And how hard is that to get, with the right amount of waterboarding?”

Shep’s throat tightened. He looked at London.

“But you could corrupt it.”

Silence.

Tomas leaned forward. “I’ve been working on a program that would launch a distributed denial-of-service attack on the nodes of the blockchain network, corrupting the integrity of the blockchain. From there, we could attack the blockchain’s consensus mechanism and interfere with the validation process for transactions. Which would mean false confirmation and?—”

“In English, please,” Axel said.

“It means that suddenly no one trusts each other. They all think they’re stealing, or corrupting the crypto, and then terrorist groups are fighting each other,” Flynn said. “Brilliant.”

“So you’re saying . . .” London said, leaning a hip against the island, “give the money back, but upload this program. And then sit back and watch the players destroy themselves?”

Tomas nodded.

She stared at him, and Shep could see her wheels turning.

This London, the clever one, he knew.

But not the woman who then nodded. “That means going to Montelena and getting a new bio card, uploading the program, then transferring the money to Drago’s account, virus attached.” A small smile creased her face. “That could work. Then we sit back and watch the Bratva crumble.”

Wait—who was “we”?

“I’m in.” London said.

Shep found his feet. “You must be joking.”

All eyes landed on him. London’s breath caught.

“Over my dead body are you going to leave with this . . .jerk—and give two hundred million dollars back to an international terrorist. Have you lost your mind? Who even are you?”

London’s mouth opened.

“London, think for one long second. They find out that you attached a virus to their money and it’s not just these Russians you’re running from butevery other terrorist organization in the world.Next time we find your body mutilated with the fingers cut off, it won’t be some nameless assassin. It’ll be you. And maybe even Tomas, if he’s not actually in league with this Drago guy?—”

“The Petrovs murdered my family, so . . . go boil your head, mate.”

Shep just looked at him, then at Moose, and then,oh, wow—he couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “What did you say to me?”