I RAN BANKS’ NAME THROUGH the IRB database and found his current address at 128 Buffalo Run Road in Westerville, on the northeast side of Columbus. I grabbed my bag, keyed the address into my SUV’s GPS and hit the road. Two hours later I turned onto Little Turtle Way, past the Little Turtle Golf Club, took a left on Blue Jacket, another left on Buffalo Run and pulled to a stop in front of a two-story townhouse. Banks’ unit was on the end, adjacent to the golf course.
The neighborhood was quiet. Less than twenty vehicles sat in the shared parking section, and Banks’ driveway was empty. Banks’ front door was on the side of the building. The other units had doors on the front. I followed the walkway to his front entrance and looked through the two long windows that flanked the door. The lower level was dark. No lights, a good indication that Banks wasn’t home.
There was no alarm-monitoring company decal on the glass or in the yard, so I tried the door. It was locked, so I walked around to the back, where a concrete slab patio, maybe ten feet square, abutted a sliding-glass door. A wooden slatted fence about eight feet high separated his patio from his neighbor’s unit. The sliding-glass door, half covered on the inside by a curtain, allowed me to see throughout the lower level. No sign of Banks or anyone else. I gave the door a tug, but it was locked. I noticed a wooden dowel in the sliding door’s track, but the dowel was about six inches shorter than the length of the track. Not too modern in his approach to home security, but it gave me an excuse to check out the golf course pro shop.
THE SIGN AT THE ENTRANCE of the Little Turtle Golf Club said it was a private course, but the faded bricks and ripped doormat said it was the type of club I could afford. I scanned the parking lot. American-made vehicles. As country clubs go, it appeared Little Turtle catered to the upper-middle class, not the hyper-rich. I walked into the pro shop and found the head golf pro behind the counter. The plastic tag on his shirt introduced him as Ryan.
“Hi there. Can I help you?” he said.
“I played the other day and I think I left a wedge on the course. Did anyone turn one in?” I wasn’t a pro by any means, but I did have a ten handicap. I’ve also lost a half-dozen clubs during my lifetime, always wedges. Players tend to leave them just off the greens.
“Hang on a sec. Let me look.”
Ryan walked into the back room and returned a minute later with two clubs in his hand.
“I’ve got a Calloway and a Nike,” he said.
“Great! It’s the Calloway.” He handed me the club. “Thanks so much. I was afraid I’d have to replace it.”
“No problem. You getting out today?” he said.
“I wish I could, but I’m still on the clock. Just swung by home for lunch and thought I’d stop in and see if anyone turned it in. If the weather holds up, I might try to get out next week.”
Ryan stepped to the computer on the counter. “You want to go ahead and schedule a tee time?”
“Nah. Gotta check with my buddies first. I’ll give you a call to set it up.”
“Okay, enjoy the rest of your day.”
“You too,” I said. “Thanks, Ryan.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER I STOOD at Banks’ back door with the wedge in hand. Sliding-glass doors aren’t the most secure, but they keep most people out. I’m not most people. If Banks lived in a pricey house, then he’d likely have a more secure lock, but this townhouse looked like a rental, so I figured the locking mechanism was on the cheaper side.
A few golfers walked the course. An elderly couple played the hole adjacent to Banks’ back patio. They both looked at me, probably wondering if I was playing their fairway. I slowly swung the wedge through the grass, trying to appear like I was looking for a lost ball. I glanced up and waved them through. Seconds later the older man swung and drilled his ball into the trees on the other side of the fairway. I heard the ball ricochet off a tree, sending a group of birds fleeing for their lives. The woman followed with a worm-burner that went in the same direction as his ball. The trees and rough kept them busy and allowed me to focus on the sliding door.
Most spring-loaded locking mechanisms have a significant flaw. They can fail against upward force. I leaned the wedge against the wooden privacy fence, slipped on my blue nitrile gloves and grabbed the sliding-glass door’s handle with both hands. My teeth clenched as I jerked up as hard as I could, pulling the door off its track and popping the spring latch to the open position. I lowered the door back onto the track and eased the door open until the dowel caught the bottom doorframe. No alarm. After backing the door off a few inches, I slid the wedge through the open space and used the club’s head to lift the dowel out of the track and opened the door the rest of the way.
The inside of Banks’ townhouse was small and tidy. The first floor consisted of a living room, kitchen, breakfast nook and a laundry room. A desk with pictures of who I assumed was Justin Banks with an older couple, probably his parents, was positioned against the living room wall. I was relieved to see no photos of a wife and kids, because if this was our guy, he wouldn’t be around much longer, and I didn’t like the idea of breaking up families.
I picked up one of the photos. Banks was a middle-aged man with an average build, short, dark hair parted on one side. The photo showed palm trees and what looked like an old fort behind him. I set the photo back on the desk and went upstairs.
The second floor included two bedrooms separated by a bathroom and double-door closet in the hall. Banks used the bedroom that overlooked the golf course as an office. There was a solid desk, not like the small writing desk in the living room, a lateral file cabinet and a bookshelf that bowed under the weight of thick computer programming textbooks. There was a computer on the desk. I clicked it on and rummaged through the file cabinets as I waited for it to boot up. I didn’t know what I expected to find in the files, but everything looked normal. Each file folder had a printed label. Typical files. Car loan, warranties, bills, health, finances. I opened the folder labeled “bills” and checked the address to make sure that Banks indeed lived here. The folder contained several months of electric and gas bills, all addressed to Justin Banks. I returned the file, closed the file cabinet and turned back to the computer. The home screen stared back at me. No password prompt, which was good. He probably didn’t expect anyone to break into his home and search his computer. I clicked the hard-drive icon and poked around, looking for any folders or files that could link Banks to Bishop, but I didn’t find anything.
Bishop’s website was difficult to find online. Search engines didn’t catalog this portion of the Internet. Users could find the site only by using a special browser to mask their IP address. Then they had to key in a specific URL, which looked like a series of random numbers, to access the site. It was like kicking virtual sand over digital footprints, a nice benefit when shopping for illegal information.
I checked the dock at the bottom of his home screen and found “TorBrowser.” I clicked and it opened. It looked like any other Web browser. I checked the browser’s bookmarks and found a link to the Dark Brokerage. It wasn’t a surprise that Banks would bookmark a site on the deep Web, given the long URL strings, sometimes upwards of twenty characters. They aren’t easy to memorize. It’s not as simple as typing www.cnn.com.
After clicking the link, Bishop’s website popped up on the screen. Bishop’s site prompted me for a username and password, which I didn’t have, so I closed out of the system.
Banks looked like our guy. He had the technical expertise to hack Bishop’s site, had accessed the site before, and had met with Bishop and perhaps Fat Sam in person, but I still wanted a smoking gun.
I found what I needed inside Banks’ closet. There was another smaller vertical two-drawer file cabinet. The top drawer was empty. The bottom drawer contained a purple velvet Crown Royal bag filled with coins. Next to it was an accordion file folder. I dumped them out onto the carpet. The gold coins each had an image on them, a symbol that looked like the letter “B” combined with a dollar sign. They looked like arcade-game tokens.
Most sites on the deep Web managed transactions with bitcoins because of the anonymity, a bank account with no names attached. But I’d thought bitcoins were only a digital currency, so I couldn’t figure out why I was staring at a heap of coins on Banks’ floor.
I grabbed my phone and dialed Bishop.
“What you got for me?” said Bishop.
“Are bitcoins only digital? You don’t actually have anything physical? You can’t put a bitcoin in your pocket?”
“You can exchange the digital currency for physical coins, if you want,” said Bishop. “I’ve converted them before as a precaution against hackers. But most people just use the digital currency.”
“What do you mean protection against hackers?” I said.
“Digital currency is stored on your computer, and even though you can encrypt the shit out of things, a hacker can still get through and liquidate your account. One day you’ve got a few million in coins, and the next day you’ve got dick. Anything online is at risk. Someone might want to get the physical coins and put them in a safe-deposit box or whatever. Just an added level of protection.”
“Or a closet,” I said. “But you paid Silvio in digital currency, right?”
“Right. People don’t exchange the physical currency. You take the digital currency and convert it to physical coins. Some banks even have ATMs that accept bitcoins for deposit. It’s just not that widespread.”
“So if Silvio had the physical coins, it’s because he’s protecting them from hackers.”
“Probably. I can’t think of any other reason why he’d have them.” Bishop paused. “What makes you think he has them?” Bishop’s voice quickened and went up an octave. “Did you find something?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll know more soon and get back to you.” I hung up the phone and clicked over to my phone’s camera to snap two photos of the coins before putting them back into the bag and returning them to the closet.
I pulled the elastic band off the accordion file, opened it and removed a dozen pieces of paper. I fanned them out in my hands and scanned them. The first few pages looked to be a list of usernames, account numbers and passwords. The next few pages included screen shots of Bishop’s website, followed by what looked like an inventory list of items for sale on the site. I laid them out on the floor, snapped more photos and stashed them back in the file cabinet. Justin Banks was our guy.
I closed the closet door, turned off the computer and headed back downstairs. As I walked past the kitchen, I noticed several keys hanging on a hook attached to the side of the refrigerator. I flipped through them, wiping away a layer of dust, and found a set with a paper label marked “Spare” attached to the ring. Two of the keys looked identical. I checked them in the front door’s deadbolt and they worked. I relocked the door from the inside, slipped one of the keys off the ring and put it in my pocket, and then returned the others to the hook. From the dust, I knew Banks hadn’t used the keys in some time. He wouldn’t miss one.
I walked back through the living room, slid open the back patio door enough to fit through it and propped the dowel at a forty-five degree angle in the track, wedging it between the wall and partially open door. I picked up my new golf club, walked out, closed the door and watched as the dowel eased back into the track.
Everything except the lock on the sliding-glass door looked exactly as Banks left it. Even if Banks did notice the unlocked door, he’d see the dowel set in the track and assume he’d forgotten to lock it.
A sprinkler on the fairway activated while I was inside. It sprayed water across the manicured green grass, moving from side to side and clicking like a machine gun. I pocketed my gloves and checked the adjacent fairway to make sure no one would see me leaving the back of the townhouse. Clear. The old man and woman had moved on farther down the course, far enough away that they wouldn’t notice me. I watched as the man settled in for another shot. He swung and sailed the ball across the fairway and into the trees on the other side.
“Goddamnit!” he yelled as he slammed the club head into the ground, lifted it high and slammed it again. Then, he hung his head and walked across the fairway, dragging his club behind him.
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