Matthew Mather's Blog

May 4th

Surgical Rehab Wing of Valhalla Corporation

Manhattan, New York, present day…

 

 

“What do you mean, head replacement?”

A face came into focus–a mane of shaggy gray-blond hair, with blue eyes nestled in weathered wrinkles. Soothingly familiar, alarmingly unknown. “Buddy, take it easy,” said the face, the words whispered. “Just take it easy…”

A steady beeping in the background gave way to an alarm, a rising klaxon.

Shaggy-beard-face receded, revealing an eggshell-white ceiling glowing from hidden lights.

A new face appeared. Angular. Green piercing eyes this time, set deep in smooth skin. Also familiar, but not soothing. “Tell me your name. Do you know your name?” The accent was Eastern European. New-face scowled after asking the question. He turned and spewed a tumble of unintelligible words at unseen recipients.

The klaxon stopped.

My name? What is my name? The question reverberated, echoed from one side of empty mind-space to the other. The answer tickled the back of the throat, a too-distant taste of the past gulped back by terrible nothingness. Blank fear strangled competing thoughts. And then–

“Royce,” came the answer, the word rolling out by itself, a stray rock from unseen heights, emerging whole as if from someone else’s lips. A pause, and then: “Royce Lowell.” These two words were more confident, attached to a bloom of recognition coloring the empty canvas of the mind. I’m Roy, he thought. My name is Roy. Relief tingled his scalp, and then…is that right? That’s not my name, is it? Am I Roy?

“Good, very good, that’s right,” new-face said. “And I am Dr. Danesti–”

“Lowell-Vandeweghe. Royce Lowell-Vandeweghe,” interrupted another voice–higher pitched–the owner out of view. “That’s your full name. Roy, my God, it’s me. This is all my fault…”

Roy tried to turn his head, but couldn’t. Tried to shift his body. Nothing. Panic dribbled into his veins. Where am I?

“Please, Mrs. Vandeweghe.” Dr. Danesti held up the palm of one hand, the fingers spread out hard.

Penny, Roy thought, now recognizing the woman’s voice, that’s Penelope. He rolled his eyes as far right as he could, and just caught a glimpse of her cropped blond hair. My wife.

Dr. Danesti turned back to Roy. “Do you know who I am?”

I know you, Roy thought, but the words refused to form. Another wheezing rattle of air through a constricted windpipe. Is that my lungs? He tried to breathe deep, but felt nothing. The still-smoldering fear tightened its knuckles around his brain stem.

“Blink once if you can hear me,” Danesti said, his voice gaining pitch.

Again the siren wailed, inundating Roy’s already-brittle senses. He blinked, once, twice, three times in rapid succession. A white-clad figure materialized to his left, and then disappeared just as fast. A languid ooze settled over and into Roy’s mind. The room went quiet again.

He remembered what he was trying to remember. “You’re my mother’s doctor.”

“That’s right.” Danesti’s voice was calm again. “And now, I am your doctor. Do you know what year it is?”

“Who won the last World Series?” the comforting-but-gruff voice said. Shaggy-beard-face loomed into view again, adding: “I’m telling you, Roy would hardly remember what year it was even when he was sober. But baseball–”

“Rangers, the Rangers won last year,” Roy wheezed. Shaggy-beard man is Sam, Roy remembered. Samuel Phipps. My best friend. The cool ooze filled more of his brain, the familiar patina of drugs sliding over his mind’s eye. “I won five grand off you.”

“That’s right. See, what’d I tell ya?” Sam said, turning to Danesti. Their faces hovered in Roy’s field of vision. “And the Rangers ain’t never won in sixty years before that. I told you he was okay.” In a lower voice he asked the doctor. “Can I hold his head for him?”

The doctor’s hollowed cheeks quivered into a smile. “Be gentle.”

“Wouldn’t ever be any other way.”

A hand slipped under the back of Roy’s head, tender fingers reaching through his sweaty hair. Pressure on his neck, on his windpipe, the sinews at the back of his neck stretching–but that was all Roy felt. The rest of his body was numb–not even numb, just not there. Like dropping over the edge on a roller coaster, the rest of the room swiveled into view as Sam lifted his head. Roy’s eyes fought to focus. A mass of blond hair and alabaster skin rushed at him.

“Roy, baby, thank God,” Penny cried. “I’m so sorry. We’re going to be okay.”

His wife deposited wet kisses on his cheeks. Lips warm against his clammy skin. Roy wanted to reach up to hold her, but he couldn’t budge. This time no panic, just the detached observation. She brushed back his hair and kissed his forehead.

“What…what happened?” Roy stammered, the words hoarse and thready.

“There was a terrible accident, we were almost killed,” Penny replied. “A car accident. Do you remember? I was driving, we went over the cliff–”

“What…I don’t, I don’t…” What was the last thing he remembered? I don’t know. Images of faces. “We were at the…” Soft music. Red velvet curtains. “…the party? A party?”

“The Chegwiddens,” Penny said. “That’s right, baby. We were at the Chegwidden’s house. Oh God. Thank God.”

Penny retreated a step, her hands coming together as if in prayer, and Roy noticed the smooth red scar across her left forehead, an insult to the perfect skin on her perfect face. His brain tried to add up the details. The scar looked smooth. Why couldn’t he move? He tried to look down. He couldn’t shift anything. Couldn’t feel anything. His eyes darted left and right. Featureless white walls. Where am I again?

“Am I paralyzed?” Roy asked instead.

“That would not be the correct terminology,” Dr. Danesti replied. “At least, we hope it is not.”

Roy’s brain tried to parse the doctor’s meaning. Right. An operation. Some surgery. “How long?” he said after taking a moment.

Did I already ask this? He got the sense this wasn’t the first time he’d been in this room, but it was the only time he could remember. A second ago he couldn’t even remember his name. Just take it slow.

“Five months since the accident,” Dr. Danesti answered. “You’ve been in a medically induced coma for most of that.”

Roy blinked to clear his eyes. Three other figures loomed at the back wall of the room. The lights were low. One of them advanced. A woman, also with blond hair and striking features, but unnatural; old skin pulled tight over high cheekbones, lips artificially swollen, her sweep of hay-colored hair thin and brittle.

“Mother,” Roy croaked, the single word dry and cracked.

“A miracle,” Virginia weeped, leaning in to kiss her son’s forehead. “I just wanted to…my God. Thank you, God.”

“Praise be to God,” Sam whispered.

A lot of God stuff here, Roy thought, a random flash. He’d never been to church in his life, certainly never with his mother. Raindrops of past-life sprinkled into his mind.

The figures in the back of the room came into focus. One was a large African-American man in a rumpled suit sitting in a corner chair. His sweaty bald pate, ringed with a halo of white hair, reflected the overhead lighting. A wide nose, flattened off center from some insult, slouched over a thick gray bristle of a mustache.

Atticus, Roy remembered, his lawyer. Their family lawyer.

“What do you remember, Roy?”

Atticus sagged forward in his chair to stand. The man grunted in effort as he stood, but then he was huge. Six and a half feet and at least three hundred pounds. Most of it fat, but enough of it muscle. A Marine, Roy remembered, served in Vietnam. Something he rarely let Roy forget.

“Do you remember what happened?” Atticus asked again, more insistent. “Before the accident?” He checked his watch.

Roy closed his eyes.

The Chegwiddens’ house, in Montauk.

A rush of blurred images emerged from the haze of his mind.

“We took my old Porsche, we drove in…” It felt as though everyone in the room leaned closer.

His mind slid back, filled with a vision of startling clarity. They’d driven in from Manhattan, waited for the traffic to ease off. He’d asked the concierge to bring around his baby blue 356 Speedster. Penny hated it, couldn’t stand the way it blew her hair around when he took the top down. He remembered she tried to insist that they get the driver to bring them in the Escalade, or take the helicopter shuttle from West 30th, but he’d refused. Said it was too expensive, that they weren’t that rich. Said that anyway, it was his birthday–New Year, every year, a cursed day for a birth if there ever was one.

The smell of the leather seats, the bite of the frigid air and Penny’s hair flying in the wind–images of the drive on the Long Island Expressway flashed in his mind, and then of scraggly chokeberry and bayberry bushes half-lit in the beam of the car’s headlights, the washed gray cedar shingles of the Chegwiddens’ rambling New England home rising up from the knotted wind-blown pines around it. White-framed windows cast warm yellow light over patches of sea grass atop sand dunes. A distant crash of waves, a full moon reflecting off the Atlantic. Strains of a cello, soft clink of plates and glasses, black-suited kitchen staff serving hors d’oeuvres on silver platters, hushed conversation and peels of laughter, a flash of a diamond necklace, and then…

Screaming, but not in an accident. He was yelling at someone. Or was someone yelling at him?

“I just…I only remember…the house. Getting to there. That’s it.” Roy coughed. “The accident wasn’t on the Expressway?”

“It was in Montauk,” Atticus replied. “Don’t you remember–”

“Gentleman, ladies, ” Danesti said, “I think Mr. Lowell-Vandeweghe has–”

“Roy. Just call me Roy.”

“I think that Roy,” Danesti continued, “has had enough for today. We needed to expect some memory loss, as I took pains to explain before in our meetings together. We need to give him some rest.”

“Of course,” Atticus said. “I just wanted to be here…for the family.”

“Me too,” said the other man at the back of the room, standing beside Atticus.

He wore a uniform. A police uniform. Roy didn’t recognize him–or at least, his brain couldn’t dredge up anything.

“That’s Captain Harris, he pulled you and Penny from the wreck,” Roy’s mother whispered. “When the doctor said they were waking you up today, he wanted to be here. We all wanted to be here.”

Roy’s brain took a moment to process, then he said, “Thank you,” as loud as he could to Captain Harris. Attempted a smile he didn’t feel.

The captain nodded. Said he wished Roy a speedy recovery, that he was here to help and that anyone could call him. He left quietly with Atticus, putting an arm around the lawyer’s shoulders as they left together, bent toward each other in muted conversation. The door swung shut behind them.

Medical equipment beeped in the ensuing silence. Sam’s fingers flexed under Roy’s head.

“Why can’t I move?” The question came without fear now, the intravenous drugs a safety net for any emotional performance.

Danesti smiled. “This is a complex question–”

“Just give it to me. Am I paralyzed?” If yes, then turn the machines off. Kill me. Make it painless, his inner voice urged. Or painful. Maybe you deserve some pain. Roy frowned. “What did you say before? A transplant? What was transplanted?”

“Relax, buddy,” Sam whispered. His grip tightened on the back of Roy’s skull.

“But what did you say before?”

Penny stepped back, raising a hand to her mouth. She pulled away and, by accident, took the bed sheet halfway with her, exposing one of Roy’s arms, his torso and a leg and foot. Roy focused on his big toe. Except it wasn’t his big toe. His eyeballs rolled left. The leg. That hand. Was he hallucinating? The room seemed to swirl, the air sucked from Roy’s lungs.

“We had to perform a very aggressive surgical transplant to save you.” Dr. Danesti pulled back the sheets to cover the body.

“What did you do?” Roy strained but couldn’t move anything except his eyes. He darted them side to side and up and down, trying to find a way to escape.

The soft beep of the machines quickened in tempo. Sam’s finger’s slip away. The ceiling slumped back into view. The machines beeped faster, their beat faltering into a staccato arrhythmia.

Dr. Danesti’s sunken-cheeked face appeared close to his right side. “We call the procedure a body transplant.”

“What body?” Roy wheezed.

“Your body was crushed”–Penny leaned over Roy from his left, a tear streaming down one pink cheek–“destroyed in the accident. There was no hope. No other way.”

“We replaced your body with a donor body,” Dr. Danesti said, matter-of-factly. “You are a very lucky man, Roy. One of the very first few to successfully–”

“What do you mean donor body? Whose body? I’m attached to someone else’s body?” His eyes swiveled down as far as they could in their sockets. “You mean my head is attached to someone else’s body? Where’s my…here’s their head? How the hell…what…”

Black dots raced and coalesced in Roy’s vision, the machines’ stuttering beeps merging into a single high-pitched whine.

“Nurse,” Danesti called out, and then yelled: “Nurse!”

Roy’s mind dropped backward and away into the dark maelstrom churning behind consciousness.

***

Note from Matthew Mather — Hope you enjoyed the first chapter of my upcoming novel, The Dreaming Tree. I will release more chapters in the next two months before its release on Jan. 28th!

 

 

 

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NOMAD gets into top 100 on all of Amazon! Awesome! Thanks so much everyone that helped in the launch!

The post NOMAD gets into top 100 on all of Amazon appeared first on Matthew Mather.

NOMAD

Matthew Mather

Before writing my newest book Nomad (just released August 12th)I spent months talking to astronomers and astrophysicists to build up the science behind the encounter I envisioned. At first, the physicists said the event would totally destroy the Earth, but slowly, I managed to piece together a physics-based scenario where it was possible life could survive on the surface—otherwise it wouldn’t make for much of a story!

I won’t give away a spoiler and say exactly what the anomaly is in Nomad, except to say that it’s on the order of a hundred times the mass of the sun, totally invisible, and coming at us quickly. It’s based on real-world science, and I spent a lot of time working with the astrophysicists to work out a scenario of how we would miss detecting this kind of anomaly.

In the end, I managed to convince a team of post-graduate researchers build a full three-dimensional gravity simulation of the entire solar system to lob my Nomad  anomaly through the middle of. All of the elements of the story—all the forces involved and the paths of the planets afterward—are based on real-world physics (at the end of the book, I have instructions on where to watch a video of me running the simulation).

There have been many books and movies illustrating the idea that the Earth is part of the ecosystem of asteroids and comets, planets and even our Sun, and that from time to time, an object may hit the Earth, or the Sun may flare, triggering catastrophic events. But what hasn’t been explored as much is the effect of an ecosystem on a much larger scale—the effect exerted on the Earth by objects in our interstellar and even intergalactic neighborhood.

It might sound far-fetched, but it isn’t.

In fact, much of the events we’d attributed previously to chance, like the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, might not be random at all, but the direct result of the interstellar interactions the Earth has with passing stars (still random, but on a much larger scale). In school, we’re taught that the closest star, apart from the Sun, is Proxima Centuri, at just over four light years of distance. It may seem like the interstellar neighborhood is static.

But it’s not.

In February of 2015, researchers were dumbfounded to discover that just 70,000 years ago, near enough in time that our direct ancestors would have seen it, Scholz’s star, a red dwarf, passed about a half light year from us. This led to a flurry of data crunching, leading scientists to discover that, for instance, four million years ago, a giant star, more than twice the mass of the sun, passed less than a third of a light year from us, and in just over a million years from now, another star will pass at just over a hundredth (yes, a hundredth) of a light year from our sun, grazing the solar system itself and possibly affecting the orbits of the planets.

Now scientists are saying that Sedna, the 10th planetoid of the Sun, the one after Pluto, isn’t even an original planet of our Sun. It was captured from a passing star over a billion years ago, when our solar system collided with an alien star’s planetary system. Hundreds of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the collection of planetoids past Uranus, are believed to have been captured from passing stars.

So we are continually mixing together with others stars and interstellar objects, and not on a time scale of billions of years, but on a regular basis every few million years—some scientists now even think that alien stars transit our solar system’s Oort cloud as often as every few hundred thousand years ( BBC )

A change in Earth’s orbit might have triggered one of the biggest global warming events in its history ( Daily Mail ). And scientists now think that a massive ice age, started 35 million years ago, might have been also been caused by another shift in Earth’s orbit, and that this same event disturbed the asteroid belt enough to precipitate several large asteroid impacts, one of which formed the Chesapeake Bay. Some now believe these sorts of events might have been caused by the gravitational effect of a passing star.

Asteroids and comets transiting the inner solar system will of course hit the Earth from time to time, but there is an added element of the influence of passing stars that churn these objects into new and dangerous orbits, and even pulling the Earth itself into a slightly different orbit around the Sun. Which leads to speculation about the root cause of some large comet/asteroid impacts, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The point is that there are a lot of things in our universe, happening right around us, that we have no idea about.

And we haven’t even talked about the 95% of “stuff” floating around us, dark matter, that we can’t see or detect, other than knowing it’s there from its gravitational signature. With upgraded sensors and increased power in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2015, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, many scientists had hoped to see evidence of dark matter.

But they’ve found nothing. Despite all of our technology and hundreds of years of peering into the cosmos, we still have no idea what makes up the vast majority of our universe.

The scenario is Nomad  is perhaps farfetched, but perhaps not—truth is often stranger than fiction—and this is the story of Nomad.

Click here to go to Nomad’s Amazon Page.

All the best,

Matthew Mather

July 27th, 2015

The post Real-world encounters with alien stars appeared first on Matthew Mather.

I get a lot of requests from new authors looking for tips and advice on how to navigate the self-publishing book market. I created this document to summarize the approach that worked for me in getting started.

Exactly one year after publishing my first novel, Atopia Chronicles, a science fiction epic (followed a half a year later by CyberStorm, a present day tech-thriller in the vein of Crichton) I’ve managed to achieve some impressive success: 20th Century Fox purchased the film rights to CyberStorm, over 120,000 books sold, and ten foreign language publishing deals…tooting my own horn a bit

My new Darknet novel not just fiction…Posted on April 14, 2015

While my new novel Darknet is a work of fiction, on Feb.26th 2015, just when Darknet was being published, the real-life world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater announced that it was pursuing its own artificial intelligence program. This was an absolutely stunning revelation as I’d spent three years researching and coming up with the idea behind Darknet, only to find that it seemed to be actually happening in real life. Words can’t describe how spooky this was to me when I found out, and turned this book from a work of pure fiction into something more scary.

In addition to the Bridgewater revelation, many of the plot devices I use in Darknet, likemurder-for-hire on darknets and the Assassination Market, autonomous corporations,cryptocurrencies, darknet marketplaces, and chatbots—that can fool you into thinking they are people—are all real and operating right now. I have a list of links to articles below if you’d like to read more.

And, a machine beat the Turing test for the first time in 2014, forever changing the world that we live in. From now on, it will be increasingly difficult—if not impossible—to tell if we are talking to humans or machines when we get on the phone.

My first job, over twenty years ago now, was working as a research assistant at theMcGill Center for Intelligent Machines. It was there that I first studied artificial intelligence and conducted my own research into machine vision. After McGill, I went on to pursue several other technical fields before becoming a writer of fiction, but my fascination with the idea of intelligent machines never left me. You could say that Darknet was a novel twenty years in the making.

One issue that I always had with book and film portrayals of the ‘rise of intelligent machines’ was that they always seemed to create these ‘superhuman’ entities that were like human beings in a box, just much smarter and faster than we were (and inevitably seemed to want to destroy the human race). I didn’t see it happening like that, not the ‘first’ time, anyway. The desire to see a novel that explored the rise of the first intelligent machine network, but not characterizing it as a human-like entity, was my inspiration for writing Darknet.

The process of writing Darknet opened my eyes to many corners of the new informational world that surrounds us—these things like the Assassination Market and autonomous corporations. I invite you to go on the web and research these for yourself. I have included a list of links below:

Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, announces its artificial intelligence program on Feb. 26th, 2015: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-27/bridgewater-is-said-to-start-artificial-intelligence-teamReal-life murder-for-hire case on darknets (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/judge-govt-can-show-murder-for-hire-evidence-in-silk-road-trial/)Forbes article on the new Assassination Market(http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination-market-creator-whos-crowdfunding-murder-with-bitcoins/)An Economist article on Digital Autonomous Corporations (http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/01/computer-corporations)A list of active darknet marketplaces (https://vault43.org/chart.php)Cryptocurrency market capitalizations (http://coinmarketcap.com/ )A Discover magazine article on the Turing test being beaten (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2014/06/10/turing-test-beating-bot-reveals-more-about-humans-than-computers/#.VEUGvPnF_zU)

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Darknet

As a teaser, here’s the first two chapters to my new novel, DARKNET, available now for pre-order on Amazon (will be released March 11th): http://www.amazon.com/Darknet-Matthew-Mather-ebook/dp/B00R52OLSI/

CHAPTER 1

 

Wednesday, August 10th

Central London, England

12 pm

One hour until the next assassin deadline. Dead-line. An appropriate word. Sean Womack checked his wind-up wristwatch.

Tried to steady his shaking hand.

It was noon.

Clang. Clang…

The clocks of central London chimed their consensus. Sixty minutes until the next assassin’s bet, but he only needed half that. Time was on his side, if barely. The Assassin Market—a crypto-based, crowd-funded murder site—was on the hunt for him.

Sean sat on a granite bench beside a statue of Queen Anne, balancing a thick manila envelope on his knees while he stopped and rolled up his sleeves to relieve the sweltering July heat. My God, he didn’t know England could be this hot.

Buses and cars rumbling past, tourists staring at maps, children on summer outings squealing with excitement—the hustle and bustle of the city surrounded him. Next to Sean, a man in a tailored suit had his brown-bagged lunch spread out on his lap. The man chewed thoughtfully on a whole grain sandwich while staring at a flock of pigeons that scratched and cooed in front of them.

Glancing at the man sitting beside him—perfect silk tie, coiffed hair, polished brown shoes—Sean wondered if he was the one. The man didn’t look the part, but then it was impossible to tell anymore.

Sean’s stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten in a day—maybe two—but he had no appetite. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and adjusted his sunglasses.

Staring at the immense face of St. Paul’s cathedral in front of him, Sean wondered why there was only one clock, or at least, only one clock face, located on the right side. On the left, there was an empty space where a clock face should have been. Had it been designed like that? He didn’t think so. As scared as he was, the inconsistency of it annoyed him. He reached for his phone—to do a web search and find out why—before stopping himself.

He didn’t have one.

No cell phone, no computer. No electronics of any kind.

Sean glanced back up at St. Paul’s. His mind deconstructed it, visualizing where the flying buttresses, hidden behind the towering walls, lined up to support the dome in the middle. In his mind’s eye, the stones of the cathedral hovered in space, great wooden arches coming up around them, his brain recreating the systems and sequences of events needed to build it hundreds of years ago.

He couldn’t help himself.

His mind never stopped planning, creating systems, imagining possibilities.

He checked his watch again.

Fifty-six minutes.

Looking at the envelope sitting on his knees, he pulled a pen from his pocket and scrawled an address on it. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he scratched out the address and wrote a different one, then pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and scribbled something else on this and inserted it into the envelope. Satisfied, he rocked to his feet and pocketed the envelope, then walked forward to join the line of tourists going into St. Paul’s.

At the entrance there was a stone box: a suggested donation of five pounds. Sean fished in his back pocket and stuffed his last twenties into the box. Walking inside, he followed the tourist flow and gawked up at the marble arches, the gilt frescos of gold and blue lining the cavernous main dome, the wrought-iron chandeliers dangling from vaulted ceilings.Jake would love this. They never would have dreamed of visiting a place like this when they were kids.

Every few feet, Sean stopped to glance back at the entrance.

Reaching the back of the cathedral, Sean glanced again at the security guards at the entrance, then stepped over the cordon rope into a back corridor. Melting into the shadows, he turned and ran down the passageway. The sound of his footfalls echoed off the stone walls. Reaching the end, he banged on the lever of an emergency exit.

No alarm sounded.

Suddenly he was back outside, squinting in the sunshine. A helicopter hovered overhead, chop-chopping in the clear blue sky. A red double-decker bus growled past, belching fumes as the driver changed gears. Green trees swayed in the breeze. Has the story already broken? He looked at the helicopter. Another had joined it. Keeping his head low, he continued down the street, glancing back at the emergency exit.

Nobody followed.

Blue glass-and-steel skyscrapers rose past the dome of St. Paul’s on his left, construction cranes balanced between them like insects atop termite mounds; building, building. He glanced at the helicopters again, then took a sharp right turn to duck down an alleyway, colliding with someone coming from the opposite direction.

“Can you help me?” the man asked.

Sean grabbed him. “Who are you?”

“Dave,” the man squeaked, trying to step back. “I wanted to know if you’d take a picture of me and my family.” He pulled free.

Sean looked up. The man’s wife and kids were huddled behind him. Sean glanced up higher, at a CCTV camera on the corner of a building. London had the highest concentration of surveillance cameras in the world. It was a risk Sean was well aware of, but one he needed to take.

“Sorry,” Sean said to the man. “Sorry, I was just…” but he didn’t finish his sentence as he jogged away from them, down the last steps of the alleyway.

He stopped at the corner.

Looked in all directions.

Glanced at his watch again.

Forty-four minutes.

Turning left onto Queen Victoria Street, Sean started back toward the center of the City of London. People thought that London was this huge city, but the City of London, proper, was contained in one single square mile. One of the smallest cities in Europe, in fact, but it was also probably the highest concentration of financial firepower on the planet—and the money laundering capital of the world.

More helicopters assembled overhead.

After three more blocks, Sean found what he was looking for. A Royal Mail box, bright red, with the Queen’s ER insignia emblazoned in gold on the front, standing at attention next to the entrance to the Bank tube station. It was in the middle of a roundabout in a five-way intersection of streets—Victoria, Cheapside, William, Threadneedle, Prince—and in the shadow of the imposing Bank of England building. Next to the post box stood an equally red and iconic English telephone booth.

Sean slipped the envelope into the post box, double-checking to ensure it slid all the way in, then opened the door to the telephone booth while searching his pockets for change. No credit or debit cards, not since Amsterdam. Even if he didn’t use them, he wasn’t sure if someone could track their RFID tags. It was best not to take chances. Sean leaned against the inside wall of the booth and dialed a number he’d committed to memory.

Glanced at his wrist.

Thirty-eight minutes.

More than enough time.

The entrance to the Bank of England building was directly across from him, the Governor’s limousine parked in front, waiting. The quarterly Bankers’ Assembly meeting had started inside. Across the street was as far as he needed to get to finish what he’d started.

As he cupped the receiver to his ear, the line started ringing, and not the long muted tones of a UK or European number, but the short, familiar jingling of a North American one. He stared at the Bank of England across the street.

Three rings.

Then four.

Nobody answered.

Then an answering machine picked up.

“You have forty seconds,” announced an automated voice before connecting him, telling him how much time he’d paid for. He only heard the tail end of an answering machine message on the other end, “…the O’Connell residence, please leave a message.”

Sean took a deep breath. “Jake, hi, it’s me.”

How to put this?

“Listen, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch for so long, but there’s something I need to tell you…”

Behind him, a growling roar erupted, and Sean turned in time to see the front of a double-decker bus bearing down on him. It crashed into the telephone booth, crushing and dragging him across the center of the square.

CHAPTER 2

 

Thursday, August 11th

Atlas Capital Offices, Long Island, New York

4:54 pm

 

“I like the ring of it—blood diamonds.” Danny Donovan, the CEO of Atlas Capital, held up his arms to show off his new cuff links. Diamonds the size of gumdrops glistened on them.

Jake O’Connell held his gaze steady on his boss. “Nice,” he replied.

They sat across from each other in the main conference room of Atlas Capital, at a mahogany table that stretched the length of the thirty-foot space, the room separated from the rest of the office by a glass wall. Nice, but not too nice. The table was scuffed in places; the chairs bought from a bankruptcy auction. Donovan liked to keep up appearances, but only to the outside. Few people, except those who worked here, ever came to Atlas’s offices.

Atlas liked to say it was a Wall Street firm, but in reality, it was far from it—at least physically. Like the legendary garage start-ups of Silicon Valley, Long Island now housed more financial upstarts in abandoned shopping malls and reconverted warehouses than all of Manhattan combined.

“I didn’t defraud them,” Donovan added, getting back to their discussion. He maintained persistent two-day-old stubble below thick eyebrows that looked plucked and arranged, his black hair parted and slicked back to one side, his three-thousand dollar bespoke suit immaculate.

Donovan’s father had been a school teacher in the Bronx, his mother a secretary. He fought his way up, graduating from Harvard on scholarship before making a rapid ascent through the ranks of JP Morgan, the largest investment bank on Wall Street. These were the things Jake genuinely respected him for—hard work, coming up from the bottom, working class roots. After only three years at JP Morgan, Donovan led a rebellion in the high frequency trading group and dragged some of their best minds out here to Long Island for his own start-up. It was a risky move that paid off. Rumor had it that Donovan cleared two hundred million the year before.

“I’ll admit to bending a few rules,” Donovan continued, “but I didn’t steal from those pensioners’ accounts. I would never do something like that.”

Jake watched a veil pull over Donovan’s eyes like a translucent third eyelid to obscure the reptilian depths below. Probing. Searching for weakness. The edges of Donovan’s words were all too familiar to Jake.

“I know,” Jake replied, the same way he’d always acknowledged his own father’s lies. “I believe you,” he added.

But he didn’t.

If there was anything Jake knew about, it was psychopaths. His experience was as personal as it could get: his own father was one.

It was something that took Jake a long time to see for what it was. Growing up, Jake had assumed that every father treated his children as possessions. But one day in middle school, a kid taunted Jake, saying his dad thought Jake’s was a psycho. Jake beat the crap out of the kid, but afterward he looked up the word in an encyclopedia. A great truth was revealed. Many things came into focus.

And a life-long obsession with psychopaths was born.

The popular media vilified ‘psychos,’ made them out to be ogres, but they possessed the exact qualities celebrated by Wall Street and the modern world: charm, ruthlessness, and a win-at-all-costs mentality. Psychopathy wasn’t black or white, but more a multi-colored rainbow from Ted Bundy to the Dalai Lama, with everyone else fitting somewhere in between.

Jake often wondered why psychos seemed to surround him.

Did he search them out?

Or did he notice them more than most?

It was hard to tell.

Jake rated everyone he met on his psychopath scale, from full-Ted to deep-Dalai, even himself. He stared into the mirror sometimes, deep into the depths of his own eyes. Did a full-Ted psychopath know what he was? How? Everyone thought they were good people—even Hitler imagined himself a savior, bearing his cross for the greater good.

It was all a matter of perspective.

Jake spent his life trying to hide the void inside. He used to rely on anger and violence to do the job, but now his family and work fulfilled that role. Still, his life often felt like a show, a collection of learned behaviors.

Donovan pulled back from Jake and smiled. “I don’t know which one of us is the better liar.”

Jake forced a smile in return. “Do I have to answer that?”

“Not yet.” Donovan grabbed his coffee cup from the table. “But soon you’ll be answering questions. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawyers are getting ready. It’s not just my neck on the line, you understand?” Donovan pointed his cup at Jake. “Who would have imagined that an ex-con like you would end up a Wall Street trader? You want to keep it that way, you play ball.”

Jake nodded. “Understood.” It was a point Donovan never let him forget. Ever.

Five years ago, Sean Womack, his childhood friend, started bringing Donovan into the bar Jake managed in the Meatpacking district, one of the hottest late-night party corners of Manhattan. Soaked in tequila and high on cocaine, night after night Donovan had promised to bring Jake into his new financial start-up.

Jake never believed it would happen, but he took to treating the guy with a few shots whenever he showed up. Then one day Donovan made good on his word.

Almost inexplicably.

Donovan flashed his cufflinks again. “Three carats. Not bad, huh?”

“They are nice.” Jake couldn’t care less about the cufflinks. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and steepled his fingers together. “Listen, I need to know what to do with this Joseph Barbara guy. Who is he?”

Donovan smiled. “Who is he? You don’t know?”

“I put a meeting on our schedule with him tonight, down at Johnny Utah’s.”

“Cancel it. Doesn’t matter anymore.”

“This guy sounded pretty upset.” Jake needed some resolution. “His name’s not on our official list of customers, so I don’t know how—”

“I gave him your name.” Donovan held his cufflinks up at a new angle.

“You have him my name?” What was Donovan up to?

“Don’t worry about it.”

This set alarms jangling. Donovan might have taken Jake in under his wing, but he had the uncomfortable feeling of a big brother, like the one that used to hold Jake’s head underwater in the bathtub when he was little. For the hundredth time he felt the impulse to quit, but there was no way he could get this kind of money elsewhere.

“Okay,” Jake replied, unconvinced, “if you say so.” He could do his own research. Just then he saw someone he wanted to talk to walking by outside. Jake excused himself to Donovan, “Just a second,” as he jumped up and opened the conference room door. He stretched his hand out. “Mr. Viegas,” Jake said, projecting his voice.

Vidal Viegas, the chief operating officer of Bluebridge Capital, turned to Jake and blinked, his watery left eye drooping from some long-ago illness. Bluebridge was doing an audit on Atlas’s accounts today. Viegas looked more clean-cut than Jake remembered, his hair thicker. They’d met a few times over the years, but Viegas was a financial superstar now—no longer the obscure university professor he used to be. Maybe he didn’t remember Jake.

They stared at each other. Jake’s hand hovered in space between them. He was about to pull it back when Viegas finally took his hand.

“Ah, yes, Mr. O’Connell. How are you?”

“Good.” Jake gave two firm shakes, then Viegas’s hand slithered out of his. “Have you heard from Sean lately?” Jake asked.

Another a pause. “No, I haven’t.” Viegas flashed a weak smile. “Please, excuse me.” He turned and started for the front. Another man, limping, walked beside and behind Viegas, following him.

Jake watched them go. On the wall of plasma TVs lining the front of the office, Senator Russ talked on CNN. It was coverage of the presidential debate on the conflict in the Middle East. Eleven weeks to go until the election, and Russ was twenty points ahead. Jake closed the door and sat back down with Donovan.

“It’s those bastards at Bluebridge who are setting me up.” Donovan thrust his chin at the disappearing silhouette of Viegas. “They’re paying big money to back Russ in the elections. Something weird is going on there. How do you know Viegas?”

“Through Sean. You remember Sean Womack?”

Donovan scowled. “Of course.”

“Viegas was his thesis advisor at MIT.” Jake turned his Silver Eagle dollar coin over and over in his pocket. An old habit.

“Viegas was Sean’s thesis advisor?” Donovan hissed. “He never told me that—”

“You still talk to Sean?” Jake asked. He hadn’t talked to his old friend himself in months, but there were more pressing issues. Jake took a deep breath. “Look, we need to talk about this SEC investigation. I want to know what I should do if they come for you. I’m worried.”

“Me too,” Donovan sympathized.

But Jake knew he wasn’t. Not really.

Jake had ranked Donovan a half-Ted psycho the moment he walked into Jake’s bar for the first time; his well-oiled smile and piercing eyes were dead giveaways. Right now, Donovan’s eyes did their best to project concern and sympathy, but Jake imagined what was going on behind them.

To a psychopath, there were no dark clouds, only silver linings. There were no moral hazards, only opportunities. Even with an impending arrest and possible jail time, Donovan was probably thinking he’d get a movie deal when he got out in a few years, cement his fame as the Lion of Long Island. People saw Wall Street executives being dragged away in handcuffs after stealing the life savings of millions of retirees and asked, “How could someone do something like that?” when the real question was, “How couldn’t they?”

Donovan’s phone buzzed. He looked at the message on it. Jake watched him clench his jaw, a vein popping out in his neck. He was only a half-Ted. He felt some stress. Donovan looked at Jake, down at the message again, then back at Jake. “I need to talk to you, too.”

Jake stared at Donovan for a long second. “Anything I should be worried about?”

Donovan paused. “This is going to sound nuts, but they have audio recordings, even video, of me saying and doing things that I…didn’t…do.”

It was odd that Donovan kept insisting he was innocent. The lies were usually casual—obvious, even. So why keep up the pretense? Most of the time Jake could parse what Donovan was up to, but not now.

“Between you and me, I’m no angel,” Donovan added. “I’ve done some stuff that’s a little off the books to get this place where it is.” His pasted-on prep school accent was sliding into his old Bronx slang, a sure sign of agitation. “I’ll admit to that, but not this stuff they’re trying to stick on me.” He slid a memory key across the table to Jake. “Put this in your pocket.”

Jake picked it up, held it between his fingers like it was radioactive. “What the hell is it?”

“We ain’t got much time. That text I just got? They’re on their way.”

“I can’t have anything to do with this.” Jake put the memory key down, pushed it back across the table. “I’ve got a family to protect.”

Donovan laughed. “How do you think you got this job?”

An ominous current slid down Jake’s back.

“Your friend, Sean, he helped me out. So I helped him out. Hired you.” Donovan pushed the memory key back to Jake. “There are encryption keys on there for some locked accounts. You keep that safe. We’re in this together.”

A commotion erupted in the front of the office. Through the smoky glass walls of the conference room, Jake saw a group of men massing at the front, one of them holding a piece of paper above his head. They wore bulletproof vests and spoke in loud voices. After more angry shouting, the secretary at the front pointed toward the conference room. The men in vests advanced toward Jake and Donovan, handcuffs out. Jake looked Donovan in the eye and grabbed the memory key, stuffing it into his suit vest pocket.

Donovan straightened his sleeves and admired his diamond cufflinks again, nonplussed. “You take care of that, Jakey.”

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The Birth of the New Book Market
Posted on August 21, 2014

Yesterday, I watched a documentary about the rise and fall of Napster, and it made me think. It made me think of how good things are for indie writers in the new digital book world. If we didn’t have Amazon leading this switch to digital, we might have had some Napster-for-books start-up with free sharing, ripping of books, a hot race to the bottom in terms of pricing and structure. I say this, because over this past weekend weekend, I had an interesting reaction to seeing part of my (per unit) revenue from Amazon drop due to the new Kindle Unlimited subscription model.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with it, Amazon unveiled a new “Netflix for books” called Kindle Unlimited that lets readers access an unlimited number of about 600,000 books (about 25% of all 2.4 million books on Amazon) for $9.99 a month. This isn’t the first subscription model, there are others from Oyster and Scribd, of course each with their own licensing deals, but Kindle Unlimited is the first from Amazon, and a potential game-changer (to use that over used word).

What gets writers (like me) concerned, is the per-unit revenue that Amazon shares with writers when they let someone read a book through Kindle Unlimited. In the music business, subscription models like Pandora and Spotify need to have an artist’s song played about 10,000 times (I’m averaging, their actual payments vary, but this is a good order of magnitude) to generate revenue to the artist equivalent to one CD’s worth of revenue. Amazon does much better than this. Through their “Kindle Owners’ Lending Library” program, they pay about $2 per book that is read “for free” by Amazon Prime members. This payment is now extended to anyone who reads a book “for free” under Kindle Unlimited.

The issue is that, doing a quick calculation on the per-unit royalty Amazon started paying since the new Kindle Unlimited program started, it dropped from about $2.24 in June of 2014, to about $1.14 from July 18-31 when Kindle Unlimited started.

My initial reaction was a knee jerk, “hey, Amazon is going to screw us” response…but on further reflection, that was the wrong reaction. The new subscription model does throw a wrench into things, forcing me to think of maybe changing the way I write, what titles I put out. This felt uncertain and made me want to say, “Just leave things the way they were, I was doing good the way they were.”

The point that many other writers have made is that this will skew writers to start producing more short stories and short content so that they can live with about $1 per copy…and will push people away from producing full-length novels. That might happen, but honestly, writers will just have to adjust if this is the case.

After my initial reaction, the further reflection part that made me laugh was that my reaction was the same one that established publishers, authors, etc–anyone in the business already making a business of it–is feeling about this whole switch to digital, the churn in the market and so on. The whole fight between Hachette and Amazon, and all the other struggles in birthing this new book market came into focus.

Everyone has a different perspective, an entrenched interest, careers in the balance and families to provide for. In that context, I have a lot more sympathy for everyone involved. This personal reflection generated a wave of outward sympathy in me for everyone involved—for publishers, established writers, up-and-coming writers–we’re all in this together, we’re all trying to make a living from it, and right now a lot of it is up in the air. Then again, as a writer, everything is ALWAYS up in the air.

I have to remind myself that this is just business, and that Amazon has been awfully good to me–and for me–in the past year, so I should give it time to see how things turn out before complaining about anything. We’re upset that we might be getting only a $1 to $2 for a “free” book read on their platform, but if Amazon hadn’t been there, we might have been getting close to nothing. Either that, or the big publishers might have controlled the digital platforms, in which case it would have been business-as-usual with little chance for indie writers (which would have spurred on the copyright infringing free sites).

The switch to digital was inevitable. Amazon is just an agent of the change, not the change itself. On the balance, Amazon has been good to us writers. So I, for one, am going to roll with the punches and see what they come up with. We’re probably all going to have to roll with the market a few more times before things settle down. In fact, it’s a certainty.

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged book, howey, hugh, kindle, market, mather, matthew, model,new, subscription, unlimited by Matthew. Bookmark the permalink.

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The Third Way of Book Publishing
Is the future of book publishing with the Big Five or with the self-published author/marketer?

When it comes to book publishing, traditionally published authors, as John Green has said, tend to favor the Big Five. Self-published authors pull for their side, as Brenna Aubrey convincingly illustrated in her article. There has been a lot said on the topic in the past year or two, but I’m going to throw my hat in the ring and propose that an important mode may end up being “The Third Way”, a path that winds between these two.

So who am I?

To start with, I’m very much a newbie to the publishing business, but one with recent success, and that affords me an interesting (if limited) view into this world.

In 2011, the year before I self-published my first novel, I was turned down by over a hundred publishers and agents who told me—in a nutshell—that my book, Atopia Chronicles, wouldn’t sell (Atopia has now sold over 70,000 copies, and my second novel,CyberStorm, nearly 120,000).

Now, by self-publishing and without any help from the Big Five, I’ve gathered nearly 200,000 readers in under two years. This was only possible because of the new platforms and outlets that became available to authors in the past few years. Without them, I wouldn’t be an author, or at least, not a “published author”. And, because of my self-publishing success, 20th Century Fox purchased the film rights to my second novel, CyberStorm.

In 2013, I turned down several six-figure offers from most of the Big Five for publishing my second novel, CyberStorm, choosing instead to continue self-publishing—at least in the domestic US market. Now I do have publishing contracts with several of the Big Five, but for foreign markets—I have about a dozen foreign country deals, and these make up a good chunk of my revenue.

The Harper Collins (Canada) version of my CyberStorm book just came out, and I have to admit having a big publisher name on the cover made me feel special. I’m not being sarcastic. It’s an accomplishment I’m very proud of, and I look forward to working closely with Harper Collins and other publishers in the future. Working with them has helped improve my end product dramatically.

So—and now we’ll get to the financial part—when all is said and done, in the 18 months since I self-published my first novel in August of 2012, I’ve earned an average of into-the-tens-of-thousands a month…which even I am dumbfounded at. Almost unbelievable.

But the real point I’m trying to make is this: half of my writing revenue has come from self-publishing, and the other half from working with the “publishing establishment”. This is The Third Way that I think may become more accessible and more important for authors in the future.

I fully realize that my kind of outcome is rare and unlikely (and very, very lucky), and yet, there it is. I’m going to draw a few conclusions from my experiences, with the full acknowledgement that I’m just one (quite rare) data point. And I’m going to say, up front, that I’m no expert…if you want an expert opinion and view into the book business of 2014 I recommend having a look at Mike Shatzkin’s excellent article on the topic.

My first conclusion is this: Not only do I see electronic self-publishing as a new way to get into the writing game, I see it as just about the only way in for new authors. My perspective is colored by my own entryway, but after watching a string of self-published authors (in my circle of contacts this includes Andy Weir, A.G. Riddle, G. Michael Hopf, the Wearmouth brothers and more) get courted by “the establishment” it makes more and more sense.

(Ed. Note: Yes, I know some of you are screaming that self-publishing has a long and storied history, but I’d be careful of some claims that writers like Twain, Clancy, or Stephen King were self-published as detailed in this Huffington Post article. More to my point, by “new way” I mean using the electronic self-publishing platforms that have only become available in the past few years.)

As I see it, the route now is that a new writer self-publishes, works to generate an audience, and in the process creates a “virtual team” of people who are enthusiastic about their writing and helps them hone their craft. Once they pop up onto the Amazon charts, writing agents take notice and start contacting them. When an agent gets involved, they can start selling to the establishment (Ed. Note: getting an agent involved was the best thing I ever did as a writer—a little shout out to Paul Lucas at Janklow & Nesbit!!—but it’s a very personal and difficult process…this will be the subject of a different article).

I’ve watched this process happen time and time again in the past year, myself included.

Let me get back to that “virtual team” idea. One of the most amazing things I’ve discovered is the enthusiasm that readers now have for self-published authors. I have a database of nearly a thousand readers who’ve volunteered to help beta read, proof read, and even let me interview them about their lives and work. Doing an initial crowd-sourced content edit has now become a standard part of my process.

Amazing.

(And if you’re an aspiring author, make sure to tap into this as much as you can.)

The second conclusion that I’m going to draw is that to maximize the revenue a writer can generate from their work—if they can get a self-published e-book success on their hands—it’s possible to work both the self-publishing and traditional publishing angles at the same time. Hugh Howey famously managed to retain his electronic publishing rights while doing print deals, but there are more options that are more accessible.

If a writer manages to get out a self-published book that is successful, they can separate out rights for: domestic US, Canada, UK, rest of world country by country, audio rights, film and TV rights and so on. As I did, they could keep self-publishing in the US domestic market (both print and electronic), but sell off rights for each of these separate parts individually through an agent. With enough volume in e-book sales, this becomes possible.

All I’m saying is that it’s possible, and that working with the “publishing establishment” doesn’t need to be antithetical to self-publishing at the same time. Of course I realize that I’m not the first person to think of mixing self-publishing with book publisher contracts, but I’m saying that the new electronic platforms have created a dynamic that makes it more possible (and for a wider audience) than before. I think some other commentators have called writers who employ both self-publishing and publisher contracts “hybrids” which makes sense.

I’m going to make a guess that as a new generation of writers rises up through the ranks, often coming through the self-publishing route (as illustrated in a great article from Hugh Howey), many are going to remain “hybrids” and keep at least one foot in the self-published world and push to create better deals for themselves and everyone else.

That’s The Third Way that I see coming.

ps. feel free to ask questions–the best place to do this would be on my author Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Author.Matthew.Mather on the posting linking to this article

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged big, contracts, five, foreign, howey, hugh, path, publishing,self, success, third, writing by Matthew. Bookmark the permalink.

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While my new novel Darknet is a work of fiction, on Feb.26th 2015, just when Darknet was being published, the real-life world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater announced that it was pursuing its own artificial intelligence program. This was an absolutely stunning revelation as I’d spent three years researching and coming up with the idea behind Darknet, only to find that it seemed to be actually happening in real life. Words can’t describe how spooky this was to me when I found out, and turned this book from a work of pure fiction into something more scary.

In addition to the Bridgewater revelation, many of the plot devices I use in Darknet, like murder-for-hire on darknets and the Assassination Market, autonomous corporations, cryptocurrencies, darknet marketplaces, and chatbots—that can fool you into thinking they are people—are all real and operating right now. I have a list of links to articles below if you’d like to read more.

And, a machine beat the Turing test for the first time in 2014, forever changing the world that we live in. From now on, it will be increasingly difficult—if not impossible—to tell if we are talking to humans or machines when we get on the phone.

My first job, over twenty years ago now, was working as a research assistant at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines. It was there that I first studied artificial intelligence and conducted my own research into machine vision. After McGill, I went on to pursue several other technical fields before becoming a writer of fiction, but my fascination with the idea of intelligent machines never left me. You could say that Darknet was a novel twenty years in the making.

One issue that I always had with book and film portrayals of the ‘rise of intelligent machines’ was that they always seemed to create these ‘superhuman’ entities that were like human beings in a box, just much smarter and faster than we were (and inevitably seemed to want to destroy the human race). I didn’t see it happening like that, not the ‘first’ time, anyway. The desire to see a novel that explored the rise of the first intelligent machine network, but not characterizing it as a human-like entity, was my inspiration for writing Darknet.

The process of writing Darknet opened my eyes to many corners of the new informational world that surrounds us—these things like the Assassination Market and autonomous corporations. I invite you to go on the web and research these for yourself. I have included a list of links below:

Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, announces its artificial intelligence program on Feb. 26th, 2015: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-27/bridgewater-is-said-to-start-artificial-intelligence-team
Real-life murder-for-hire case on darknets (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/judge-govt-can-show-murder-for-hire-evidence-in-silk-road-trial/)
Forbes article on the new Assassination Market (http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination-market-creator-whos-crowdfunding-murder-with-bitcoins/)
An Economist article on Digital Autonomous Corporations (http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/01/computer-corporations)
A list of active darknet marketplaces (https://vault43.org/chart.php)
Cryptocurrency market capitalizations (http://coinmarketcap.com/ )
A Discover magazine article on the Turing test being beaten (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2014/06/10/turing-test-beating-bot-reveals-more-about-humans-than-computers/#.VEUGvPnF_zU)

Feel free to email me with any questions or comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts or share in things that you find out there!

As a teaser, here’s the first two chapters to my new novel, DARKNET, available now for pre-order on Amazon (will be released March 11th): http://www.amazon.com/Darknet-Matthew-Mather-ebook/dp/B00R52OLSI/

CHAPTER 1

 

Wednesday, August 10th

Central London, England

12 pm

One hour until the next assassin deadline. Dead-line. An appropriate word. Sean Womack checked his wind-up wristwatch.

Tried to steady his shaking hand.

It was noon.

Clang. Clang…

The clocks of central London chimed their consensus. Sixty minutes until the next assassin’s bet, but he only needed half that. Time was on his side, if barely. The Assassin Market—a crypto-based, crowd-funded murder site—was on the hunt for him.

Sean sat on a granite bench beside a statue of Queen Anne, balancing a thick manila envelope on his knees while he stopped and rolled up his sleeves to relieve the sweltering July heat. My God, he didn’t know England could be this hot.

Buses and cars rumbling past, tourists staring at maps, children on summer outings squealing with excitement—the noise of the city surrounded him. Next to Sean, a man in a tailored suit had his brown-bagged lunch spread out on his lap. He chewed thoughtfully on a whole grain sandwich while staring at a flock of pigeons that scratched and cooed in front of them. Glancing at the man—perfect silk tie, coiffed hair, polished brown shoes—Sean wondered if he was the one. The man didn’t look the part, but then it was impossible to tell anymore.

Sean’s stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten in a day—maybe two—but he had no appetite. Wiping the sweat off his forehead, he adjusted his sunglasses.

Staring at the immense face of St. Paul’s cathedral in front of him, Sean wondered why there was only one clock, or at least, only one clock face, located on the right side. On the left, there was an empty space where a clock face should have been. Had it been designed like that? He didn’t think so. As scared as he was, the inconsistency of it annoyed him. He reached for his phone—to do a web search and find out why—before stopping himself.

He didn’t have one.

No cell phone, no computer. No electronics of any kind.

Sean glanced back up at St. Paul’s. His mind deconstructed it, visualizing where the flying buttresses, hidden behind the towering walls, lined up to support the dome in the middle. In his mind’s eye, the stones of the cathedral hovered in space, great wooden arches coming up around them, his brain recreating the systems and sequences of events needed to build it hundreds of years ago.

He couldn’t help himself.

His mind never stopped planning, creating systems, imagining possibilities.

He checked his watch again.

Fifty-six minutes.

Looking at the envelope sitting on his knees, he pulled a pen from his pocket and scrawled an address on it. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he scratched out the address and wrote a different one, then pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and scribbled something else on this and inserted it into the envelope. Satisfied, he rocked to his feet and pocketed the envelope, then walked forward to join the line of tourists going into St. Paul’s.

At the entrance there was a stone box: a suggested donation of five pounds. Sean fished in his back pocket and stuffed his last twenties into the box. Walking inside, he followed the tourist flow and gawked up at the marble arches, the gilt frescos of gold and blue lining the cavernous main dome, the wrought-iron chandeliers dangling from vaulted ceilings. Jake would love this. They never would have dreamed of visiting a place like this when they were kids.

Every few feet, Sean stopped to glance back at the entrance.

Reaching the back of the cathedral, Sean stepped over the cordon rope into a corridor. Melting into the shadows, he turned and ran down the passageway. The sound of his footfalls echoed off the stone walls. Reaching the end, he banged on the lever of an emergency exit.

No alarm sounded.

Back outside, he squinted in the sunshine. A helicopter hovered overhead, chop-chopping in the clear blue sky. A red double-decker bus growled past, belching fumes as the driver changed gears. Green trees swayed in the breeze. Has the story already broken? He looked at the helicopter. Another had joined it. Keeping his head low, he continued down the street, glancing back at the emergency exit.

Nobody followed.

Blue glass-and-steel skyscrapers rose past the dome of St. Paul’s on his left, construction cranes balanced between them like insects atop termite mounds; building, building. He glanced at the helicopters again, then took a sharp right turn to duck down an alleyway, colliding with someone coming from the opposite direction.

“Can you help me?” the man asked.

Sean grabbed him. “Who are you?”

“Dave,” the man squeaked, trying to step back. “I wanted to know if you’d take a picture of me and my family.” He pulled free.

Sean looked up. The man’s wife and kids were huddled behind him. Sean glanced up higher, at a CCTV camera on the corner of a building. London had the highest concentration of surveillance cameras in the world. It was a risk Sean was well aware of, but one he needed to take.

“Sorry,” Sean said to the man. “Sorry, I was just…” but he didn’t finish his sentence as he jogged away from them, down the last steps of the alleyway.

He stopped at the corner.

Looked in all directions.

Glanced at his watch again.

Forty-four minutes.

Turning left onto Queen Victoria Street, Sean started back toward the center of the City of London. People thought that London was this huge city, but the City of London, proper, was contained in one single square mile. One of the smallest cities in Europe, in fact, but it was also probably the highest concentration of financial firepower on the planet—and the money laundering capital of the world.

More helicopters assembled overhead.

After three more blocks, Sean found what he was looking for. A Royal Mail box, bright red, with the Queen’s ER insignia emblazoned in gold on the front, standing at attention next to the entrance to the Bank tube station. It was in the middle of a roundabout in a five-way intersection of streets—Victoria, Cheapside, William, Threadneedle, Prince—and in the shadow of the imposing Bank of England building. Next to the post box stood an equally red and iconic English telephone booth.

Sean slipped the envelope into the post box, double-checking to ensure it slid all the way in, then opened the door to the telephone booth while searching his pockets for change. No credit or debit cards, not since Amsterdam. Even if he didn’t use them, he wasn’t sure if someone could track their RFID tags. It was best not to take chances. Sean leaned against the inside wall of the booth and dialed a number he’d committed to memory.

Glanced at his wrist.

Thirty-eight minutes.

More than enough time.

The entrance to the Bank of England building was directly across from him, the Governor’s limousine parked in front, waiting. The quarterly Bankers’ Assembly meeting had started inside. Across the street was as far as he needed to get to finish what he’d started.

As he cupped the receiver to his ear, the line started ringing, and not the long muted tones of a UK or European number, but the short, familiar jingling of a North American one. He stared at the Bank of England across the street.

Three rings.

Then four.

Nobody answered.

Then an answering machine picked up.

“You have forty seconds,” announced an automated voice before connecting him, telling him how much time he’d paid for. He only heard the tail end of an answering machine message on the other end, “…the O’Connell residence, please leave a message.”

Sean took a deep breath. “Jake, hi, it’s me.”

How to put this?

“Listen, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch for so long, but there’s something I need to tell you…”

Behind him, a growling roar erupted, and Sean turned in time to see the front of a double-decker bus bearing down on him. It crashed into the telephone booth, crushing and dragging him across the center of the square.

 

 

CHAPTER 2

 

Thursday, August 11th

Atlas Capital Offices, Long Island, New York

4:54 pm

 

“I like the ring of it—blood diamonds.” Danny Donovan, the CEO of Atlas Capital, held up his arms to show off his new cuff links. Diamonds the size of gumdrops glistened on them.

Jake O’Connell held his gaze steady on his boss. “Nice,” he replied.

They sat across from each other in the main conference room of Atlas Capital, at a mahogany table that stretched the length of the thirty-foot space, the room separated from the rest of the office by a glass wall. Nice, but not too nice. The table was scuffed in places; the chairs bought from a bankruptcy auction. Donovan liked to keep up appearances, but only to the outside. Few people, except those who worked here, ever came to Atlas’s offices.

Atlas liked to say it was a Wall Street firm, but in reality, it was far from it—at least physically. Like the legendary garage start-ups of Silicon Valley, Long Island now housed more financial upstarts in abandoned shopping malls and reconverted warehouses than all of Manhattan combined.

“I didn’t defraud them,” Donovan added, getting back to their discussion. He maintained persistent two-day-old stubble below thick eyebrows that looked plucked and arranged, his black hair parted and slicked back to one side, his three-thousand dollar bespoke suit immaculate.

Donovan’s father had been a school teacher in the Bronx, and he fought his way up on scholarship at Harvard before making a rapid ascent through the ranks of JP Morgan, the largest investment bank on Wall Street. These were the things Jake genuinely respected him for—hard work, coming up from the bottom, working class roots. After only three years at JP Morgan, Donovan led a rebellion in the high frequency trading group and dragged some of their best minds out to Long Island for his own start-up. A risky move that paid off. Rumor had it that Donovan cleared two hundred million the year before.

“I’ll admit to bending a few rules,” Donovan continued, “but I didn’t steal from those pensioners’ accounts. I would never do something like that.”

Jake watched a veil pull over Donovan’s eyes like a translucent third eyelid to obscure the reptilian depths below. Probing. Searching for weakness. The edges of Donovan’s words were all too familiar to Jake.

“I know,” Jake replied, the same way he’d always acknowledged his own father’s lies. “I believe you,” he added.

But he didn’t.

If there was anything Jake knew about, it was psychopaths. His experience was as personal as it could get: his own father was one.

It was something that took Jake a long time to see for what it was. Growing up, Jake had assumed that every father treated his children as possessions. But one day in middle school, a kid taunted Jake, saying his dad thought Jake’s was a psycho. Jake beat the crap out of the kid, but afterward he looked up the word in an encyclopedia. A great truth was revealed. Many things came into focus.

And a life-long obsession with psychopaths was born.

The popular media vilified ‘psychos,’ made them out to be ogres, but they possessed the exact qualities celebrated by Wall Street and the modern world: charm, ruthlessness, and a win-at-all-costs mentality. Psychopathy wasn’t black or white, but more a multi-colored rainbow from Ted Bundy to the Dalai Lama, with everyone else fitting somewhere in between.

Jake often wondered why psychos seemed to surround him.

Did he search them out?

Or did he notice them more than most?

It was hard to tell.

Jake rated everyone he met on his psychopath scale, from full-Ted to deep-Dalai, even himself. He stared into the mirror sometimes, deep into the depths of his own eyes. Did a full-Ted psychopath know what he was? How? Everyone thought they were good people—even Hitler imagined himself a savior, bearing his cross for the greater good.

It was all a matter of perspective.

Jake spent his life trying to hide the void inside. He used to rely on anger and violence to do the job, but now his family and work fulfilled that role. Still, his life often felt like a show, a collection of learned behaviors.

Donovan pulled back from Jake and smiled. “I don’t know which one of us is the better liar.”

Jake forced a smile in return. “Do I have to answer that?”

“Not yet.” Donovan grabbed his coffee cup from the table. “But soon you’ll be answering questions. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawyers are getting ready. It’s not just my neck on the line, you understand?” Donovan pointed his cup at Jake. “Who would have imagined that an ex-con like you would end up a Wall Street trader? You want to keep it that way, you play ball.”

Jake nodded. “Understood.” It was a point Donovan never let him forget. Ever.

Five years ago, Sean Womack, his childhood friend, started bringing Donovan into the bar Jake managed in the Meatpacking district, one of the hottest late-night party corners of Manhattan. Soaked in tequila and high on cocaine, night after night Donovan had promised to bring Jake into his new financial start-up.

Jake never believed it would happen, but he took to treating the guy with a few shots whenever he showed up. Then one day Donovan made good on his word.

Almost inexplicably.

Donovan flashed his cufflinks again. “Three carats. Not bad, huh?”

“They are nice.” Jake couldn’t care less about the cufflinks. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and steepled his fingers together. “Listen, I need to know what to do with this Joseph Barbara guy. Who is he?”

Donovan smiled. “Who is he? You don’t know?”

“I put a meeting on our schedule with him tonight, down at Johnny Utah’s.”

“Cancel it. Doesn’t matter anymore.”

“This guy sounded pretty upset.” Jake needed some resolution. “His name’s not on our official list of customers, so I don’t know how—”

“I gave him your name.” Donovan held his cufflinks up at a new angle.

“You gave him my name?” What was Donovan up to?

“Don’t worry about it.”

This set alarms jangling. Donovan might have taken Jake in under his wing, but he had the uncomfortable feeling of a big brother, like the one that used to hold Jake’s head underwater in the bathtub when he was little. For the hundredth time he felt the impulse to quit, but there was no way he could get this kind of money elsewhere.

“Okay,” Jake replied, unconvinced, “if you say so.” He could do his own research. Just then he saw someone he wanted to talk to walking by outside. Jake excused himself to Donovan, “Just a second,” as he jumped up and opened the conference room door. He stretched his hand out. “Mr. Viegas,” Jake said, projecting his voice.

Vidal Viegas, the chief operating officer of Bluebridge Capital, turned to Jake and blinked, his watery left eye drooping from some long-ago illness. Bluebridge was doing an audit on Atlas’s accounts today. Viegas looked more clean-cut than Jake remembered, his hair thicker. They’d met a few times over the years, but Viegas was a financial superstar now—no longer the obscure university professor he used to be. Maybe he didn’t remember Jake.

They stared at each other. Jake’s hand hovered in space between them. He was about to pull it back when Viegas finally took his hand.

“Ah, yes, Mr. O’Connell. How are you?”

“Good.” Jake gave two firm shakes, then Viegas’s hand slithered out of his. “Have you heard from Sean lately?” Jake asked.

Another pause. “No, I haven’t.” Viegas flashed a weak smile. “Please, excuse me.” He turned and started for the front. Another man, limping, walked beside and behind Viegas, following him.

Jake watched them go. On the wall of plasma TVs lining the front of the office, Senator Russ talked on CNN. It was coverage of the presidential debate on the conflict in the Middle East. Eleven weeks to go until the election, and Russ was twenty points ahead. Jake closed the door and sat back down with Donovan.

“It’s those bastards at Bluebridge who are setting me up.” Donovan thrust his chin at the disappearing silhouette of Viegas. “They’re paying big money to back Russ in the elections. Something weird is going on there. How do you know Viegas?”

“Through Sean. You remember Sean Womack?”

Donovan scowled. “Of course.”

“Viegas was his thesis advisor at MIT.” Jake turned his Silver Eagle dollar coin over and over in his pocket. An old habit.

“Viegas was Sean’s thesis advisor?” Donovan hissed. “He never told me that—”

“You still talk to Sean?” Jake asked. He hadn’t talked to his old friend himself in months, but there were more pressing issues. Jake took a deep breath. “Look, we need to talk about this SEC investigation. I want to know what I should do if they come for you. I’m worried.”

“Me too,” Donovan sympathized.

But Jake knew he wasn’t. Not really.

Jake had ranked Donovan a half-Ted psycho the moment he walked into Jake’s bar for the first time; his well-oiled smile and piercing eyes were dead giveaways. Right now, Donovan’s eyes did their best to project concern and sympathy, but Jake imagined what was going on behind them.

To a psychopath, there were no dark clouds, only silver linings. There were no moral hazards, only opportunities. Even with an impending arrest and possible jail time, Donovan was probably thinking he’d get a movie deal when he got out in a few years, cement his fame as the Lion of Long Island. People saw Wall Street executives being dragged away in handcuffs after stealing the life savings of millions of retirees and asked, “How could someone do something like that?” when the real question was, “How couldn’t they?”

Donovan’s phone buzzed. He looked at the message on it. Jake watched him clench his jaw, a vein popping out in his neck. He was only a half-Ted. He felt some stress.

Jake stared at Donovan for a long second. “Anything I should be worried about?”

Donovan paused, then looked Jake in the eye. “This is going to sound nuts, but they have audio recordings, even video, of me saying and doing things that I…didn’t…do.”

It was odd that Donovan kept insisting he was innocent. The lies were usually casual—obvious, even. So why keep up the pretense? Most of the time Jake could parse what Donovan was up to, but not now.

“Between you and me, I’m no angel,” Donovan added. “I’ve done some stuff that’s a little off the books to get this place where it is.” His pasted-on prep school accent was sliding into his old Bronx slang, a sure sign of agitation. “I’ll admit to that, but not this stuff they’re trying to stick on me.” He slid a memory key across the table to Jake. “Put this in your pocket.”

Jake picked it up, held it between his fingers like it was radioactive. “What the hell is it?”

“We ain’t got much time. That text I just got? They’re on their way.”

“I can’t have anything to do with this.” Jake put the memory key down, pushed it back across the table. “I’ve got a family to protect.”

Donovan laughed. “How do you think you got this job?”

An ominous current slid down Jake’s back.

“Your friend, Sean, he helped me out. So I helped him out. Hired you.” Donovan pushed the memory key back to Jake. “There are encryption keys on there for some locked accounts. You keep that safe. We’re in this together.”

A commotion erupted in the front of the office. Through the smoky glass walls of the conference room, Jake saw a group of men massing at the front, one of them holding a piece of paper above his head. They wore bulletproof vests and spoke in loud voices. After more angry shouting, the secretary at the front pointed toward the conference room. The men in vests advanced toward Jake and Donovan, handcuffs out. Jake looked Donovan in the eye and grabbed the memory key, stuffing it into his suit vest pocket.

Donovan straightened his sleeves and admired his diamond cufflinks again, nonplussed. “You take care of that, Jakey.”