Red Team Blues: A Thriller Novel About Cryptocurrency Heist

My next novel is *Red Team Blues,* out on 4/25; it's easily the most "commercial" book I've ever written - a "grabby thriller," or, as @molly0xFFF put it, "don't start reading it at bedtime if you have to be awake for something the next morning."https://t.co/fnfbGtfB60

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on https://t.co/iSBh8srvly, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:https://t.co/AFkT2nILC8

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

*Red Team Blues* is the story of Martin Hench, a 67 year old, near-retirement forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding Silicon Valley finance scams, who stumbles into the most dangerous job of his life.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

He gets embroiled in cryptocurrency heist that exposes the finance rot at the heart of tech and the way that it curdled the dream of technology as a force for connection and good.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

I'll be doing a giant tour (San Diego, LA, Burbank, Berkeley, SF, PDX, Mountain View, Vancouver, Calgary, Gaithursburg, DC, Toronto, London, Hay, Oxford, Manchester, Nottingham, Berlin); upcoming dates in each edition of my Pluralistic newsletter:https://t.co/Ry13KEnCkL

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

To whet your appetite, I'm going to syndicate the first chapter of #RedTeamBlues, starting today. In this installment, we meet Martin Hench and the *Unsalted Hash*, his "foolish and ungainly" tour bus, just as he's being roped in for the job of his career.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

I hope you'll consider ordering! And I hope you'll post a review or recommendation to your social media/blog. There is literally no greater favor you can do for a writer than to telling people who trust your judgment about books you enjoy. It's gift more precious than gold.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

Here's where US readers can pre-order the book:https://t.co/fnfbGtfB60

Here's pre-orders for Canadians:https://t.co/A6cF4qote2

And for readers in the UK and the rest of the Commonwealth:https://t.co/yrkrXG2q3X

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

And now, here's today's serial installment:

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One evening, I got a wild hair and drove all night from San Diego to Menlo Park. Why Menlo Park?

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

It had both a triple-­Michelin-­star place and a dear old friend both within spitting distance of the Walmart parking lot, where I could park the *Unsalted Hash*, leaving me free to drink as much as I cared to and still be able to walk home and crawl into bed.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

I’d done a job that turned out better than I’d expected—­well enough that I was set for the year if I lived carefully. I didn’t want to live carefully. The age for that was long past. I wanted to live it up. There’d be more work. I wanted to celebrate.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-­seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

Getting close to Bakersfield, I pulled the *Unsalted Hash* into a rest stop to stretch my legs and check my phone.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

After a putter around the picnic tables and vending machine, I walked the perimeter of my foolish and ungainly and luxurious tour bus, checking the tires and making sure the cargo compartments were dogged and locked.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

I climbed back in, checked my sludge levels and decided they were low enough that I could use my own toilet, then, finally, having forced myself to wait, sat on one of the buttery leather chairs and checked my messages.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

That’s how I learned that Danny Lazer was looking for me. He was working the usual channels—­DMs from people who I checked in with when I was looking for work—­and it put a shine on my evening, because sixty-­seven or no, there was always work for someone with my skill set.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

Danny Lazer had a problem with his Trustlesscoin keys, which relied on the best protected cryptography in the world (nominally). So I messaged him. One rest stop later, past Gilroy, I got his reply. He was eager to see me. Would I call on him at his home in Palo Alto?

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

My pathetic little ego swelled up at his eagerness. I told him I had a big dinner planned the next night, but I’d see him the morning after.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

Truth be told, putting off a man as important as Danny Lazer, even for twenty-­four hours, made me feel more important still. I could tell from his reply that the delay chafed at him. I felt petty, but not so much so that I canceled my dinner.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

My dear old friend was a lively sort, and it was possible we’d walk from the restaurant to her place for an hour or three before I returned to the Walmart parking lot.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

Dinner didn’t disappoint, and neither did the fun and games afterward. It was a very nice capstone to a very successful job, and a very good prelude to another job for one of the nicest rich men (or richest nice men) in Silicon Valley.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

Danny was old Silicon Valley, a guy who started his own UUCP host so he could help distribute the alt hierarchy and once helped Tim May bring a load of unlicensed firearms across state lines from a Nevada gun show.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

He’d lived like a monk for decades, writing cryptographic code and fighting with the NSA over it, and had mortgaged his parents’ house back east to keep himself and a couple of programmers in business in a tiny office for a decade...

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

...while he and Galit lived in a thirty-­foot motor home that needed engine tuning once a month just so it could trundle from one parking space to the next.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

It was a bet there would come a day when the internet’s innocence would end and people would want privacy from each other and their governments, and he kept doubling down on that bet through every boom and bust, living on ramen and open cereal from the used food store...

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

...refusing to part with any equity except to promising hackers who’d join him, and then the bet paid off, and he became Daniel Moses Lazar, with a 75 percent stake in Keypairs LLC...

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

...whose crypto-­libraries and workflow tools were the much-­ballyhooed picks and shovels of the next internet revolution.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

Keypairs wasn’t the first unicorn in Silicon Valley, but it was the first one that never took a dime in venture capital and whose sole angels were Danny’s parents back in Jersey...

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

...to whom Danny sent at least $100 million before they made him stop, insisting that they had nothing more they wanted in this world.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

Galit picked out a big place in Twin Peaks that you could see Alcatraz from on a clear day, gutted it to the foundation slab, bare studs, and ceiling joists, completely rebuilt it...

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

...while being mindful of both Danny’s specification for networking receptacles throughout, and Galit’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

One day, as she was bringing out some Mendocino grig and a cheese board for the two of them to enjoy from their half-­built porch, she gasped, complained of pain in both arms, then her chest, and then she collapsed and was dead before the ambulance arrived.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

It had been a good marriage: twenty-­two years and no kids, because there was nowhere in their old RV to put them unless they wanted to hang them from the rafters.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

She’d been his rock while he’d built up Keypairs, but he’d been hers, too, rubbing her feet and helping her deal with the endless humiliations that a woman doing administrative work in Silicon Valley had to put up with.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

He didn’t see it that way, though: after he took possession of her ashes, all he could talk about was how they’d wasted nearly a quarter of a century chasing a fortune that didn’t do either of them a bit of good...

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

...and it had cost them the time they could have spent in a beach shack in the Baja while he did two hours of contract work a month to pay for machete sharpening and new hammocks once a year.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

A procession of Silicon Valley’s most powerful leaders and respected technologists filed through the Palo Alto teardown they’d bought to perch in during the Twin Peaks project. People who weren’t merely wealthy but famous for their vision, their sensitivity, their insight.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

They argued with him about his crushing regrets and tried to tell him how much good he’d done, both for Galit and for the world, but he was unreachable. A consensus emerged among the Friends of Danny that he was not long for this world.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

Not that he was going to kill himself or anything but that he would simply stop caring about living, and then nature would take its course.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

They were right—­given all facts in evidence, that was a foregone conclusion. But there was one hidden variable: Sethuramani Balakrishnan, who was twenty-­five, brilliant, and had made a series of lateral moves within Keypairs:

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

...customer support, then compliance, and finally Danny’s PA, a job she was vastly overqualified for.

She helped him flip the house, then to turn Keypairs over to a management committee carefully balanced between hackers who’d been with Danny since the PDP-­8 days...

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

...and people with real managerial experience and proven experience growing companies and running big teams. He got rid of the shares he’d taken in over the years with advisory boards and stuck everything into tracker funds—­the ones that *didn’t* buy a lot of tech stocks.

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023

As far as anyone could tell, Sethu didn’t try to talk him out of any of this, just offered efficient, intelligent, and supremely organized help in getting Danny’s life’s work out of a realm in which it had to be actively managed by someone with Danny’s incredible drive...

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— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) April 17, 2023