So what’s the super-hacker’s laughably byzantine scheme? Let’s go through the sequence of events: He causes an explosion at the nuclear power plant. Then he manipulates soy markets to a nine-figure tune, spread out among various bank accounts. But this is all a warm-up for the big plan, which Hathaway and Lien discover in a barren river bed in Jakarta: As it happens, the area is pocked with tin-mining operations. The hacker’s plan is to disrupt the pumps that keep water from flooding the river beds, wipe out the mines (and villages), create a shortage of tin supplies, and bet that that shortage will dramatically raise the price of tin, thus making him richer than he already is. 

And it would have worked, too, if not for those meddling counter-hackers!