The slim jet flew thousands of feet above the Atlantic Ocean, ripples glittering far below the belly of the private plane, while Tristan Fortunato King stared at spreadsheets on his computer screen.
A tumbler of rare scotch with melting ice cubes sat at his elbow as he scanned the blinking columns of numbers and cross-referenced graphs running on another computer.
It wasn’t going to work.
Tristan held his head in his hands.
A young man appeared at Tristan’s elbow. His black suit was cut close to his slim form, his perfectly knotted blue tie the only hint of color about him. In a low, deferential tone, he asked, “Mr. King, if I may interrupt?”
Tristan looked up, blinking at the interruption. “Jian, I said you don’t have to do that. When I’m in business meetings, you can call me Mr. King if you want to, but I look around for my grandfather when you do that.”
The man’s expression didn’t move a whisker of the knife-sharp edges of his short beard or ruffle even one strand of his glossy hair tied into a short ponytail on the back of his head. He said, “The arrangements for the hotels in New York, Chicago, Phoenix, and Los Angeles have been finalized, in addition to transportation.”
“And the hotels are?” Tristan asked, going back to scanning his spreadsheets.
A pause. “The Plaza, the Four Seasons, the Boulders, and the Nobu Ryokan Malibu respectively, and BMWs appropriate for your stature, sir.”
He had stature? Tristan hadn’t known he had stature. “And about the ‘sir’ thing—”
“Sir, as your Personal Assistant, I will take care of such minutiae as hotel accommodations and private jet rentals.” Jian waved his hands like the Queen’s spiral flick-wave. “And I can do it without your energy or your input. It’s a PA’s job to ensure his clients don’t have to think about such trivia so they can concentrate on their work and private life. As we become more accustomed to each other, I’ll know your tastes better. I value your feedback after the fact.”
“Okay, but I just want to make sure everything is taken—”
“It is.”
Just a few months before, Tristan had stolen Jian from a boarding school frenemy, Ikenna Kalu, by offering him more money. With Jian at the helm, Ikenna’s life had run without a hitch. He’d dressed like an Italian model and was always invited to exclusive events. And yet, maybe there was a reason that Ikenna had let Jian go without too much of a fight. “I just want to check them off, for the time being.”
“Very good, Mr. King.”
The name Mr. King creeped Tristan right out. When Jian called Tristan that, he mentally scanned the room, or the short tube of the airplane in this instance, for his grandfather. Tristan’s grandfather had been a mean old codger who’d whipped his grandchildren with a switch when they’d misbehaved and when they hadn’t, lest they turn to the Devil. None of Tristan’s cousins had spoken to their grandfather during the last decade of his life. Tristan had sent money to his grandmother to bury the cruel old man decently.
Tristan had to get Jian on a first-name basis and quickly, or else he’d have to change his last name.
Which wasn’t a bad idea, come to think of it. Attending an elite Swiss boarding school while sporting the surname of King and being surrounded by actual royal princes had been a weird four years in Tristan’s life, not to mention what they’d done with the combination of his middle initial and his last name.
Maybe he should change his surname to Smith.
Or Williams.
Something no one could ever remark on.
But he only replied, “Thank you, Mr. Laio,” and turned back to his computer screens.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jian narrow his eyes and set his teeth, his jaw bulging.
Yeah, that might work—tit for tat.
Jian leaned down and murmured in his low butler’s voice, “When we stop in Italy on the return trip, I have scheduled five hours with your tailor in Milan, Mr. King.”
Revenge.
Jian controlled Tristan’s life now, so maybe Tristan should shut up and let the man do his job, lest Tristan end up with more pins in his butt than a voodoo doll.
“Thank you, Mr. Laio.” Giving up wasn’t Tristan’s way.
Hushed footsteps padded on the thick carpeting of the plane’s aisle as Jian left Tristan alone with his impossible spreadsheets.
Loose papers covered with Tristan’s chicken-scratch handwriting littered the mahogany table in front of him. His head rested in his hands while he looked at the numbers and stock market abbreviations on the computer screen.
Ninety percent of that whole exchange with Jian had been procrastination.
Tristan couldn’t do it.
No one could do what the letter demanded.
For several days after he’d received the letter, Tristan had suspected he’d hallucinated it, which considering the amount of alcohol and other inebriants he and his high school buddies had imbibed at the royal wedding the night before, was not outside the realm of possibility.
But he must not have hallucinated the damn thing because the thick, cream-colored stationery stuck out of the side pocket of his briefcase.
The very first day Jian had walked onto the boat to begin arranging Tristan’s life, he had scoffed at Tristan’s backpack, a frayed relic from his college days when he’d toted his computer to coffee shops. A week later, a box had arrived bearing the rum-colored Brunello Cucinelli briefcase sitting on the end of the table. Tristan suspected Jian would’ve burned his old knapsack except that the nylon’s toxic fumes would’ve been environmentally undesirable.
The leather of the Brunello Cucinelli briefcase was as soft as kitten tummies.
Tristan removed the folded stationery from the upper pocket of his briefcase and reread the handwritten letter.
The all-caps first line in black ink at the top still dripped ice between his shoulder blades: Behind every Great Fortune lies a Great Crime, and it’s Time to Commit Yours.
The handwriting returned to cursive lettering so precise that it looked like computer script font, but for the indentations in the paper and the occasional bleed of the ink into the stationery’s fibers. The stationery didn’t even have a header on it. The paper was smooth, expensive, and anonymous.
Good Afternoon, Mr. Tristan King, currently of Monaco.
Even though Tristan was thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean and a month beyond the date on the top right corner of the letter, he could smell the sarcasm.
Congratulations on your recent release of an artificial intelligence program designed to manipulate financial instruments.
First of all, it was freaky that the letter writer knew he’d released his AI or even what he’d been working on at all. His AI was supposed to be not only undetectable but also confidential. Anyone who knew about it—including Micah, Blaze, and Logan—had signed non-disclosure agreements, and damn, Tristan had thought that he could trust those guys.
They’d been friends since high school when they’d had no one but each other. The thought that any one of those three guys would betray him, or narc on him, or even flap their gums about what they knew was simply unbelievable.
Which might suggest something worse.
The letter continued. Six years ago, you borrowed a substantial sum of money from your mentor (or Malefactor, as you called him), Mr. Stanley Bell of New York City, and signed a promissory note to that effect. As the legal contract detailed, your debt did not die with him but has been folded into his estate, which is held in a trust that continues to manage his business endeavors.
The thought of the Malefactor’s business endeavors was enough to make Tristan’s stomach queasy, or maybe that was just the flutter of turbulence under the wings of the airplane.
In addition, the promissory note specified that the debt must be repaid by whatever legal tender or property the lender deems fit, meaning we will now detail exactly how and by when you will repay the substantial debt you owe.
A headache squeezed Tristan’s temples as he reread the letter, just as it had the several dozen previous times he’d pored over the contents of the envelope, or maybe the ache in his skull was from the plane’s engines growling on the tail of the Gulfstream G280 somewhere behind him.
Or maybe his headache was because the next paragraph didn’t make any sense.
He’d read it over and over again, unsure why anyone would want what the letter insisted he give them.
It would cost a hell of a lot of money, but it wasn’t worth much.
The letter was signed Mary Varvara Bell, a name that Tristan didn’t recognize except for the surname. Tristan wanted to ask Logan Bell about her, but he didn’t want to tell Logan about the letter.
The other piece of paper that had been included in the envelope was a photocopy of the notarized promissory note Tristan had signed when he was twenty-two years old, back when he’d owned in total a laptop computer, a ten-year-old sedan, and one ratty black backpack.
The letter didn’t need to reiterate what would happen if he failed. The penalty was right there in the photocopied promissory note with his scrawled signature on the bottom.
If Tristan didn’t deliver what they asked for, everything he owned would be forfeited to White Holdings, Inc.
Everything.
Six years before, he’d laughed when Logan’s grandfather had written “everything Tristan F. King owned” as collateral for a few million dollars of seed money. He’d been ready to sign away a decade of future earnings and his firstborn child to get the cash he’d needed.
But now, Tristan owned not only a live-aboard yacht and a coveted membership in the Monaco Yacht Club, but he’d also created several unique intellectual properties.
His artificial intelligence program wasn’t the kind of strong AI that might take over the world and make Terminators.
Instead, Tristan’s algorithm was adept at proverbially catching falling knives in the stock market sense of that term.
Even as Tristan read the extortionate letter on his private plane high above the glimmering gray water of the Atlantic Ocean, his creation was vacuuming up stocks that were on the move, buying lower and selling higher, shorting stocks that were falling, and trading options in both directions whilst it purchased and sold the equities.
His algo swooped for profit like a flock of seagulls when it was raining french fries.
That was why he lived in Monaco. The principality was the first country in the world to install a true 5G network, not just a souped-up 4G with a trademarked brand name of 5G, when other countries were hemming and hawing.
The AI, his masterpiece after a double-major of computer science and business/finance at UC Berkeley, had taken him five years to perfect, and it was gleaning millions for him every day. Tristan would be a billionaire in less than two years.
If he could keep it.
If he lost control of the algo, not only would they own it, but Tristan would be contractually prohibited from rewriting it from memory and rereleasing his own version upon the world. Parts of the AI’s strategy were patented, and the computer code itself was copyrighted. Neither he nor anyone else could copy-paste the code and make their own stock-trading AI.
Lawyers would eat them for lunch.
Tristan had two months to come up with the nonsensical list of commodities the letter demanded and turn them over to White Holdings, Inc., or else he would lose control of everything he’d worked for since he’d walked away from an Iowa farm with nothing but the clothes on his back and a charity plane ticket to Switzerland when he was thirteen years old.
But this list was impossible. If Tristan sold everything he owned, including that overpriced computer bag on the end of the table, bartered away the yacht club membership, and ate ramen three times a day as his AI gathered millions of pennies and dimes during the interim, he might come up with ten percent of the cash he needed.
If he did all that and sold the AI to the nefarious financial company DarkNight, he might come up with half of what he’d need. DarkNight would examine it for five minutes and make him an offer that, in any other circumstance, would be more than enough to live out the rest of his life, if he wanted to give DarkNight the ability to finish taking over the world.
From the Wi-Fi in his plane, Tristan logged onto three stock market discussion forums simultaneously and checked the current values and gossip about the various commodities on the list.
Nothing unusual. Nothing incriminating.
He could just give up. He could hand over his boat and the AI to White Holdings and walk away with nothing for having spent the last five years of his life grinding and polishing his creation.
His chest hurt like his ribs were bending and pushing on his heart.
He’d been sitting in a dang gaming chair for five years coding that beautiful AI, which he loved like it was his dog or his best Pokémon, with only occasional gym or jogging breaks.
He might be having a heart attack.
Unfortunately, the ache subsided, and he didn’t die.
But still, Tristan was on the cusp of losing everything.
Damn, he wished he’d known that the Malefactor’s trustee was going to pull something like this before he’d hired Jian Laio away from Ikenna. Jian’s salary was a raindrop in a cow trough compared to what White Holdings, Inc. was demanding, but Jian deserved reliable employment, not a boss who was going to lose everything in two months.
Unless Tristan could figure out a way to get what he needed.