Colleen was glaring at him, her fists braced on her hips while they stood in the corner of her apartment that served as a kitchen, demanding to know what was in that damned letter that had screwed up his life.
Tristan sighed. “Yeah. I suppose it’s time.”
He found a second cereal bowl on a high shelf in the back corner of the cabinets and waited while Colleen played hostess, setting out the cereal and milk on the tiny patch of countertop. At any other time, he would have insisted on taking her to a fine hotel and ordering room service, but these were not normal times.
The studio apartment, which appeared to be fifteen feet wide and about as long, didn’t have a dining table and chairs to eat at, so Colleen rearranged her computer desk, piling the keyboard and mousepad to the side near the desktop system. She said, “I don’t have dinner parties. I eat while sitting at my computer, moderating the Sherwood Forest forum and some other boards. You sit in the chair. I’ll stand. There’s plenty of room on my desk for the bowls.”
“Why don’t you have a monitor?” he asked, settling himself in the computer chair because arguing with her seemed ridiculous. He had every intention of pulling her into his lap when they were done eating anyway. The chair creaked a little under his weight.
“I lent it to Anjali while I was gone. Anjali’s monitor is dying. It’s got stripes, and it flickers.”
That made sense.
Colleen chewed a mouthful of the cereal and swallowed. “Okay, Tristan. Seriously, we didn’t finish talking about the letter. Out with it. There was a letter.”
He poked his spoon into the bowl. “Yes. There was a letter.”
“And you didn’t tell your friend on the phone about it yesterday on the plane,” she said, watching his eyes as she asked.
“No,” he admitted.
“So what was in the letter, Tristan?”
He hadn’t told Blaze what he was being forced to do, and he hadn’t told Micah. If Logan called, Tristan wouldn’t tell him either.
But Colleen—
Because she had been with Tristan in LA and was still with him, she was in harm’s way. She deserved to know.
Not good enough. He could make sure she was out of danger within hours. He could just dump money on her and tell her to get lost, though Micah had a point about them being safer together.
So if they were together, if she might be able to help Tristan with what he had to do, then he needed to tell her.
But he didn’t want to involve her in it.
Because it was immoral. And depending on how he did it, it toed the line of being illegal.
Because the best ways to do it were entirely illegal.
And afterward, when he transferred the stock to the Malefactor’s estate at an artificially depressed price, that was definitely going to be illegal.
But he didn’t have to involve Colleen in that. Indeed, that was a few keystrokes on a computer. Tristan, alone, would do it.
But she was knowledgeable about both computer programming and the financial markets. She could help him.
Rationales for not telling Colleen flashed in his head, each one more desperate than the last.
She would worry.
She would judge.
She would throw him out of her apartment and lock the door, as she should.
And she should have all the information about him so she could make that choice for herself.
“Just to be clear,” Tristan said, “I never wanted to get you involved in this. If your manager hadn’t mistreated you so badly, and if I hadn’t provoked him to fire you, I wouldn’t have involved you at all. Well, maybe,” he mused. “I probably still would’ve asked you to go to coffee with me, and in all honesty, maybe I would’ve offered you a job to fly around the world with me and talk coding because I liked you from the first minute I saw you. So that would’ve ended up with the same result. But I wish I hadn’t done it. I wish I hadn’t gotten you involved with me and my problem. So I’m sorry.”
Tristan reached for his rum-colored briefcase, which he’d stowed under her computer desk when they’d arrived the night before. He lifted the soft leather flap over the top and rummaged around inside until he found the thick cream stationery emblazoned with Mary Varvara Bell.
As he handed it to her, relief spread through his entire frame, all six feet four of it, nudging out the trepidation about Colleen’s reaction. Tristan had to spill his heart to someone, and Colleen was the only person he felt safe enough with to spill it to.
Her eyebrows pinched toward the top of her nose as she read the letter.
Tristan waited, resolved to endure forever if he needed to. Waiting was better than the very real possibility that she might throw it back in his face and tell him to get the hell out.
She glanced at him over the top of the page a few times, but she read the entire thing before she asked any questions.
Finally, she flipped the final page over, glared at its blank reverse side, and frowned. “That’s all they said?”
“Yes.”
“They didn’t say what the stock was for or explain why they want it?”
“That’s all I got. That’s all I know.”
She dropped the letter onto the computer desk and stabbed it with her finger, her fingernail painted and manicured the previous afternoon before everything went to hell. “And if you don’t do this, if you don’t follow their directions to the letter, they will take everything you own and ruin you.”
“According to the promissory note I signed when I was twenty-two years old, they can take absolutely everything I own away from me. That includes not only the Anonymity computer program that the Butorins kidnapped us to steal, but also another algorithm that I set loose just a few months ago that essentially churns money for anyone who owns it. Just like Sergey was so impressed with his offer of clean and laundered money, all of that money becomes legitimate. A crime syndicate would love it. They’d even be able to run their black-market money through it and clean it.”
Colleen hadn’t looked up at him yet. “And all you have to do in order to keep your money and your yacht and your nifty computer programs that run around the internet to vacuum up money and erase you, is to acquire millions and millions of dollars’ worth of GameShack stock, burn down the company until that stock is essentially worthless, and give the worthless stock to this estate or hedge fund or whatever it is that’s run by this woman, Mary Varvara Bell.”
“They said the stock would be transferred to them, and I think they have some sort of portal or way to receive it that is set up for that. But yes, that’s what I took away from the letter, too.”
Her sweet mouth set in a grim line, and her voice was low with disappointment in him. “I knew you were trying to burn GameShack to the ground, TwistyTrader, but I didn’t know why. So this is why, huh?”
“Yeah,” he admitted.
“GameShack has twenty thousand full-time employees and then another forty thousand part-timers like myself. Its valuation is sixty billion dollars.”
“And that’s why I can’t just liquidate everything I own and buy what I need.”
“Crashing the stock like this will destroy the company. Everybody is going to get laid off.”
Tristan nodded. “I know.”
“Do you? Do you know what something like that will do to ordinary people who work for a living? When Miller fired me because you were being an ass, it just about ruined my life. I mean, most of the possible outcomes ended up with me being homeless. That’s what sudden unemployment does to people. Especially here in the US where the government has cut all the strings in the safety net, people are vulnerable when corporations want to screw us over. That’s why we’ll take any job for whatever pittance they decide to pay us and then have three side hustles going when we should be sleeping just to keep our heads above water. I didn’t think you were like this, Tristan. I didn’t think you do something like this to people.”
Tristan shook his head. “I do know what this is going to do to people, which is why I’m having problems bringing myself to do it. I’m a farm kid. I know what the price of corn does to people. I understand what a sudden lack of money does to a family. And I’m not going to let this affect you. I’ll make sure you have enough money not to be impacted by GameShack’s implosion, and you’re already fired from there anyway. Heck, I’ll make sure you have enough money to finish college before I burn it down. You’ll be safe. That’s all I care about.”
Colleen lifted her eyebrows and shook her head. “I thought you might be morally gray, but I didn’t think about what that would look like in the real world.”
He didn’t know what that was.
Tristan took a deep breath to explain. “I don’t want to do this, but I don’t know what else to do. I’m not burning it down just to sell the ashes and make money for myself. If I don’t destroy GameShack, they’ll take everything I own, including my IP, which is those two computer programs, and then Mary Varvara Bell will force one of my best friends to do the same damn thing anyway. If I refuse to do it, it won’t stop it from happening. It might delay it for a month or two. Or if she goes to Micah Shine next, it might only be a week. He’s the one of us who I’ve always suspected has a black hat in the back of his closet. He’ll throw the match and grill a chicken over the flames while GameShack burns.”
She frowned. “If you liquidated everything you own that is real property—your boat, your car, and all that—would that be enough to buy all that stock at the current value?”
Tristan shook his head. “Not even close. If I sold absolutely everything, it wouldn’t be enough to buy even ten percent of the stock she’s demanding. I mean, half of it is worth thirty billion dollars. Either you inherited that kind of money from your robber baron ancestors, or you were a computer science college drop-out with delusions of grandeur in the right decade. If I wanted to sell my two computer programs, the only people who would buy them would be organized crime syndicates, and then I might be able to get up to half of the stock that I need. Even if I borrowed myself into a deep, deep hole, which I was trying to do with GrazBank, there’s no way I could get all of it at the price it is now.”
“It’s like she closed all the loopholes,” Colleen said.
He nodded. “And the real problem is that the letter specifies that the stock has to be worth less than a dollar per share when it’s turned over to them, which means I have to crash the stock, either before or after I buy it.”
“Then why don’t you just let her take everything you own and start over instead of screwing up the lives of sixty thousand people? Just wash your hands of the situation and walk away?”
“Yeah, I know what that reference is, and that’s exactly what it would be. It’s a gesture of helplessness in the face of great evil and injustice.” Tristan plucked the letter from Mary Varvara Bell off the computer desk and sighed, angry with himself for even being in this situation. “Even if I did refuse, it’s going to happen anyway. One of my friends will be forced to do it in my place if I don’t. Plus, Mary Varvara Bell will get those two computer programs I wrote. The first one will allow criminal organizations—like the Russian bratvas and the Central American drug cartels and the Mafia and the Yakuza and the Asian Triads and the Mumbai Underworld and the Black Axe and all the rest of them—to evade facial recognition software in airports and everywhere else. The other program would allow them to launder money as they’ve never been able to before. If they control those two programs, the fallout won’t be that merely sixty thousand people will lose their jobs. Instead, millions of people will die in wars and genocides and street violence due to weapons trafficking, or they’ll be kidnapped for human trafficking and slavery, or they’ll die from drug overdoses as illegal and addictive drugs flood the world even more than now. Political corruption will increase as the few remaining honest politicians are coerced, bribed, or killed. Everything that is wrong with the world will get worse if they have my computer programs. So I can’t.”