“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?”