“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.”
17
The Impossible Task
Tristan
Colleen leaned her hip against the computer desk and asked Tristan, “If those computer programs are so dangerous, why don’t you just delete them? I accidentally deleted a whole program I wrote in Python for homework one time. A month’s worth of work, pfffft.” Colleen mimed smoke with her fingers.
He dropped the letter on the table and pointed to the page. “My computer programs are listed in the next-to-last paragraph. A subtle threat runs through this whole letter that they’ll also kill me if I don’t do what they want. And that means that when they move on to Micah, Logan, or Blaze, they’ll try to force them to do this, and then they’ll kill them if they refuse, too.”
She shook her head. “We’re talking about sixty thousand people’s livelihoods. People who work full-time at GameShack have 401(k) plans heavily invested in GameShack’s stock. If you bankrupt the company, those retirement plans are going to be decimated, and their retirement savings will be wiped out.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“A lot of people have their health insurance through GameShack, too. There have to be people out there who have cancer or heart disease, or their spouses do, or their kids do, and their health insurance is the only thing that’s keeping that person they love alive.”
Tristan sighed. “I don’t want to do this, but I have to do something. Either I torch a corporation that hired a white supremacist who treated you like shit, or literally millions of people will die, and the world will get worse. Something has to go down. It has to be GameShack because corporations are not people.”
“Well, no—”
“I have to burn it down. The only way to get that much stock and deliver it at that low price is a long squeeze. So I have to crash the stock and scare investors enough to make them panic-sell at a loss before they lose any more money.”
She was still staring at the paper. “Did they give you an impossible task because they want your computer programs when you fail? Or your boat, maybe? Is this all just a ploy?”
Tristan had been leaning on his elbows on the desk, and he settled back in his chair. “I don’t know. I’ve thought about that, but I haven’t come up with an answer. But if that was their plan, why did they give me three months to do it at the outset? Why not give me a week and declare that I’d failed? I think they want the stock.”
Colleen scowled at the letter lying on the desk between them. “I mean, why are they sending you after GameShack of all companies? Why aren’t they demanding you crash a big insurance company or Apple or Goldman Sachs or something? GameShack is just a pissant retail store that no one will even miss. It’s been nearly going out of business for a decade.”
“I have no idea. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure that out, too. Maybe because GameShack is just a piddly little company that’s always on the verge of bankruptcy. No one will be shocked when its stock crashes and it goes out of business. Maybe they’re hoping the Federal Trade Commission won’t figure out it’s a scam.”
She looked up at him, her gaze sharp. “How is it a scam? Is Mary Bell holding short positions or something?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“When is this month’s options-expiration Friday?”
“Third Friday of the month was last week.”
“Okay, how about next month?” she asked.
Tristan shook his head. “The letter’s deadline is a week after expiration day.”
“Damn,” she sighed.
“Yeah. But if they were holding shorts, they probably would’ve told me two weeks before those options expired that I had to crash it. They wouldn’t have waited three months and kept buying put options and letting them expire.”
“Right, because that would’ve made sense. This makes no sense. Unless maybe they’re trying to pay someone off? Or ruin someone? Does somebody hold a huge stake in it?”
Tristan shook his head. “GameShack is a meme stock. It’s so volatile because traders play with it so much. It’s distributed over millions of trading accounts. No one holds enough of it to be registered as a market maker in it. I looked into it after I got the letter. They’re not going to ruin anyone big with this. It doesn’t make sense. It’s exactly the kind of volatile stock that the Sherwood Forest day traders love because it zooms up and crashes down. If all the Sherwood Forest minnows and groupers pooled their GameShack holdings together, they might collectively be a market maker. But no one person.”
“So you’re going to do it,” she said, staring at him, her soft brown eyes wide open. Her gaze pinned him to the chair.
“I have no choice. If there were any other way to fulfill the conditions of the letter, I’d do that instead. But I can’t let the computer programs that I wrote fall into the hands of organized crime and put Micah, Logan, and Blaze in danger.”
“Did they get letters?” Colleen asked him.
Tristan’s heart flip-flopped in his chest. “What?”
“Did they get letters from this Mary Varvara Bell, too, instructing them to do something else that’s heinous or else lose everything they own?”
Tristan hadn’t asked. “Why would she do that? I’m going to get her the stock. She doesn’t have to go after them.”
She tapped the letter on the table between them. “Maybe this makes no sense to us because it’s only part of the puzzle. Maybe we’re one of the four blind people trying to describe an elephant, like in the old parable. One blind person stands at the trunk and says an elephant is like a thick rope. Another is standing at its side and says an elephant is like a wall. Maybe we’re not seeing the whole elephant, and their plan is much bigger than just your part.”