That was overdoing it.
Anjali said, “Of course, Colleen should have a separate room, also. Or Colleen and I can share a room. Because you should not take advantage of Colleen or hurt her reputation any more.”
Colleen told her, “I don’t think I have much of a reputation in Monaco for anybody to hurt.”
“Still,” Anjali said. “People will talk.”
Anjali and Colleen spent a few hours walking around Newark’s Liberty Airport to stretch their legs before returning to the private terminal and the plane. They bought a new, extra-large roller suitcase, which Colleen tucked herself into when the US customs official walked onto the plane, looked around, and left, to Anjali’s dismay.
The sun and the East Coast of the United States fell behind them as they flew over the enormous rippling disk of water toward France.
Colleen wheedled until Tristan relented and allowed her to help him prepare supper.
When she found out that it was literally just sticking foil trays into a warming oven for twenty minutes, she laughed at him. “And I thought you were hustling back here.”
Tristan stood up from closing the door of the tiny oven. “I feel like crap for getting them into the situation. Jian is injured, and Anjali is traumatized. I don’t mean to minimize Jian’s trauma, either. Or yours. It’s because of me. We’ve been kidnapped and on the run, and your apartment was trashed. I think I must be mental. When I tapped you to be my coding consultant, I wanted to wine and dine you in London and Paris, not eat takeout in your apartment and a crappy hotel.”
“I got the authentic professional coder experience then.”
“Yeah, probably.”
He still looked so sad, like the light had gone out of his brilliant blue eyes.
“Look, you didn’t know how this was going to pan out,” she said. “You didn’t plan this. All this stuff just happened. No one blames you.”
“It’s still my fault, though. Or at least my responsibility.”
“One interesting thing about this is that I learned my bestie Anjali has a sadistic streak. You should’ve heard the way she was talking about what she would do to the Butorins if she ever got a hold of their data on the internet. It was malicious. I loved it.”
Tristan chuckled. “I wish I could have helped with that.”
“Dude! I do not like that you are talking about yourself in the past tense. We had some things to do today, including taking Jian for medical care and getting ourselves out of the country, but it’s time to start talking about how we can get Mary Varvara Bell off your case.”
“There’s nothing I can do. By the time we get to Monaco, it’ll be Tuesday morning. I’d only have two business days to get the stock and crash it. I don’t even know how I could do it. I’d have to own a ton of the stock to begin with to enact a long squeeze to drive the price down, and I don’t. Buying large amounts of the stock will drive the price up because of supply and demand. It’s not enough time. I can’t do it.”
“You keep saying ‘I’ can’t do it, ‘I’ don’t own enough stock, and all that. It’s not just you. I’m here, too, and I told you that I’m not going to let you flap in the wind. I can help. I can figure stuff out, too. Like every other moderator on the Sherwood Forest forums, I have stock trading accounts in good standing on every major platform to film tutorials. And like every forum member, I have an account that I play with. I paid off half my student loans by treating the Killer Whales’ advice as contrary indicators and doing the opposite of what you guys told everyone to do. I might have half a CS and finance degree and little money, but I’m not nothing.”
“Good girl.”
Was he playing that game in the middle of this? “What? Dude, seriously.”
“You’re doing well. You’re not apologizing. You’ve listed a few of your many virtues. Good girl.”
“Yeah, okay.” Confusion spun her head, but Tristan’s sexy voice made her want to sit at his feet and hug his leg. “But my point was that you’re not alone in this. I can help you.”
“So noted.”
“And your guy friends from school, like Micah who rescued us in a helicopter after we were kidnapped by the Butorins.” The one with the eyes. “And you said there were others.”
“Blaze and Logan,” Tristan said.
“Right. So, if Micah can rent a helicopter with an hour’s notice, he must be loaded. Are the others rich, too?”
“They’re comfortable.”
“Right. So they’re loaded. Have you done favors for them in the past?”
“Of course.”
“Like what?” she asked him, prompting.
Tristan waved his hand dismissively at the clouds and sea outside the porthole window. “Picked them up when they were stranded in the Andes in South America. Paid off and threatened a blackmailer. Talked a stalker out of murdering them. Rescued them when they were in the middle of a civil war. Saved their data from ransomware. Normal stuff.”
“Right, just normal stuff like that. So they owe you.”
“It’s not like that. They don’t owe me.”
“But they’re contacts. They’re parts of your network. You aren’t alone in this.”
“Yeah, I am, because I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”
“But we can fix this if we try hard enough, if we work together and come up with ideas,” Colleen told him.
Tristan tapped his phone that was lying on the galley kitchen’s tiny countertop. “I called Mary Varvara Bell whilst we were in Newark. She said that my deadline was Wednesday. Three hours after the close of the market on Wednesday, I will be considered in default, and court proceedings will be filed. When she said she ‘knew’ a judge, I assume she owns a judge who owes her something. If I don’t get her the GameShack stock as I promised, I will lose everything, and then she paused and said ‘everything’ again. When I asked her what she meant, she laughed and hung up.”
The oven timer dinged.
Colleen grabbed a hot pad and began pulling the silver foil trays out of the mini-oven. “Ew, creepy much?”
“I might as well accept it. We’ll arrive in Monaco by noon. I already have reservations at my favorite restaurant for dinner. Would you like to come with me? Do you like seafood?”
“I love seafood.” Colleen had eaten seafood exactly twice at Red Lobster. She’d grown up a poor farm girl in the middle of the high desert. “I can hardly wait.”
46
TwistyTrader
Tristan
Tristan was prepping snacks in the galley kitchen of the airplane because that’s what he’d seen airplane staff do. GetJets seemed to have stocked the plane with a week’s worth of food for four, presumably in case they crashed on a deserted island somewhere between New Jersey and France and it took a bit for the Coast Guard to find them.
Hell, a deserted island in the middle of the Atlantic might be safe from Mary Varvara Bell’s goons.
Probably not.
He continued warming the puff pastry-covered brie for the charcuterie plate.