A commotion, and Anjali slid to a halt at the entry to the galley, blinking rapidly with her eyebrows lifted. “What the hell?”
Colleen trudged up beside her with her hands crammed in her jeans pockets.
Anjali turned to Colleen and pointed at Tristan. “Him?”
“Yeah,” Colleen sighed.
“Tristan King is TwistyTrader, the King of the Killer Whales?” Anjali whirled and faced him, scowling. “Oh, I see it now. I see how you played us with the name and everything.” She spun back to Colleen. “Meeting him was a very bad idea and against forum rules. It was a very bad idea!”
She stomped away.
Colleen rolled her eyes and followed her friend.
Tristan checked on the brie, which was ready.
Charcuterie could probably smooth this over.
He grabbed another bottle of wine just in case brie and crackers weren’t enough to pacify Anjali.
47
Community
Tristan
As the private jet streaked through the sky toward Europe, Tristan put his life in order.
The jet had internet access through a satellite link, so he sipped a double shot of excellent, smoky scotch whiskey from a cut-glass tumbler and made minor tweaks to his will.
Material goods didn’t matter. Everything he owned would be liquidated and sucked into the hungry maw of Mary Varvara Bell’s promissory note. His yacht, his car, his stock portfolio, and most of all, his computer programs would all be consumed by Mary Varvara Bell’s holding company, White Holdings, Inc.
White Holdings, Inc.
It was weird that the company wasn’t called Bell Holdings, or Evil New Yorker Holdings, or Malefactor Holdings, or something. Back when Tristan was twenty-two, he’d signed the promissory note so fast that he hadn’t noticed Stanley Bell’s holding company’s name.
Not that it mattered.
And especially, not that it mattered now.
Putting together a few sentimental but monetarily worthless things into a list to mail to his friends Tuesday, things they might like to have as mementos, took just a few minutes.
He planned to send a skiing medal that they’d won together as a team in intramural sports at Le Rosey to Micah, because Micah was sentimental about items with a history.
Blaze had always admired Tristan’s Patek Philippe Celestial watch, and surely Mary Varvara Bell didn’t have an inventory of Tristan’s watches and cufflinks that she was going to check off when she took everything he owned.
For Logan, Tristan should find something personal. There was a non-zero chance that Logan Bell would inherit everything Tristan owned as part of the Malefactor’s sprawling business someday, if he could muster the spleen and muscle to fight Mary Varvara Bell for it.
Logan wasn’t the brawling type, in bars or in businesses. He was the laughing type, who charmed people and joked around. In high school, Logan had had a new girlfriend every week, sweet-talking another one of the girls into his arms and his bed.
But Logan might walk away from the Malefactor’s empire as his father had done, and Tristan wanted to give him something to remember their friendship by.
Tristan didn’t know any way that he could send Logan his gun collection stashed behind his desk in his computer den, especially across international borders. The Monegasque post office would refuse to ship it.
And the only person Tristan knew who was probably involved in smuggling guns was Mary Varvara Bell.
In some ways, Tristan knew Logan the least out of all his friends, like he was always one step removed from the other three of them, which was why Tristan was having so much damn trouble trying to figure out the perfect memento to give him.
If Tristan had time, he would’ve written Logan some Anti-Anonymity malware, a program to ensure Logan’s name was prominently displayed in every scanned picture of him.
That was the problem.
Tristan had thought he’d had time.
He’d have to figure something out.
And Colleen.
Tristan needed something to give Colleen to remember him by.
Something more than his heart and soul because she already had those.
Something that only he could give her.
He’d have to think about it.
Tristan had never found where his parents and his siblings had moved to after he’d returned to Iowa and discovered their family farm had been deserted, so he couldn’t send them anything.
Maybe he should’ve tried harder.
Maybe they didn’t want him to find them.
He’d talked to his friends—especially Micah, Logan, and Blaze—a lot over the years about that day, about walking into the decrepit farmhouse and finding nothing but dust and mice, and even the neighbors hadn’t known where his parents, brothers, and sisters had gone.
He’d talked to them about how sliced-off he’d felt.
His friends were all estranged from their families, too, and they’d agreed that they were a flock of black sheep, a tribe of scapegoats, but they were all outcasts together.
And that was why he’d been able to call the Scholarship Mafia guys when he’d needed rescuing from real mafia kidnappers or Cannes con artists, and why they’d called Tristan when they’d needed a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of a particular cryptocurrency with no questions asked, or when they’d found themselves hiding under the bed of a corrupt politician’s young wife and needed a distraction so they could jump out the window.
Good times.
Tristan should delete his few social media and messaging accounts or transition them to memorial sites on Wednesday, so hackers couldn’t phish his friends if they hadn’t heard about what was going to happen to him.
Organizing the end of his life soothed him, turning it into an intellectual exercise instead of a looming gray void that he would enter on Wednesday night or Thursday at the latest.
He sipped the scotch, a mellow burn and smoke on his tongue and throat, and deleted everything off his phone’s calendar from Friday onward.
“What’cha doing?” Colleen asked as she leaned on the other side of the table from him.
Tristan slapped his laptop closed and tucked his phone in his pocket. “Just getting ready to set out the charcuterie trays for a snack, and then we might want to turn out the lights for a few hours to rest before we get to France in the morning.”
Anjali and Jian wandered toward the front of the plane, both looking fresher for the rest and food over the last few hours, though Jian still moved gingerly from his broken and bound ribs.
As the two of them encroached on the table where he’d been sitting and Colleen was already standing across from him, an itch started on the back of Tristen’s neck, the tingle of prey when it is cornered. “What’s going on?”
Colleen spun the chair and sat down directly across from him. Anjali took the chair beside her whilst Jian eased into the seat beside Tristan.
He looked at the three of them arrayed around him and lifted his highball glass of scotch. “This is literally my first one. I don’t need an intervention.”
Colleen leaned on her elbows and clasped her hands on the table. “Tristan, we need to talk.”
“No, we don’t.” Stupid instinctive response.
She said, “We need to talk about how we’re going to get the GameShack stock before the New York Stock Exchange closes on Wednesday night.”