Maybe he should change his surname to Smith.
Or Williams.
Something no one could ever remark on.
But he only replied, “Thank you, Mr. Laio,” and turned back to his computer screens.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jian narrow his eyes and set his teeth, his jaw bulging.
Yeah, that might work—tit for tat.
Jian leaned down and murmured in his low butler’s voice, “When we stop in Italy on the return trip, I have scheduled five hours with your tailor in Milan, Mr. King.”
Revenge.
Jian controlled Tristan’s life now, so maybe Tristan should shut up and let the man do his job, lest Tristan end up with more pins in his butt than a voodoo doll.
“Thank you, Mr. Laio.” Giving up wasn’t Tristan’s way.
Hushed footsteps padded on the thick carpeting of the plane’s aisle as Jian left Tristan alone with his impossible spreadsheets.
Loose papers covered with Tristan’s chicken-scratch handwriting littered the mahogany table in front of him. His head rested in his hands while he looked at the numbers and stock market abbreviations on the computer screen.
Ninety percent of that whole exchange with Jian had been procrastination.
Tristan couldn’t do it.
No one could do what the letter demanded.
For several days after he’d received the letter, Tristan had suspected he’d hallucinated it, which considering the amount of alcohol and other inebriants he and his high school buddies had imbibed at the royal wedding the night before, was not outside the realm of possibility.
But he must not have hallucinated the damn thing because the thick, cream-colored stationery stuck out of the side pocket of his briefcase.
The very first day Jian had walked onto the boat to begin arranging Tristan’s life, he had scoffed at Tristan’s backpack, a frayed relic from his college days when he’d toted his computer to coffee shops. A week later, a box had arrived bearing the rum-colored Brunello Cucinelli briefcase sitting on the end of the table. Tristan suspected Jian would’ve burned his old knapsack except that the nylon’s toxic fumes would’ve been environmentally undesirable.
The leather of the Brunello Cucinelli briefcase was as soft as kitten tummies.
Tristan removed the folded stationery from the upper pocket of his briefcase and reread the handwritten letter.
The all-caps first line in black ink at the top still dripped ice between his shoulder blades: Behind every Great Fortune lies a Great Crime, and it’s Time to Commit Yours.
The handwriting returned to cursive lettering so precise that it looked like computer script font, but for the indentations in the paper and the occasional bleed of the ink into the stationery’s fibers. The stationery didn’t even have a header on it. The paper was smooth, expensive, and anonymous.
Good Afternoon, Mr. Tristan King, currently of Monaco.
Even though Tristan was thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean and a month beyond the date on the top right corner of the letter, he could smell the sarcasm.
Congratulations on your recent release of an artificial intelligence program designed to manipulate financial instruments.
First of all, it was freaky that the letter writer knew he’d released his AI or even what he’d been working on at all. His AI was supposed to be not only undetectable but also confidential. Anyone who knew about it—including Micah, Blaze, and Logan—had signed non-disclosure agreements, and damn, Tristan had thought that he could trust those guys.
They’d been friends since high school when they’d had no one but each other. The thought that any one of those three guys would betray him, or narc on him, or even flap their gums about what they knew was simply unbelievable.
Which might suggest something worse.
The letter continued. Six years ago, you borrowed a substantial sum of money from your mentor (or Malefactor, as you called him), Mr. Stanley Bell of New York City, and signed a promissory note to that effect. As the legal contract detailed, your debt did not die with him but has been folded into his estate, which is held in a trust that continues to manage his business endeavors.
The thought of the Malefactor’s business endeavors was enough to make Tristan’s stomach queasy, or maybe that was just the flutter of turbulence under the wings of the airplane.
