Colleen scowled at the letter lying on the desk between them. “I mean, why are they sending you afterGameShackof 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. MaybebecauseGameShack 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 aboutnextmonth?” she asked.
Tristan shook his head. “The letter’s deadline is a weekafterexpiration day.”
“Damn,”she sighed.
“Yeah. But if theywereholding shorts, they probably would’vetoldme two weeks before those options expired that I had to crash it. They wouldn’t have waitedthree monthsand kept buying put options and letting them expire.”
“Right, because that would’ve made sense. This makesnosense. 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 crimeandput Micah, Logan, and Blaze in danger.”
“Did they get letters?” Colleen asked him.
Tristan’s heart flip-flopped in his chest.“What?”
“Didtheyget letters from this Mary Varvara Bell, too, instructing them to do somethingelsethat’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.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve been so busy trying to figure out how to do it that I haven’t even considered if there’s a bigger picture.” And he couldn’t ask his guys without tipping his hand that he was being blackmailed into doing something.
She said, “Well, maybe we have to start considering it.”
Colleen’s phone, charging on the upper part of the computer desk near the power strip, buzzed.
She craned her neck to read the screen because it was lying sideways on the desk. “Anjali is on her way over to return the stupid monitor. Hold on a second.” She snatched up the phone, pressed something, and then held it to her ear. “Hi, Anjali? Honey, you don’t have to bring that over right now. It’s fine.”
Tristan’s phone also chose that minute to ring with an actual phone call.
He dragged it out of his pocket. The screen said that the caller’s phone number was unidentified.
He let it go to voice mail. Probably just a telemarketer. He should write an algo that killed robocalls.
Colleen walked a few steps away from him, looking down while she was still talking on the phone. “Honey, youdon’thave to bring it back right now. I don’t even know how long I’m going to be here.”
Tristan’s phone buzzed again.
It was probably the same person calling back, so he flipped to the voice mail screen and read the transcription of the earlier message. It read,This is Mary Barbara Bell. Pick up your phone, Tristan King. We need to talk about your project and Ms. Frost.
The voice mail had transcribedVarvaraas Barbara, but Tristan knew who it was. His face flushed hot, and he switched back to the phone app and touched the green spot to answer the call. “Hello?”
