Colleen wove her fingers around her shoulder straps and shivered. “There’s no safe place we can go. You said that they were Russian mafia, and Svetlana said it, too.”
He settled back in his seat, still solemn. “Yes. Yes, I did say that.”
Yes, a private plane. A private plane that she would get on with Tristan, who was also the King of the Killer Whales, TwistyTrader, who was also God-only-knew what else.
She didn’t really know this guy,TwistorTristan Kingor whatever he was calling himself today.
She didn’t knowanythingabout him.
All that stuff he’d told her about boarding school might be fake. That Micah Shine guy might be faking it, too. He might be just going along with whatever Twist said. What kind of a name wasMicah Shine,anyway? It sounded fake.Shine.Didn’t that mean lying? Shining someone meant that you were conning them, right?
Everything Twist hadeversaid might be fake. Surely, that baloney he’d rambled on about at the hotel aboutliking herand all this crap while he’d beenholding her handhad to benothing but a con.
She didn’t even know what he was after anymore.
She didn’t have any money.
He’d already gotten her into bed.
She didn’t own anything of value. Her laptop was a jury-rigged piece of trash that she’d reconfigured to run Linux so it would work.
Whatever Tristan wanted from her must be something else, something valuable that she knew or could do that he was willing to swindle her for.
But what on Earth could a man like Twist want fromher?She owned nothing,wasnothing, controllednothing. When she’d met him, she was a nada-nobody working a dead-end job with an unhealthy internet-forum habit. He was a much better coder than she was.
And with that thought, she figured it out.
The Sherwood Forest stock market forums wouldn’t seem important to an outsider because it was supposedly just an entertainment and education bulletin board, but its influence went further than that.
Thousands of small- and medium-size traders blindly followed the advice on the boards.
Journalists were known to haunt the posts, looking for scoops.
They were a mob on the stock market.
That was why she took her moderating job so seriously. Any one of the small traders could be wiped out with a single piece of bad advice. A rumor could start a run on a stock, either buying it at any price or dumping it as fast as they could.
But put together, there were enough traders and lurkers and influencers and market makers and journalists on Sherwood Forest to create more than a ripple in the trading frequency and stock price of even moderately priced stocks.
Between the Killer Whales and the rest of Sherwood Forest’s Merry People, someone with control of a moderator’s account could influence the people who believed everything the forum told them, and they could banhammer anyone who tried to call them out.
And thus, a person with a Sherwood Forest moderator account could control markets, at least for a while.
TwistyTrader didn’t like Colleenfor herself.
He wasn’tattractedto her orinterestedin her.
He was trying to steal her Sherwood Forest moderator credentials.
Yeah, Tristan had known her name and address because she’d had to give the Devilhouse her ID. He’d conned her into meeting him there so he could track her down. And then he’d shaved his beard, changed the way he talked, and worn a long-sleeved shirt inJuneinPhoenix, Arizona,to cover up the tattoos on his arms and make sure she didn’t recognize him at GameShack.
And he’d worna suitwhen they’d been at the airport. Even Anjali had said they must be boiling in those suits in the hot summer morning.
Obviously, Twist had been hiding something. No one in their right mind would wear a long-sleeved shirt or a suit in the desert summer unless they had a good reason.
And then he’d gotten her fired and convinced her to go with him to LA.
Damn,it all fit together, and Colleen was an idiot.
