Utter chaos and destruction. Those were the words Nick Napier first thought of when he arrived at Mr. Webster’s house. The door had been open when he arrived, and after he tried calling out Wint’s name a few times and received no reply, he had let himself in and closed the door behind him.
He stood at the entrance to the living room and took in the sight. The room was larger than his entire flat. The curtains were open, and his own reflection from the dark window across the room startled him. Something bad had happened here. Everything that could be out of place, was. Drawers hanging open or removed from their cabinets and thrown about the room, their contents strewn haphazardly on the floor: papers, binders, and assorted writer’s paraphernalia scattered about. All the books from the massive dark wood bookshelf had been pulled out and piled haphazardly on the floor. Whoever had ransacked the place clearly didn’t know what exactly they were looking for, and judging by the mess had some serious anger issues.
Then he saw a single, bare foot peeking from behind the sofa.
“Mr. Webster!”, he gasped and rushed across the room. His boss’s limp body lay on the shag carpet where a now-upturned coffee table had previously been. Nicky had never seen a dead body before. He was surprised how alive it looked, almost like it was just asleep.
Earlier that day, after the board meeting, Nicky had watched from his desk as his editor rushed from the boardroom into his office and slammed the door shut. The door was never kept closed, and Nicky was worried he’d shortly see his boss escorted out of the building clutching his precious award. But after an hour or so of unnerving quiet, Wint Webster emerged from his office like a bat out of hell, and rushed to the elevators pulling on his blood-spattered coat. Merida had somewhat reluctantly filled Nicky in on the accident on the bus, but the sight was still gruesome.
Later in the evening Nick was cooking at home when his cell phone rang. Pasta puttanesca, his favorite since he’d gone full veg. Over the line, Mr. Webster’s speech slurred as he asked Nick to please come to his house immediately, there was something very important he needed help with but didn’t want to explain over the phone. He didn’t sound right, and Nick was worried Wint’s head injury had caused more damage than he’d realised. Nick turned off the cooking hob and left the half-ready sauce on the pan, quickly checked that Misty’s food and water bowls were full, and rushed out to get his bike.
Clearly, he had arrived too late. He cursed himself for not splashing out for an Uber.
Nicky’s eyes darted madly all over his boss’s succumbed form on the living room floor. He looked for the wound. Knife or gunshot?
But there was no wound, and no blood stained the beige rug. As Nicky scanned Wint’s body, clad in a grey jumper and jogging bottoms, he saw the weapon that had felled his boss. Next to the prone figure on the floor lay a familiar square-shaped bottle of Jack Daniels, half empty.
A warm, tingling feeling of relief rushed all over Nicky’s body. Then the heat of the warmth turned up to a burning rage.
“Mister… Webster!”, he yelled, with weight on both words, as if scolding a misbehaving cat.
Wint Webster opened one eye, then another. His hand rose to his face and scratched his two-day stubble.
“Nicky!”, he exclaimed sounding genuinely pleased to see him and pulled himself up at the waist and clambered up from the floor, steadying himself as he gained foothold on the rug. “I’m glad you’re here. Come.”
“Are you ok?”, Nick asked as he followed Wint. The hallway floor was covered in clothes and more papers. Nick tried not to step on anything, but Wint, charging towards the kitchen, didn’t seem to care and trampled all over his scattered possessions.
“What happened here?”, Nick asked, but still received no reply.
“Wint!”, he exclaimed. This stopped Wint Webster in his tracks. Nick Napier had never called his boss by his preferred name, no matted how much he’d tried to plead, cajole or threaten him to do so.
“Right”, Wint said and motioned to a seat at the kitchen table. The room was relatively unscathed. A few of the kitchen cabinet doors hung open, but the dishes and tins inside hadn’t been touched. Whatever the marauders had been looking for, it wasn’t something you’d hide in a flour jar.
They sat down at the table opposite each other.
“Who did this?”, Nicky demanded.
Wint looked sheepish and scratched his forehead where the bandage met his ear.
“Nicky… do you know that feeling when you’re about to leave the house, but you can’t find your wallet anywhere?”
“Yeah. Everybody does.”
“Well, I don’t handle that feeling well. When I can’t find something, it makes me very, very angry.”
“Hah, me too”, Nicky chuckled.
“So, take that feeling and multiply that with about… two hundred million?”
Nicky looked down the hallway, into the pandemonium of the living room. “You mean… you… you did this?”
Wint shrugged.
“Because you couldn’t find something?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And you called me late at night to…”
“…help me look for it”, Wint finished Nicky’s sentence.
“You’ve finally lost it, Mr. Webster.” Nicky never spoke to his boss in this tone, and he was sure to revert to addressing him formally to not overstep their boundaries.
“You’re right, Nicky. I have lost it”, Wint said, opening up the lid of a black IBM laptop that lay on the table in between them. He turned the computer around to face Nick Napier, and said, looking straight into his eyes: “I’ve lost my wallet, and you’re going to find it for me.”
***
Wint paced back and forth in the kitchen. Every now and then he stopped behind Nicky’s shoulder and looked at what the boy was doing. He was searching things on Google, clicking on the top results, briefly looking at the opened tabs and closing them before returning to Google and refining his search query.
“I thought you were good with computers.”
Nicky threw his hands in the air. “This is Windows! Nobody’s used Windows since… I don’t know, for ever.”
Nicky had been at this for the better part of an hour. Wint started another round of nervous walking around the table.
“I’ve run a search on the disk for the likely filenames and looked in all the obvious places, plus quite a few non-obvious ones. I’ve tried the deleted file recovery utility. I’ve checked your email history, including the trash, which, by the way, you should empty some time. I’m sorry, Mr. Webster, I don’t think it’s here… are you sure this is the same laptop you mined them on?”
Wint stopped in his tracks. “No, of course not”, he snapped at Nicky. “That was more than eight years ago. I bought this one just a few years back, it’s basically brand new.”
Nicky blinked a few times and slammed the laptop lid shut. “Well, in that case it’s not going to be here”, he sighed as if explaining something to a dense child, “unless you copied the data file over. The wallet and the keys will be on the computer you used to mine it, or maybe on some backup drive, if you had one?”
“…”
“Do you still have the computer you used?”
“…”
“Right. It’s getting late.”
“Ah — of course, Nicky, thank you”, Wint said and reached to his back pocket to dig out his regular wallet, the type that was made of leather and held cash, credit cards and pictures of your children if you had any. He was going to get the kid some taxi money at least, but he was wearing his joggers, and of course his wallet wasn’t on his person. On a different day he would’ve laughed at the irony, but today he couldn’t muster the sense of humour. “I’ll owe you.”
“If you find it, just give me a percentage”, Nicky said, approximating levity.
“I will. I promise.”
Once Nicky was gone, Wint went to the living room and took in the mess he had created. He didn’t remember ever losing his calm quite that badly. His head still hurt and the buzzing noise in his ears has begun worryingly to alternate its frequency. He thought he should go to the hospital to get it checked out. In the morning, maybe.
He picked up a few books from the floor and placed them back on the shelf. It had been one hell of a day. He’d woken up hung over, been involved in a fatal traffic accident, gotten manhandled by EMT’s who’d treated the situation like a battlefield surgery and stitched his head up without any anesthetic, had a complete blackout until lunchtime, when he learned that apparently robots were now going to do his writing job for him. And that’s when the real weirdness was just getting started.
After the board meeting wrapped up, Wint had gone back to his office. He’d need to decide which of his staff members to fire in order to meet the board’s budget demands. But before that, he was going to find out what this “HODL” business was all about. He typed the letters to Google, and got back a convenient summary at the top of the search results:
“Hodl (/ˈhɒdəl/ HOD-əl; often written HODL) is slang in the cryptocurrency community for holding the cryptocurrency rather than selling it.”
That didn’t explain what each letter of the acronym stood for, but it made sense to him, sort of. The article under which the comment had been posted was about cryptocurrencies, specifically about one called Bitcoin. Wint couldn’t have told you any details of any other piece he wrote in 2009, but this one he remembered like yesterday. It was the job that had led him to meet Ada.
Though Wint now understood what “HODL” meant, he had no idea what the anonymous commenter intended with his message: “I hope you HODLed!”. He clicked on the comment in The Platform’s admin interface to see what other articles the same user had commented on and what articles they had visited, and what information they had about this visitor. There was no such thing as “anonymous” anymore. Even if you didn’t give your name, you were being tracked. But curiously not this user. Wint pursed his lips. Sometimes it happened when the reader had a new phone. It wasn’t that out of the ordinary.
He opened a new browser tab and searched for “cryptocurrency”. This time Google’s results were topped with news articles. “Bitcoin hits $17,000”, read the top hit, dated December 12th 2017. That was today.
Still not quite comprehending, he clicked the link and waited as the pointy line chart loaded on the screen. Wint squinted. It looked like in the last year the currency’’s value had grown twenty-fold. It didn’t make any sense. Who would pay $17,000 for a single worthless bitcoin? From $900 to $17,000 in one year sounded like a bubble to him. One way or another, one hell of a good investment, Wint thought. He hoped his own investments in mutual funds would’ve —
Finally, the penny dropped.
His hand shook as he browsed back to his nearly decade-old article to confirm the number he remembered very well, but at that moment he needed his eyes to corroborate what his memory was telling him.
The article, “The Crypto-Currency and Its True Believers” was published in October 2009, originally in The Intrepid’s sunday print edition, and reprinted on the web. In it, Wint interviewed computer scientists, conspiracy theorists, hackers, bankers, activists, anarchists and men-in-the-street whose savings had been devastated by the financial crisis of the previous year. Some of his interviewees were convinced that a new “crypto-currency” called Bitcoin could one day replace the Pound Sterling, the US Dollar and the like. He had started researching the topic it in the spring of the same year after hearing about it from a source of another article related to cyber-terrorism, but then Ada happened, and the whole summer that ensued was such a whirlwind it took him months to complete the relatively straightforward piece.
He scrolled down to halfway through the article to the phrase he was looking for. “Eventually, I grew tired of listening to my computer whirr and blow hot air into my house day and night, and let the virtual miner retire from his tireless labours. In those three months, my computer had created —”
Wint had to briefly close his eyes before advancing to the next line, though he knew exactly what was coming.
” — nearly twelve thousand of the little buggers. In total, my 11,982.22 Bitcoin are worth almost five hundred quid. Not a bad outcome for a few months’ passive idling, I thought, until I received my electricity bill for the period and quickly realised the only winner in this transaction was going to be the power company.”
He opened the calculator application on his computer and punched in the numbers. 11,982.22 multiplied by 17,000 (he ignored the exact digits) was…
He looked at the number. It was long. He counted the digits and reached up to 9. Starting with at “2”, it meant the calculator was telling him that his Bitcoin was now worth more than… two hundred million dollars. Even at the miserable current exchange rate, that was one hundred and fifty million pounds. Sterling.
Wint felt like he needed to sit down, except he was already sitting down. He felt like he needed to lie down, and he did, on the wooden floorboards of his office.
He was rich. Not Zee Chakramurthy rich, but still, incredibly, empoweringly, freeingly, giddyingly rich. The anonymous commenter’s hope had come true: he had indeed HODL’ed. After the article had been published and things had become complicated with Ada, he thought about selling the bitcoin he had mined over the summer, but couldn’t figure out how, so he forgot all about them, and now they were going to change his entire life for the better. Talk about compound interest.
With hundred and fifty million quid Wint could solve all his problems. He could put his mother up in a nicer facility and get her a personal round-the-clock staff of carers. He could pay off his mortgage. Heck, he could sell his house and buy a castle! Two castles!
Maybe, just maybe, he could even convince Zee to sell The Intrepid to him. Wint didn’t often pay attention in the board meetings so he wasn’t abreast of the exact numbers, but he knew which color they were: red, always red. The paper hadn’t turned a profit for fifteen quarters running, and with falling advertising prices and despite, or because of, Zee’s investment into the development of The Platform there was no end in sight to its financial slump. Wint often wondered what a chronic winner like Zee saw in a newspaper that hemorrhaged money, but clearly he had a plan, since he’d been buying a handful of them across Europe and the Americas. But Wint didn’t care about profit and loss, all he wanted to do was write meaningful pieces, and he was convinced people would still pay for it. With a hundred and fifty million, he could convince Zee to sell the sinking investment vehicle to him, and keep it afloat for as long as it took to turn it around. Plus, he would never have to fire anyone.
And who knew, maybe at this rate of growth his bitcoin could soon worth a billion dollars, or more. He’d sell half now in case it was indeed a bubble like he suspected, and —
He paused to think.
He wasn’t sure how the entire system worked. He hadn’t magically wised up in the last eight years, and he still had no idea how to sell his bitcoin.
In fact, he had no idea where his bitcoin were.
He felt like he needed to lie down, but he was already lying down. Instead, he got up.
***
Wint put the last book back on the bookshelf. The rest of the mess would have to wait until tomorrow. He grabbed his bourbon glass from the floor and felt dizzy as he came up. He hadn’t eaten anything all day.
He wandered into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich. He chewed on it thoughtfully. His mad search of the flat had been irrational, he had known all along what he was looking for wasn’t going to be in the house, he just didn’t want to admit it to himself. Standing at his kitchen counter, he threw the rest of the warm whiskey into the sink and filled the glass with water from the tap, washing down the rest of the stale bread with a big gulp.
The search had, however, turned up one vital clue. He pulled a folded slip of paper from the pocket of his joggers and carefully unfolded it. The phone number was penned in a handwriting he hadn’t seen for a very long time but he remembered vividly. There was a time when, for days on end, all he hoped for was a letter written in that neat old-fashioned cursive script to be waiting for him when he came home. Above the phone number it said, “emergency only!”
He had forgotten about this number. Ada had slipped it in his hands one morning that summer when she left on one of her missions. “Serious”, she had said. “Emergency only.” Her look had been so serious Wint hadn’t even thought of disobeying her rules.
Surely, this counted as an emergency. Losing your wallet was a tragedy any day, but if that wallet contained a couple hundred million quid and the solution to all your problems, misplacing it was unequivocally a cause for panic.
He swallowed another glass of water. His head was still buzzing and whirring like a bitcoin miner, but he felt awake and sober enough to make the call.
It was not a call Wint was looking forward to making.
The way he had broken things off with Ada was… regrettable, to put it mildly. He walked into the hallway, his hand shaking as he grabbed the receiver and tapped the number into the cordless landline telephone. The number was eight years old, so she had probably already changed numbers, he told himself.
There was no ring-back tone. He had expected a slow boop, boop, boop. Or, in the worst case, an automated voice message telling him the line was disconnected. But there was nothing, just absolute quiet. He checked the neon green display of the handset. He had dialled the correct number, and somewhere, a phone was supposed to be ringing.
He hung up and tried pressing the number again, slower this time. Same response, meaning no response.
He tried once more, and listened to the complete desolate quietude on the line, as his dreams dissolved and washed away into waves of anger, frustration, sadness, and fifty more hues of emotions he couldn’t even name. This morning he had woken up with nothing, and he was ending his day with nothing, but along the way he had lost everything.
He knew Ada was his only connection to the bitcoin wallet, and this phone number had been his only connection to Ada.
Working for The Intrepid, he had access to researchers, databases, contacts at national and international law enforcement agencies, and The Platform, the biggest and most tentacular store of personal information ever created, which spanned so much more than just their newspaper — a global information network of all of humanity interconnected via the Internet. And still, Wint knew he would never find Ada. He knew, because he had tried, many times.
Wint hung up and placed the phone back into its dock.
He headed to the kitchen and opened the fridge. The cool, vegetal odour from the nearly empty refrigerator hit his face. There was nothing to drink. He would have cried if he knew how. The things he could have done with the money. Bought the paper. Rescued journalism. Bought a yacht. He was such a hypocrite. If he was a multi-millionaire, he would live just as lavishly as the next guy, and he doubted he’d show up to work on Monday.
He had never imagined himself being rich, it wasn’t something that was taught by his upbringing. For just one short moment he had felt the intoxicating effects of wealth, and he craved for more.
He closed the fridge door. Attached to the door with a magnet was a photo of him and his mother from a decade earlier, not too long before he’d met Ada. He was a dapper, powerful-looking man in his early thirties. His mother was a lovely woman. She’d once been sharp as vinegar. He’d have to visit before Christmas, but not tomorrow. Tomorrow was Saturday, and he deserved a day off.
Wint opened the freezer door and grabbed the ice-cold pack of cigarettes he kept around for a rainy day. It had rained a lot recently. He put on his slippers and opened the door to the small back garden, and carefully left the door behind him ajar.
He lit up and inhaled a lungful of smoke when the phone rang.