Chernov disappeared in a puff of white smoke. Then he was back. The video feed was breaking up. The baby sat in Chernov’s lap, bouncing happily on his legs, making happy baby noises. The vape smoke couldn’t be healthy for the child, Zee thought, but it was not a hill unto which he wished to climb to die. Not his battle. With a father like Mike Chernov, maybe the kid would be better off dead; a terrible thought that Zee immediately chastised himself for. Tiredness made him low on empathy, and he hadn’t slept for two nights. It was the pressure of the plane.
“Look at Uncle Chucky! Look! Iiiit’s Chuck!”, Chernov crowed and lifted the baby boy closer to the camera. The child looked more like Zee than he did like Mike Chernov. Having adopted a child had made the man insufferable. Quitting smoking had briefly made him edgy and explosive, but after the smoke had cleared, so to speak, the picture that emerged was one of a saccharine daddy — an image impossible to square with everything else Zee knew about Churn.
“So, any progress with our… project?”, Chernov asked.
“He is not in the office”, Zee said. “I’ve sent his assistant to find him. Maybe he is WFH.” Zee pronounced each letter of the acronym despite it being more cumbersome to pronounce than the words they stood for: Working From Home.
“I trust he will turn up shortly. Once he does, what should I do with him?”
“Put him on a call with me.”
“Right — so — uhh —”, Zee looked for a way to approach the topic. His brain was fried. “What do we want him for? I’ve just checked his profile on The Platform, and he seems just a normal dude.”
“It’s not what he can give us. It’s who he can give us.”
“And that is?”
“That —”, Chernov said, “is above your pay grade.”
“Above — huh?” Zee was one of the highest compensated CEOs in the Valley. He had just upgraded his jet. He wasn’t accustomed to having anybody pull rank on him, even Churn, who mostly stood out of his way. Chakra had grown triple digits year-on-year for the last decade, and this was just the beginning. They were on a cusp of rolling out the next version of The Platform — the first truly AI-assisted ad optimisation product in the world. Not only would the investors eat that up, but it would truly change the game. It was all thanks to Zee, who had started the company, steered it through the Google vs. Facebook death match that drove rest of the online advertisement industry out of business or into niche irrelevance, and emerged as the dark horse on the strength of his vision, and his superior product. So, suffice to say, he was not happy being told that even that did not earn him a seat at the table where Churn sat.
“Fuck you”, Zee said. Oh my god. Did he really say that?
“Ex-_cuse_ me!”, Chernov said. “Not in front of the boy! Marta!”
A hispanic woman entered the frame and took the boy from his arms. Chernov waited for the sound of the door to his office closing behind the nanny.
“Come again?”, Churn said. What his tone said was, “do you dare?”
Zee had entered a fork in the road. He could stand up to Churn and take his chances, or he could yield.
“I’m tired, Mike”, he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “London. This place sucks.”
“At least you can still breathe there”, Chernov said, exhaling two streams of thick, white vapour from his nostrils, like a charging cartoon bull. “You should be glad you’re over there. The air here is toxic — the forest fires are off the hook. I can’t even take the boy to the park any more. I tell ya, they’ve ruined the place. If I were you, I’d stay the hell where you are.”
They had changed the topic. Zee had stepped down from the challenge, and Churn accepted his submission. He had gotten what he wanted, a confirmation that Zee understood their pecking order.
“Just get me this damn Webster character and get us on a call. He knows something I need to know, and I’m willing to pay him handsomely for it. I wouldn’t touch a hair on his head, would I? But I can’t say the same for my Russian brothers. The chatter on the wire is they’re after him too, and I don’t think they will be as benevolent as I.”
Zee pressed a button on the remote, closing the wood panels of The Intrepid’s boardroom, enclosing the screen within. He swiveled the chair around. Laura, Chakra’s UK chief of staff, stood by the doorway with her arms crossed. She raised her eyebrows. She was a dyed-in-the-salon California blonde, her dark eyebrows betraying her mediterranean origins. The effect was no doubt intentional, and Zee thought, striking.
“Churn’s up to something”, she said.
“No shit.”
“What can I do to help?”
“If you can find Bill Webster for me, that would be great.”
“Have you tried his house?”
“His assistant should be there right now. I haven’t heard back from her.”
“Merida?”, Laura asked, with a smirk.
“Uhhh — I guess. The thick one.”
Laura bit her lip. “Let me go check in on her. I don’t trust that one. Can you ping me his address?”
“You’re too much!”, Merida squealed with laughter. She lounged on the sofa, facing the ginger boy who sat cross-legged on the rug and examined her with an earnest look on his face.
“It’s true”, Tom said, and added: “Haha.”
This sent Merida to another fit of giggles. “Stop saying that! Stop it!”, she laughed, gasping for air.
She took deep breaths, forcing herself to calm down.
“Ok, look, Tom. Don’t get me wrong, I love the story, but there’s no way any of that is true. Where did you really get Wint’s coat? And his bag? I need to find him.”
“I am telling you. Your friend is in Brighton.”
“Yeah yeah yeah, I got that part”, Merida said, rolling her eyes. The kid was becoming frustrating in his insistence. “He is in an underwater bunker hanging out with a bunch of hackers… but where is he really?”
“That… is where he is.”
Merida squinted.
“And it’s a secret hidey hole that nobody knows about.”
“Yes. Well. Few people know.”
“Are you supposed to be telling me this?”
Tom scrunched his forehead. “Good question. I guess not. I’m not very good at lying.”
“And you — you’re one of the hackers?”
“Not really.”
Talking to him was like talking to a customer service bot. He only answered what you asked, but didn’t volunteer any more information.
“So, what are you then?”
He shrugged. “I’m a mathematician.”
He certainly looked the part. He was pale, scrawny, wearing a grey jumper with a NASA logo emblazoned on the chest. He looked like someone who might work at a space agency, though Merida knew it was probably just H&M.
“And why do you have his things?”
“He couldn’t take them with him. You can’t bring any outside objects to the Hub, so I brought them back here.”
“I see. And you know about the Bitcoins?”
Tom nodded. “I know he thinks he has a lot of them.”
“You don’t think he does?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you know how to find them?”
“If he bought them from an exchange, they might still have them. But a lot of the early Bitcoin is completely lost, so probably not.”
“What if he mined them?”
“Then they’ll be on his hardware wallet.”
“What does that look like?”
“I don’t know… A computer? A phone? A USB stick?”
Merida clambered up from her lean and stood up. “Come here.”
She sat Tom in front of the laptop in the kitchen. “Could they be in… here?”
“Sure.”
“And if it’s here, can you… access it?”
“Sure. The old wallets usually don’t have any encryption, so if he hasn’t migrated it, anybody can get to it.”
“Can you check?”
“I can try.”
The kid popped open a little black window and typed in a cryptic looking command. He popped open a few more similar windows and typed a different command in each. He said he wasn’t a hacker, but he certainly looked like one.
A minute passed.
“No, it’s not here.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty much.”
He opened the Outlook email program and typed in a search.
“If it’s in an exchange, he’s used a different email for the login. There’s nothing here.”
“Damn”, Merida said. She had secretly hoped they could have found the money and split it.
“Do you have any Bitcoins?”, she asked.
“Some.”
“How many?”
“Like… a hundred?”
She whistled. She calculated the value quickly in her head. That would have been enough to pay off her student debts.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you going to spend it?”
“Eventually, I guess. That’s what money is for.”
“But not yet?”
“No. I don’t really need to buy anything right now. I have everything I need.”
Good for him, Merida thought.
“So…”, she said. “What happens now?”
He shrugged. “I guess I’ll leave. Haha.”
“Right.”
But before he could get up, the doorbell rang.
Merida’s jaw dropped.
“Hi.”
Laura had never spoken to Merida before. She had hoped one say she would. Now, she stood in Wint’s doorway in her bright red business suit and a pink silk shirt buttoned all the way up to her slender neck, revealing nothing, yet exposing everything. Laura was so fucking gorgeous it literally, physically, hurt.
“Wh— uhh, hi?” Merida was flustered.
“Can I come in?”
“I — I guess.”
Laura walked past her and strutted around in Wint’s front room, her high heeled pumps clicking on the imitation wood laminate floors.
“He’s not here, is he?”
“No.”
“Any clue where he’s gone?”
“No”, Merida lied, reflexively, throwing a sharp look at Tom who hovered in the kitchen hallway. The vibes she was receiving from Laura felt like it might not be in Wint’s best interest to be found.
“Whoa there”, Laura said, bringing on her best seductive smile at Tom. “And who, pray tell is this?”
“I’m Tom.”
“Do you know where Mr. Webster is?”
“No…”, Tom responded. Merida felt a wave of relief run over her body. The kid had picked a great time to learn to lie.
“…but I do know where he was this morning.”
Oh for fuck’s sake.
“Pray do tell”, Laura said, smiling at Tom through her California white teeth.