REKT - Chapter 30

Four Seasons

A Do Not Disturb sign hangs on the suite door. French doors open to the back patio, our lanai littered in confused consumption. Birds are picking at uncovered room service trays. Rose petals in my hair. Rose petals in Niko’s curly copper hair. She’s rubbing her hands with lilikoi lotion. She’s been rubbing her hands all morning. We are paranoia in goose down pillows, hunkered down at the Four Seasons under Paia friends’ assumed names. I hold a pile of quarters in one hand, drop them coin by coin into my other.

They are for the miraculous existence of a payphone in the lobby. They are for our phone calls to banks in Cyprus. We are working on an account for the police chief of Little Neck Cay, Bahamas. We are agents of vengeance. We are doing our part to end the life of Anthony Erskine. But that is just the beginning, that bank account is our only certain course of action, the only thing that makes sense. Everything else is up in the air. Niko and I are back-to-back in the bed, goose down wagons circled, holed up in luxury comfort, afraid that the next twist in this tale is going to turn us inside out.

Our enterprise is down to two. We are all that’s left of Icarus. The money has been returned, every last penny. The account at Frankfurt is closed. Auf wiedersehen Fritz, you blackmailing bastard. As her last act, Niko set the Serbs free with a friendly torrent of insults and payment of their completion bonus. With that, the most unstable of stablecoins ceased to exist. Icarus can exit the bubble as a footnote rather than a high crime against crypto. Its termination is the only Christmas gift we can present to our anxiety. Not much else adds up. Andy has gone missing. Niko has seen traces of the Bull God in other online identities. Certain turns of phrase, aggressive tactics, how a pumping yarn is strung together – trace signatures that all point to the man we briefly knew. Is it him or are they copycats? It’s hard to say, so hard to say. Styles are copied almost instantaneously. There’s a merging of the hivemind, an absorption of winning tactics into the collective that makes it difficult to tickle the difference between a true identity and the reflection of a username.

Niko looks up from her laptop.

“Andy is the only leverage we have on Bull God. We need to make him think he’s a threat. We need to use your story to draw him out. If Bull God thinks he’s an unwitting accomplice in a cartel kidnapping crime, he’ll reach out to me. He’ll come forward and share his side.”

“My story? You want to put my kidnapping on Telegram? There’s a far easier way to go about this. You could just believe me. You could believe what I said about Ram being Joe’s sister. You could believe what she said about Andy being Herod. There’s no need to find Bull God if you just choose to believe in me.”

“I can’t,” she says.

“You can’t?” I peel my back from hers, turn and face her in the bed. We are naked under the goose down, we are dripping rose petals from our bodies, we cannot trust each other. We are wrapped in a beauty we cannot take pleasure in, a hell of our own making.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you Ryan. It’s that I worry you are being played again. How can we know what is really going on here? How can we take the word of a larper on the beach?”

“We trust her enough to serve as the agent in an execution.”

“Erskine is scum, and we aren’t killing him. We are opening a bank account. We do that, we can get Joe back in the picture. I want Blockstar Gives to succeed. Penance for some of the other things.” Niko looks at me.

She’s speaking on two levels now. I should let her back into my heart. I’m asking her to trust me, but I can’t open myself to her yet. We won’t be able to survive like this. We need each other.

“What if we aren’t killing him for Joe? What if someone else wants him dead?” I ask.

Now, I’m caught in Niko’s train of thought. That’s the danger of the web Andy has created. This web of lies spun in the tunnel of the bubble.

“Doesn’t matter who is behind it. We are allies in that cause, but what you’re saying about Andy? I’m afraid you’re traumatized and angry. It’s not a position to act from. Trust me to love you Ryan. Trust me to do right by you. We can lay together in this bed. We can work towards the same end, but I want to love you again too. I want to take something good from this.” Niko pauses, corrects herself, “I want to give something good in all of this.”

What is all of this? What brought her here to the Four Seasons two days before Christmas? She came here out of fear. She was on her own, easy to pick off. She was scared and she came running to me, the schmuck she’s played like a fiddle for the last year. Here you are in bed with her, naked and vulnerable and she’s reaching right for your heart again. How can you let her in? How do you know she won’t do it again?

“All I can give you Niko is today. When we wake in the morning, I’ll give you another today and if you are good to me and I’m good to you, then there will be another today after that. That’s all I can give anyone right now. If you want love, you have all my love today. If you want tomorrow, you can’t. I don’t have it to give.”

“Then that’s enough Ryan. I’m through wanting what doesn’t exist.”

***

Christmas Eve at the Four Seasons, the anti-Christmas Christmas crowd are enjoying a couple days of quiet before the resort overflows with grandparents and children ready to ring in the New Year. We blend in with this crowd because we are this crowd - early thirties, affluent, childless. Our generation loiters about the lobby, faces down on iPads, conversation at a minimum. We are here not to be disturbed. We are walling ourselves off by the ocean. Coffee, smoothies, bloody marys in hand, everything else at bay.

Only Niko and I are not like everyone else. Sure, we pass as them; Niko in her yellow sundress, bikini strings tied over her bare shoulders, me in my Reyn Spooner holiday Hawaiian shirt, linen pants tied at the waist. We fit right in with the catalog crowd milling about in the early morning light, but we are hiding in plain sight, acting as accomplices in the murder of a monster. When we are not aiding and abetting, we are tracking Andy through the crypto exchanges. In the spirit of the holidays, the bubble has become wobbly and fat. Bloated and ready to burst. Reindeer abound, a fat man tries to stuff an imaginary bag down a chimney. Bitcoin may have peaked, cryptomania is due to come full circle. Niko says there’s a weirdness flowing through the markets, no one can tell if it’s a holiday lull or if this is finally it.

We are camped out by the payphone, waiting for it to ring. It is getting late in Cyprus, although tomorrow is not the same as it is here, their Christmas is on the Orthodox calendar and falls after the New Year. The banks close in an hour, before that we will receive a call and our work on the Erskine affair will be over.

“I’ve found him,” Niko says.

“Who?” I ask.

“Andy.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s in Gemini, MercuryOne, Kila, and a few other exchanges.”

“Oh.” For a moment, I thought she had the physical location of Andy. That he had surfaced and pinned himself to a place on the map, became physical again and therefore a potential target. Not that I’ve given serious thought to how I would kill Andy, but his absence from the world has made that a moot point. That, and Nikola’s insistence I do nothing without evidence. That she’s found him trading is good. I need to win her over. For that, she needs to see his red hands all over the BSTR trades. Otherwise, we are back to the word of a fake beach yogi.

I stand up, lean over her laptop. We are in a far corner of the lobby and have moved our chairs away from the main seating area, closer to the payphone. We can speak freely here.

“He’s washing BSTR.”

“Laundering it?”

“No dummy,” she gives me a look. Work Niko assumes everyone knows what she knows, otherwise she wouldn’t bother speaking with them. She’s spent too much time in the closed off world of coin scammers to realize half her jargon is a mystery even to someone like me.

“He's doing wash trading. It means that he’s selling coins from one account he controls to another account he controls.”

“Why would he do that?” I ask.

“To inflate the price. BSTR is up thirty percent on the day. The volume of coins looks strong too. If you didn’t know what was going on, you’d think there was a rally happening. You’d think there was good news about BSTR, so you’d start buying the coin. What’s really happening is that Andy is creating a fake price by passing his coins back and forth to his accounts. One side loses, the other side wins, but at the end of the day it all washes out even for Andy.”

“So, at a certain point other people need to start buying,” I say.

“Yup, or in our case start selling. You see Andy here is using our trading program. I know these patterns. I can read the signals of the software we bought. I can spoof Andy’s trades.”

“Wait, you are using this opportunity to sell?”

“Oh yes, I’m going to stick Andy with the rest of the BSTR coins we have. Our coins are up to twenty-five million and there’s finally buyers who can absorb that. I’d like to turn that into cash and if Erskine is going to, um, exit his involvement soon, we need to get out. There hasn’t been a real market in BSTR since Joe got arrested. It’s been impossible to unload our coins.”

I look at Niko and ask, “Always a trader, huh?”

“I am what I am. Besides, this will be a bit of payback. Why don’t you go for a swim? It will take me an hour to get this setup and then depending on how hungry Andy and Erskine are to buy, a day, maybe two to unload everything.”

“What about the phone call?” I ask.

She looks up at me mystified. “Do you speak Cypriot Greek?”

“Right. Still, I feel like I’m missing the action.”

“So, you want to sit quietly in a chair while I type and then eavesdrop on a conversation you don’t understand?” she asks.

When she puts it that way, I don’t and if it was me, I’d hate to have her looking over my shoulder. How strange it is. We are asserting ourselves. We are striking back, but it feels like correspondence chess. Everything has been abstracted. Our moves travel through intermediaries. They are acted out by machines or distant contacts we’ll never see. We are conning a copy of our trading bot into buying coins to get cash Andy stole from us. Cash that came from no honest action of ours. We created nothing of value, we produced nothing. We created fake news on which we traded fake coins, and now we are justified in taking it back because the person who has it is a bigger piece of shit than us.

“I’ll do the Wailea Walk and then go for a swim. Afterwards, let’s head to a different resort for breakfast. Get out of here for a change.”

“Sure.”

Niko hasn’t heard me, or if she has it’s not registering. Her fingernails are daggers. The keyboard is her killing floor. We are back in the battle of the bubble. These are the implements of destruction. There’s no reality here. Best not to dwell on it. One reality matters, Niko and I’s belief in each other, our hope that we can build belief back into trust.

“Niko,” I snap my fingers. She looks up.

“Huh?”

“Now that you’ve seen the coins and the trading patterns, do you believe me?”

“Yes. This is Andy and it’s too much money to be just Andy. Has to be Erskine too.”

“So, you can forget about Bull God?”

Her head is back on the screen. “I’ve already forgotten him.”

***

Christmas begins with a phone call in the wee small hours. I open my eyes and look at the screen, an Ohio number that doesn’t ring a bell. I decline the call. My gaze travels past the bedside table to the open doors and the lanai. It is dark except for floodlights illuminating the neatly trimmed lawn. The phone rings again. Fucking robocallers, even on Christmas. Same number. I decline. Nicola is kicking me, murmuring. The phone keeps ringing. There’s a rim of dawn on the horizon, just a slight border breaking the seal on the day. I prop myself up, reach for the phone. That Ohio number again.

“Hello,” I say.

“Ryan? Is this Ryan Declan?”

A square midwestern voice comes over the line. It is far off, but familiar to me, a voice I’ve heard before but am unable to place.

“Yeah, Ryan here.”

“Ryan, it’s Hank Hansel. Andy’s father, we’ve met a couple times. Been a few years though, look…I’m sorry for calling you on Christmas like this. I’m sorry to make this call at all.”

I’m out of the bed. Out of the suite, on the lanai now.

“What’s happened to Andy?” I ask.

“Andy’s gone.”

“Yeah, I haven’t seen or heard from him in a couple weeks. He didn’t come home for Christmas?”

“No, I mean Andy is gone gone. He’s killed himself, Ryan.”

“Andy’s dead?”

“I’m afraid so. Took the coward’s way out. Here I am, doing chemo, holding on and he goes and does this. I’ve got no hair, can’t eat real food, can’t get it up anymore, but I’m still fighting. What does Andy do? Kills himself because he can’t handle what he’s done. Boy was always a quitter. I’m sorry, just a little angry. Why couldn’t he have done this in America where they speak English? Takes me down to Mexico for a vacation, then offs himself. Anyway, I know you two had business together. Thought you should know first, being so late in the year and all. Maybe there’s some tax benefit for you if you act fast.”

Tax benefit? Mexico? Andy’s dead. I collapse onto a lawn chair, punch myself in the knee, bite hard on my lip. Andy’s dead? He killed himself.

“What couldn’t he handle?” I ask.

“Being sober. Said he cheated some people while he was getting high. Said he didn’t like the man he’d have to live with, that he betrayed some good people. He told me he didn’t deserve the friendships he had. Said it would be impossible to unravel all the awful things he’d done. I’ll tell you this Ryan, I’ve done plenty of awful things in my life, but I stood up and took responsibility for them like a man. Sure, I looked at the barrel of my gun once or a dozen times, but I’m here fighting. I’m taking my chemo and I’m accountable to anyone who comes my way. Your generation, I just don’t understand you…”

“Hank, with all due respect, your son, my best friend, just died. I don’t need the boomer lecture.”

“I’m sorry, this is my way of grieving. Never show weakness. You kids should learn that.”

“When’s the service?”

“Service? No service. I’m having him cremated tomorrow or the day after. It depends on when the policia here gets back to work. If you want to do a service, I’ll send you some ashes. Death certificates too. You’ll probably need them for your business. Give me an address and a week. I’ll send you some Andy if you want him.”

Andy’s ashes. An address and a week. What would I do with Andy’s ashes, scatter them at a trade show? “I’m sure the family would prefer to…”

“Family? His mother’s gone. She’s the one that would have. If you aren’t, I imagine my daughter will. She thinks highly of the Hansels. Would want Andy situated. She’ll put him next to his mom and stick his name on the grave. Better him than me. I’m still here, I’m fighting Ryan.”

“How did he do it?”

“Pills and vodka, like some sort of a...”

“If you want to wait a few days, I’ll come down for the cremation. I’d like to say goodbye.”

“No, no. I don’t want to be a bother. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t want to spend any more time here. I only came as a favor to Andy. Like I said, I’ll send some of Andy in a box if you want to do a memorial or something with all your friends.”

“Let me get back to you on that one Hank, and I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Loss?”

“Andy.”

“Oh yeah, Andy, a smart kid, took after me in a lot of ways. I was in sales, you know. Took him out on the road when he was little. Taught him all my tricks. He was good at it too. Soaked it all up like a sponge, just too much of his mother in him. The hotel phone is ringing. Maybe it’s those lazy cops. I’ve got to go. Goodbye Ryan.”

“Goodbye Hank.”

Goodbye Andy. I drop my phone into the grass by the lawn chair, lift my eyes to the ocean, and try to fix the news in my brain. After all of that, Andy kills himself. All that drama, all the lies and the stealing and the hurt. After all of that is over with, Andy decides the ends do not justify the means, so he kills himself. I don’t know what to think. I remember Andy low. I remember him in bed, depressed and down, suicide has been a worry in the past. Lately? No. Andy in the bubble stopped having feelings. He abstracted himself from the realm of emotion. He was a puppet master. He didn’t get down because he was above us all.

And yet he killed himself because he couldn’t lie to himself. That’s what it was. He couldn’t lie to himself. He completed his mission, executed his scam, and in the end, he was still hollow. Fake money, fake relationships, fake feelings. He came to the end of the road and there was just an emptiness inside. Spending Christmas with his father in Mexico. Maybe he was trying to make that relationship work before his father ran out of time? Maybe that trip was a misplaced notion, and when he saw what a piece of work the old man still was…how hollow and empty that must have been. Maybe he didn’t want to play out the frame like his father? It could be any number of reasons. These past months have shown me that I never knew Andy, and now I never will.

Andy is gone. He’s killed himself. Exited from position on the field. I’ll never have closure. I’ll never get to decide whether I wanted to actually kill him or not. I’ll never decide whether I had it in my heart to forgive him. I’ll never decide whether I had the moral fortitude to take account for our actions and turn us in for our crimes. Andy took all of those things when he took his life. He has completed the story for me. Fitting, because it was never my story, it was always his. Andy, who loved to live out on the edges, to push the boundaries and distort the world to his liking, decided in the end he didn’t like the world he had created. He decided he did not like himself enough to fix it. He’s left me, his faithful toadie, behind. I am here.

I am here and I no longer want Erskine to die. I want someone to be held to account for what has happened. I want Erskine to speak for what he did to me and to those girls. Killing him is not the answer. We need to go to Hana. We need to find Tess and stop Erskine from dying. There has to be a better way. Death is empty. Death is hollow. There is nothing here.

***

It took four hours to get out here. On an island so small, you’d think nowhere would take that long, but we made good time all things considered. First, we had to rouse up a rental car on Christmas Day at six in the morning. Then there was the road to Hana. Hard to describe how beautiful the drive is, clinging to a road cut into the side of the volcano, ocean beneath you, waterfalls and jungle above. Hard to describe how nerve wracking it is to race through all the blind turns on the road. Hard to describe how strange the drive is when processing the news of your partner’s suicide on your way to prevent a murder you had a hand in funding.

Hasegawa’s General Store in Hana is a green sided, tin roof place with a bit of everything crammed under the roof. After cross examination from the owner, everything includes the location of our LARPers, better known around these parts as the Sunny Day Theater Troupe. Even in a place as hippy dippy as Hana, season long LARPing is not something to publicly acknowledge. I checked online. It’s fringe, even in their world. Took us four wrong turns, but we made it to their camp. Chickens, roosters, and goats greet us in a field filled with rusted out buses and a couple hatchbacks. There are voices in the distance, the smell of smoke and food being cooked. A bronzed man approaches through the cane grass, shirt off, with a scattergun out.

“Help you folks?” he asks.

“Looking for Tessa Haggerty. I’m her brother’s friend Ryan. She knows me.”

“Tess ain’t here,” he replies.

“Can I speak with whatever character Tess is playing? I’m cool man. It’s important. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t a matter of life and death.”

He puts the gun down. Eyes Niko in her designer loungewear, her emotions hidden behind enormous gold framed sunglasses. He looks over at me, my eyes red, face filled with grief and exhaustion.

“Tess left to be with her brother. She’s been gone for two days.”

“Do you know where she’s gone?” Niko asks.

“LA and then somewhere. She took all her backpacking gear. I think they are off on an adventure of sorts. Sorry but she didn’t offer any details, and we didn't ask.”

“Can we have her number?” Niko asks.

“No.”

“Maybe we can speak with her friends? Like I said, this is a matter of life and death.” I take a step towards the man. He raises the gun back up.

“Give me your numbers and if someone wants to speak, they’ll hike down to the general store and call. Best I can do. No visitors while a session is underway.”

Niko reaches into her bag, scribbles onto a piece of paper and hands it to the man.

“Ryan, let me have the keys. You don’t look up to driving back, and this isn’t LARPing. This is a cult. Let’s get out of here.”

She’s right about both things. There’s a numbness covering me that’s masking a shakiness underneath it. I’m shot. Mentally, physically, psychically. There’s nothing in the tank. Andy’s gone. Tess is off with Joe somewhere, and short of calling the asshole himself, we need to wait on Erskine. That’s something I need to think about. Enough time to do it too. No one is killing the man on Christmas Day. Besides, there hasn’t been a cell signal on this side of the island in hours. I should have checked that before leaving. I should have bought a phone plan with roaming.

***

Niko’s chin on my shoulder. Niko’s tears in my t-shirt. Bloomberg Channel on the TV. News of Erskine’s death running across the bottom ticker. ‘Hedge fund head, Anthony Erskine, killed after a standoff with police in the Bahamas. A kilo of cocaine discovered in the boot of his Land Rover. Additional information as the story develops.’

“Some Christmas,” I say.

“I’m only crying for you Ryan. You need these tears, not them.”

“Another story with no resolution. I wonder what will even come out. Something has to in order to clear Joe’s name, but how much? What was he even into?” I ask.

“At least we’ll get to see Joe soon. I wonder where he is.”

“Knowing Joe? He’s with his spirit animal in the jungle or maybe he’s surfing off Honduras. Could be in a monastery. Did you know he was celibate?” I ask Niko.

“I didn’t but in hindsight, you could tell. I’ve seen him talk to hundreds of people, and never flirted with any of them. All that charisma and energy, and none of it was sexual. He’s a man on a different path.”

Joe’s existence has taken on greater importance with Andy and Erskine gone. The prophecy is still out there, and death comes in threes. I want Deacon Joe back in the US. I wish he was here with us now, so that we could gather for dinner together, and toast Andy despite his failings. I’d like to put Andy’s memory to rest the right way. I’d like to remember the man who opened the world to me, who showed me what was capable at the edges, and how bright the possibilities can be. Joe was there. He understood how special Andy was. Instead, we are left with the ghosts of Andy and Erskine in the exchanges. Their bots are still going, unaware that their masters have perished. They are bouncing money back and forth to keep pushing up the price of BSTR, conning people even in the afterlife.

“There’s an imbalance forming.” Niko has her laptop in front of me. She points, “See these blocks? One party is accumulating larger positions. They are aggregating the buy side.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they are bundling sell orders together. If I had to guess, it’s Erskine who’s buying and Andy who’s selling. Andy didn’t have enough money to eat these sell walls.” Niko says.

“Even in death, Andy is fucking his partners over,” I say.

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t take it with you.”

“No, you can’t.”

***

Niko wakes me with pushes and kicks. It is dark. I have no concept of time. After Erskine, I loaded myself up with NyQuil, threw back a couple double shots of tequila and knocked myself unconscious.

There’s nothing inside me. I’m trying to surface, but I’m too far under.

“Get up lard ass,” she hisses in my ear.

“Huh?”

“Blockstar Gives just passed,” she says.

“What?”

“I was woken up by alerts for BSTR. The coin fell five hundred percent since this afternoon, which is basically impossible.” Niko says.

“Ugh, I thought we sold.” I moan.

“We did. This isn’t about our money. Blockstar Gives passed. 50.1% of coins approved the proposal in the last six hours. Joe won.”

“Cool. How is that possible?”

“Well, there are all the Blockstar insiders. That’s like forty percent of the vote. The rest has to be what Erskine is holding. Someone used them to pass the approval. Maybe Andy voted his positions before selling out. It’s possible. Maybe Andy did something good on the way out.”

“Good for Joe. We needed some good news.” I drop back down on the pillow.

“Ryan…Ryan…the entire market is melting down on the news. Everything is in the red. The bubble is bursting. The bubble is popping and Blockstar Gives triggered it.”

Death comes in threes. The bubble is the third death. It is some comfort as I close my eyes and drift back to sleep.

***

I wake up to Niko pacing the room. She’s red eyed. There’s a full ashtray on the lanai. How long have I been asleep? There’s so much sun. Why is she crying?

“Joe was shot this morning,” she says.

“Shot?”

“He’s dead. Someone in the Dominican Republic drove up on a dirt bike and shot him outside his hotel.” “I don’t believe you Niko. That’s too much.”

“There's a video.”

She throws her phone on the bed. The play button sits there against a black screen. Joe cannot be dead. Three of them in a day. That’s impossible. This isn’t real. I’m dreaming. I pick up the phone. She’s gone outside. I can hear her lighter clicking. The video starts. There’s no audio. It's a closed-circuit feed from a convenience store across the street. Joe and Tess walk out from the lobby of the hotel. They start down the stairs. A Kawasaki dirt bike pulls up. The man on the back of the bike pulls out a gun. He fires at Joe. There are three flashes and then Joe falls to the ground. The bike pulls away. Tess is on the ground over Joe. She’s screaming. She’s in tears. The video cuts out.

I run to the bathroom and throw up. The tequila Nyquil concoction coating the toilet as I dump my soul into the bowl. Joe too. This sinister fucking business. Joe was the good one. Joe was the light. He tried to do something good, and they fucking shot him for it. They shot him dead. I get to my feet, hunch over the sink and spit the rest of my vomit into it. This is the bubble’s doing. The POP! of the bubble killed Joe. It wiped him off the map for trying to make a difference. His good act destroyed the bubble, and the aftershock killed him.

Just like he said it would.

Niko is huddled in the goose down. I climb into bed with her. Our world is being stripped apart. Whatever we had disappeared first in lies, then in death. All we have left is each other. There’s no point in wondering how or why right now. Our situation is more elemental than that. Are we next? What is happening? This entire enterprise was a house of lies and it is being torn apart in the most horrible way.

“Ryan?”

“Yes.”

“We need to leave this place. I need to go home. Can you take me back home?”

“Yes.”  

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