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FIFTY-NINE

NICK

I picked up Phil Crain when he was drunk as a skunk, in tears, telling the bartender at an Irish pub on the Lower East Side of Manhattan his sad life story. His sniffles were ruining my lunch, but one look at him gave me whiplash. Despite his blond hair and blue eyes, I swear he looked like Rosenberg’s doppelg?nger. He just needed several tweaks to play the part—red hair dye, green eye lenses, expensive suit, proper attitude. I paid off his gambling debt, promised him a fortune for playing the best role in his life—he was an actor at some shitty off-Broadway place. I should’ve known he had more debt than he led me to believe. The guy can’t keep his life straight.

It’s been over a year with this parasite, and I’m about done with him. He thinks he’ll get a hefty paycheck, fake passport, and disappear to some South American paradise. As if I could trust an idiot like him. In a couple of days, he will be brain dead in a hospital.

“Listen to me,” I tell Phil on the phone. “You get ready, put on the outfit I chose for you, and read the document I sent you. I don’t want you to say anything stupid or sound like a moron in front of our biggest investors. I’ll pick you up in twenty. Not a drop of booze, you got me?”

“Jesus, I already told you?—”

“Shut! The fuck! Up!” I snap. “Get to work on that document. Practice like it’s the most important audition of your life. It is , by the way.”

I cut the call and grunt in frustration.

He’s not any better than the actual Geoffrey Rosenberg. Now, that guy was a genius, though also a doormat. I met him several years ago when he was working on a new online digital currency marketplace, which was brilliant, by the way. But he was a lousy networker, so he couldn’t find investors. An introvert, a loner, a weirdo—he should’ve listened to me and made a deal that day three years ago. Could’ve been still alive.

I had developed a new cryptocurrency, ErFi Crypto—nothing special, but big potential if played right. I’d just dumped my investment company which was a fraud and got away with hefty eight figures in my offshore account.

I believe that everything happens for a reason. I lived under a new identity, came to Rosenberg to offer him a collaboration. I don’t know if he simply didn’t like me or was too protective of his idealistic vision about his online baby, IxResearch. It didn’t matter. I wanted my hand in it, but he was stalling.

The evening he and I had an argument at his place, I didn’t mean to start a fight. If he’d kept his mouth shut, things would’ve turned out differently. But he kept on blabbering and blabbering, calling me a fraud, until I punched him in the face.

I know, I know, I have occasional spurts of anger. That one resulted in him falling, hitting his head against the edge of the table, and?—

Well, let’s just say that a dead body can be a nuisance if you don’t know how to dispose of it. Luckily, I had a perfect place, a remote cabin in Vermont that belonged to my grandparents’ friend who never used it.

Rosenberg being a recluse worked out fantastically for me. I had access to everything he owned—his apartment, his computers, his software. He didn’t have any friends. No family or relatives, his single mom long dead. No one was looking for him. I realized that it would be easy to continue with his project, feeding my own obscure ErFi Crypto into his new digital market.

No one knew that Rosenberg was dead. He didn’t have to be. But soon, I needed a face for IxResearch and a person who could take all the blame for it later on.

I’ve been working on this for three years. A year and a half ago, I found that doofus, Phil. It was time to take that enterprise up a notch. I didn’t expect it to explode like it did, with the company’s net worth skyrocketing to almost a billion.

I could’ve kept it up for longer. If it were mine, that is. Unfortunately, there’s too much mess with Rosenberg’s identity, so that will have to play out differently.

Today is a big day. The company is officially going public and releasing the shares onto the stock market. With the raging interest from the investors, it’s only a matter of days until the stock prices soar. I’ll transfer the rest of the IxResearch investments to my offshore accounts, and bye-bye! The thousands of idiots who invested in yet another crypto venture will be bankrupt. Serves them right. Bernie Madoff will pale in comparison, but unlike him, when the feds get a whiff of what’s happening, I’ll be across the world, sipping cocktails on the beach under a new identity.