Page 76 of Tangled

When he sat in a secluded corner of the private terminal to make phone calls to the jet leasing company and others, the vibration of his voice might attract a venomous snake.

And he knew who the venomous snakes were, at least some of them.

The Butorins and their criminal mafia were right at the top of the damn list, of course. Getting arrested had probably slowed them down some, and Sergey had most likely dropped a couple of notches in the organization for screwing up so badly and failing to deliver.

Sergey, or whatever his real name was, though Tristan didn’t care, was probably no longer a threat. He had to figure out whether the rest of the Butorin organization was still hunting them, though.

Mary Varvara Bell was another threat.

Tristan needed to talk to Bell, because as the sun swelled over the jagged horizon and warmed his face, it was Monday, and he owed her a buttload of depreciated stock by the end of business on Wednesday, just two days away.

Except for that double-cross-kidnapping plot of hers.Thathad voided their contract.

He should inform her of that.

She probably would disagree, and her opinion was the one that mattered.

Maybe he should call her from New Jersey. Calling Bell before five in the morning seemed like a bad idea.

But he would have to produce the worthless stock by Wednesday.

Or else they were probably going to kill him.

Tristan needed to get Jian, Anjali, and Colleen the hell away from him. When Bell sent someone to cross him off, he wanted those three on another continent.

And he needed them to leavesoon.He’d never even told Colleen that Bell had shortened the deadline for the GameShack stock from a month and a half toFriday.

Which was why he’d spent all that time writing the Anonymity Plus program to wipe Colleen off the internet, so the Butorins and Bell wouldn’t be able to find her when he missed the deadline, as he invariably would.

There was no way to procure that stock in six weeks, let alone the shortened deadline of Friday, let alone theinsanedeadline of Wednesday. He’d known it. It had been more effective to save Colleen than to flail around trying to obtain the stock and ultimately fail.

At least Tristan would meet a bullet knowing that Colleen was safe.

He hoped it was a bullet. He hoped it wasn’t a knife or a garrote or a tub of water.

Yeah, Tristan hoped it was a couple of nice, clean, high-caliber bullets, preferably one to the brain stem.

Mary Varvara Bell wanted that GameShack stock with the single-minded ferocity of a mother shark that smelled blood in the water.

Now, that was interesting. If that was the case,whoseblood was Mary Varvara Bell sniffing?

Because it had to be something like that. That had to be the reason she was trying to destroy GameShack. Nobody woke up one morning and thought,I think I’ll make someone’s life absolute hell, call in an exceedingly valuable favor potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars for no reason, and get nothing out of it except a decimated company in ruins.

It all came back towhy.

Tristan had checked the company’s SEC filings again. There were no market makers for GameShack. No one person or organization held enough stock to launch a hostile takeover, and no hedge fund held enough to be ruined if the stock price fell to zero.

So, what did GameShackhavethat Mary Varvara Bell wanted?

A chain of unprofitable stores?

Unlikely.

She didn’t seem like the gaming type.

Tristan sat in a leather chair in a corner of the terminal in front of the vast expanse of windows overlooking the runway whilst private jets accelerated on the tarmac and floated into the air with the dawn.

Farther away on Sky Harbor airport’s runway for commercial jets, a Monumental Airlines 747 lumbered down the longer stretch, struggling to lift its nose and hoist itself into the air.