Iris smiled.
“I do indeed. If I had the funds, I might also be tempted.”
She inclined her head, almost apologetically.
“And speaking of such things, did you wish to give me a credit card, or—”
Will reached into his bag and pulled out a thick stack of Uruguayan currency—one- and two-thousand peso notes.
“No,” he said, “cash will be fine.”
The concierge looked at the money in silence. Will could feel himself moving into yet another box. Iris would never forgetthat this had happened, and while the chances she would actually figure out he was the Oracle had to be almost nil (in Will’sopinion), he was still advertising that he was an extremely wealthy man, far from home, who carried a ton of cash.
Hamza would hate this. If he knew about it. Which he didn’t. And wouldn’t.
Will looked at Iris, who still hadn’t taken her eyes from the stack of bills. He smiled.
“Actually,” he said, “if you’re free tonight, why don’t you see if you can get two seats?”
Chapter 17
Cathy Jenkins sprawled in a deck chair on her back patio, her tablet on her lap, both hands curled around a steaming mug,looking out at the waves. A flock of pelicans had gathered just past the edge of the beach. She watched them swooping downto snatch breakfast from the surface of the sea.
Not very pretty birds, she thought. Flying coat hangers.
It was still fun to watch them fish. They’d dive-bomb the water, smacking into the surface with all the grace of a basketball,and come up a moment later to bob along the waves with fish hanging from their beaks, looking very self-satisfied.
Cathy turned on her tablet and pulled up the home page for the Tampa Bay Times, skimming the headlines. President Green’s lead in the election polls had eroded to the point where it was an even race. She’dhave thought Green had a lock on a second term, but Aaron Wilson had somehow stolen away a lot of his support.
She scrolled the rest of the page. At first, she was surprised not to see anything Site related. This would be the first dayher employer hadn’t made the front page in weeks. And then, an item down toward the bottom—an interview with José Pittaluga,the Uruguayan actor named in one of the first Oracle predictions, whose long-awaited performance was scheduled for that veryevening.
Cathy wasn’t much for Shakespeare, really—she knew what the Bard’s work meant to the world’s cultural heritage, but parsingthrough the plays for meaning always made her feel stupid, and she knew that while she was many things, stupid wasn’t oneof them.
Cathy tapped the link to the interview and began to read. She immediately decided she liked José Pittaluga very much.
The man was completely open about the fact that the Oracle’s prediction had made his career, and that it had nothing whatsoeverto do with his ability as an actor. He seemed to relish that point, in fact. He knew he wasn’t an Olivier, not even a NicolasCage, but that didn’t matter. The Oracle had made him completely, one hundred percent critic proof. And rich.
You and me both, buddy, Cathy thought.
Cathy set down her tablet, smiling. She didn’t just like Pittaluga—it was possible that she loved him.
The man was unrepentantly gleeful in telling the entire world to fuck off—a point of view she could respect, not so differentfrom her own career in the software industry. She’d never had time for people who didn’t recognize what she could do, or whosomehow thought it was less just because she had a pair of tits. If the patriarchy didn’t want her talent on her terms, thenthey would have to get along without it, while she sat in the shadows, making their lives miserable from time to time, gettingrich off their mistakes, exploiting flaws in their security, and selling the solutions back to them.
Or, on occasion, being the IT security consultant for a man who could predict the future.
Cathy picked up her tablet again and pulled up an app. It was a search program of her own design, a spider, searching theweb in all its flavors—light, dark, and deep—for mentions of a single man’s name.
John Bianco. Who was obviously not actually named John Bianco.
She thought back to the early days of their acquaintance, when he’d been fumbling around in the blackhat forums, trying tofind someone to help him. Cathy had watched him for a while, trying to understand what he was really after—he hadn’t actedlike a cop, or a Deep Web tourist. He’d acted . . . like a child. Defenseless, with no real understanding of the dangers inherentin the depths he’d somehow managed to find. He seemed to really need help, but the first people he had found—a group of trulybrutal Slovakians—would eat him alive.
And so, GrandDame had stepped in, and here she was today, sipping coffee on her patio, seven figures richer.
But money alone wouldn’t buy off her curiosity, or her natural tendency to dig, and dig, and hack away until there were nosecrets left in the world. That had always been the real reason she wanted to work with the Oracle. Secrets were Cathy Jenkins’drug, the Oracle knew them all, and the path to the Oracle ran through John Bianco.
She didn’t know very much about the man. Just his name, and that he lived in New York. She’d only met him twice. Once whenthey finalized the deal for the Florida Ladies to work for the Oracle, and once when he gave them their bonuses. Bianco hadbeen extremely cautious with personal information, too. He didn’t talk about himself, ever.
But a name and a city wasn’t nothing, and Cathy’s little digital spider was patient. There were plenty of John Biancos inNew York City, but she’d been able to bring up photos of all of them, in time, and none of them looked like the man she’dmet. John Bianco wasn’t John Bianco. He was someone else.
She set the spider to crawl through the web, looking for new mentions of John Bianco anywhere in the NYC area—news stories,account registrations, traffic tickets, tax payments. It had been working
