“You really think this . . . this is it?” he continued. “The reason I was sent these predictions? Just . . . money?”
Hamza took his hands off the keyboard and sighed heavily.
“Okay, Will. One last time.”
He looked up, directly at Will.
“We have an opportunity here like nothing I have ever seen in my life. Big enough that I quit my job to help you—a job atan investment bank that, in a bad year, netted me a quarter mil with bonus. Big enough that I’ve been lying to my wife aboutwhy I did that. I’ll put aside the fact we have been each other’s best friend for over ten years, and that I’d expect therewould be more trust happening here.”
“Hamza, come on, it’s not—” Will began. Hamza held up a hand, and Will stopped midsentence.
“I will also not mention that you need this so much more than I do. I will not say any of that because, as your good friend,it would be rude. However—”
Hamza reached for the notebook, and Will yanked it back. A pause, as they both processed that particular reflex. Hamza slowlylowered his hand, staring at Will.
“Look,” he said, his voice quiet. “You got the predictions. You trusted me enough to tell me about them. We talked for a longtime deciding what to do. This is what we came up with, and it will change both our lives forever. Forever.
“You didn’t get instructions. You didn’t get rules. If you find a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk, did it come to you fora reason? Are you obligated to do one thing or another with that twenty? Fuck no. It’s yours. Do whatever you want with it.”
“You always go financial,” Will said.
“That is not a bad thing. In fact, it is a good th—” Hamza stopped, shaking his head. He slapped down the cover of his laptop,setting the coffee table a-wobble again.
“You know what?” he said, standing up. “Forget it. Let’s take the Site down. Let’s just . . . agh.”
Will watched Hamza pace back and forth. He didn’t have much room to work—his path bounced between the entrance to the phonebooth kitchen and the bathroom door, about four steps each way.
“You get cold feet now, when, in, oh—”
Hamza pulled out his phone and checked the time, then held it out so Will could see it.
“—seven minutes, everything we’ve been working for will be right in our hands?”
Hamza shoved his phone back in his pocket.
“You’re a guy with, forgive me, no future, and then you are literally given the future, but the possibilities in that justseem to terrify you,” Hamza said. “I mean . . . it’s overwhelming, sure, but does that mean you should just sit on all this?Ignore it? Pretend you don’t know the things you know? I mean . . . what the fuck, man?”
Will watched his friend pace.
“You’re just as nervous as I am, aren’t you?” he said.
Hamza stopped, then collapsed back into the chair, rubbing his face with one hand.
“Pff,” he said.
“You weren’t at the Lucky Corner,” Will said. “It happened before I told you I was the Oracle. You don’t know how wrong thisshit can go. I do. Once you put this information out into the world . . . once you unleash it . . . you just have to sit there,and watch what happens, knowing you did it. Everything that happens next is your fault.”
Hamza sighed.
“I know, brother. Look. We can still turn this ship around, if we do it now. In about twenty minutes, that won’t be an optionanymore. The predictions came to you, not me. I won’t push it. If you want to stop, we’ll stop. Don’t even worry about it.I can get another job. And you . . .”
Hamza gestured out at Will’s shabby, overstuffed apartment.
“You’ll still have all this.”
Will put his hand flat on the notebook, feeling the cardboard cover under his hand. It didn’t feel warm. It didn’t feel alive—butof course it was, in its way.
He sat there, thinking, for what seemed like a long time. He tried to think it through, the same way he’d tried to think itthrough a thousand times before, finding, as always, that it was just too big.
Will let his mind go blank. He opened his mouth, curious to see what he would say.
“Yes. Let’s do it,” he said. “Tell me who I’ll be talking to again.”
“Right,” Hamza said, flipping his laptop open. “It’s a hedge fund. Starrer, Wern, Bigby and Greenborough. They manage assetsvalued in the neighborhood of thirty-five billion dollars, investing in a wide variety of concerns, from pharmaceuticals toagriculture to nanotech.
“What that means, Will, is that while we don’t know what SWBG will be asking you about, we do know that it will concern onegeneral area.”
“Money,” Will said.
“Yes. And they’ll be tough. Expect them to try to bully you. That’s how they do business. But remember there’s nothing theycan actually do to you.
“They will absolutely threaten to sue you at some point, but whatever. They have no idea who or where you are. They’ll betalking to the Oracle. They’ve never heard of Will Dando, and they never will.”
Hamza frowned.
“Assuming, that is, that the Florida Ladies didn’t screw up the security on this whole chat program thing they set up forus.”
“They didn’t,” Will answered. “The Ladies know what they’re doing. And besides, with what these hedge fund guys paid to talkto me, the last thing they’ll want to do is try to hack us somehow and scare me off.”
“Right, right,” Hamza said, holding up a hand to concede the point.
Will flipped his laptop open. The chat program was already up and running. Nothing fancy, just untraceable communication,text only, running on a Tor browser through some sort of anonymized Deep Web channel.
“Okay, all set, but they have a few minutes yet,” he said. “Can you check on the money? Make sure they didn’t back out?”
Hamza typed rapidly on his own machine, then grinned. He spun the laptop so Will could see the screen, displaying an accountsummary from a bank in the Cayman Islands.
ACCOUNT # 52IJ8549UIP000-LF8
ESCROWED BALANCE: US$10,000,000.00
“Still there,” Will said. “Jesus.”
“Still there,” Hamza said. “The bank will release it from escrow to
