Rabbits(23)

He quickly loaded a program, typed in a bunch of numbers and letters, and then waited. A couple seconds later, he opened a Tor Browser of his own and entered a .onion URL. Once the site had loaded, he leaned back in his chair and motioned us over.

I was fairly tech savvy, but whatever Baron had been doing on my laptop appeared to involve some kind of root-level modification that was way outside my experience or ability to understand.

“What the fuck did you just do to my computer?”

“I was just following instructions,” Baron said. “Look.” He pointed to the screen.

“What is it?” Chloe rolled her chair over to where I had recently joined Baron at my desk.

“Tabitha Henry,” I said.

And there she was.

Her face occupied the center of the screen. It was a candid shot, probably taken from another old social media account. She was smiling in what appeared to be a Thai restaurant. There was some additional information surrounding that image, including links to Tabitha’s now-defunct Instagram and Twitter accounts, college transcripts, high school yearbook photos, library book withdrawal info, at least one bank statement, and her recent employment records.

“None of this social shit is live anymore,” Chloe said. “She must have deleted it.”

Baron shrugged and took another hit off his pipe. “Deleting wouldn’t do it. Probably hired a fucking cleaner.”

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“A couple of guys I used to work with at Lehman Brothers owed me a favor.”

“You got this from broker bros?” Chloe asked.

“They got into some pretty fucked-up shit over there,” Baron replied.

“I’ll bet,” I said, staring at the screen.

The stock market was a sophisticated system that I’d enjoyed exploring for a while, but the behind-the-scenes workings of the deeply crooked world of corporate high finance were a web of fuckery that made advanced game theory look like eighth-grade math.

“Do you have any Bitcoin?” Baron asked as he took another hit of weed.

“A little.”

“I’m going to need to borrow it.”

“Okay. How much?”

“All of it.”



* * *



—

It took us a while to comb through the information. There was a whole bunch of useless material—dozens of photographs, expired links, and archived social posts—but not one mention of any kind of attack on the famous Hollywood actor.

There were some photographs that had clearly been taken on the day of that event—including three pictures of Tabitha Henry and Jeff Goldblum, the two of them standing on the familiar stage with the movie’s poster in the background. In all three pictures, they were smiling; clearly no attempted murder, and not one drop of blood.

“It looks like that attack never happened,” I said.

Baron nodded. “I told you it was fake.”

“I don’t know,” Chloe said. “That video is pretty fucking legit. Are you sure these photos aren’t the fakes?”

“Nah, these are real,” Baron said. “The metadata’s on point, and there are a bunch of other attempted-murder-free photos of the same event online.” He took another huge rip from his pipe and leaned in to stare at Tabitha’s face on the screen.

“What is your deal?” he asked, as he slowly zoomed in on the image.

But of course, Tabitha Henry’s pixelated face couldn’t answer any questions about her deal, or anything else.



* * *



—

Baron went home to do some work, and Chloe and I spent the next several hours making calls. Somehow Chloe managed to convince a representative from the movie studio that we hadn’t made up this insane story just to mess with her. The studio rep assured us that nobody who worked for their publicity department had ever been harmed in a manner consistent with what we’d described. When we asked her if she was sure, she told us that she was one hundred percent positive.

That attack never happened.



* * *



—

According to the information Baron’s finance guys sent over, Tabitha Henry was born in Queens, New York, graduated from UCLA with a degree in communications, then moved back to New York to work in digital advertising for a while before eventually returning to Los Angeles to start an immersive interactive theater company.

Tabitha’s company was called Rowing All the Boats. They ran a few popular escape rooms in Los Angeles. Their events always received rave reviews, and by the end of their first month of operation, they had a two-month-long waiting list. A few months after that, they were purchased by a company specializing in cutting-edge online-gaming technology called Chronicler Enterprises.

I called the number listed on the Rowing All the Boats website and left a message asking Tabitha Henry to return my call.

She called back a few hours later.

After some awkward small talk, I finally explained why I’d gotten in touch with her, how some friends and I had discovered a really weird movie clip, and that Tabitha herself was the star.

She gave me her email address and I sent her the file. A few minutes later she called us back, this time on video.

Tabitha’s hair was a bit shorter, her face a little bit fuller, but otherwise, she looked pretty much the same as she had in that clip with Jeff Goldblum.