The Oracle Year(31)

Hamza was convinced that once they’d been in operation for a few years, it wouldn’t matter where the money originally came from, because they’d have a history of legitimate business activity to hide behind. They didn’t need to hide the money. They just needed to hide the fact that it was the Oracle’s money.

The main thing, as far as Will was concerned, was that he could go to any ATM and see a seven-figure bank balance. He had a few thousand dollars in his wallet right at that moment. The only other time he’d had that much at one time was at the end of a tour a few years back, when the promoter had paid the band in cash for the whole run all at once.

So, no. Not money.

Will looked up, realizing where his feet had brought him—Forty-Eighth Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. What was once known as Music Row.

During Will’s first several years in New York, he’d been on this block nearly constantly, at least once a week. Until fairly recently, it had been the home of a number of guitar shops—Sam Ash, Rudy’s, several others—each with its own staff of frustrated working musicians trying to take advantage of tiny employee discounts to keep themselves stocked with gear while suffering through the indignity of selling instruments and effects pedals and amps and strings to the city’s many, many amateurs.

Will had worked at one of these shops when he’d first moved to New York. That was back when he’d still assumed the break was coming. Maybe one of the bands he was playing with would get signed, or one of the tracks he’d cowritten would blow up, or he’d find his way into the really high echelon studio work with stars who could afford to pay their bands salaries whether they were recording or not, plus benefits.

Players with all that and more were everywhere in New York. You ran into them all the time, at open mics or at the stores or just in the bars where musicians hung out. There was no real reason Will couldn’t be one of them.

After all, Will had been far and away the best bassist—the best musician, really—in his high school. College, too. He could sing, and more importantly, he could write. His was a special talent. Musical fame and fortune were his destiny. It was just a matter of time.

And then that time had gone by, and Will had come to realize something very important. There was good, and then there was New York good. Will Dando was Chicago good. Austin good, definitely. L.A. good, probably.

But New York good? No.

It turned out that Will Dando, at least from a musical perspective, was not particularly special.

And then he woke up from a dream with a hundred and eight bits of the future in his head. Not what he would have expected, not what he would have chosen.

But pretty fucking special.

Will walked out of Music Row into the broad concrete plazas laid out beneath the skyscrapers on the western side of Sixth Avenue. An electronic news ticker ran around the fa?ade of a building a block south, displaying an endless, ten-foot-tall stream of headlines.

His cell rang. Will checked the ID—his mother. He sent it to voice mail and slipped it back into his pocket.

She called a lot, and so she got his voice mail a lot, as did Hamza, Jorge Cabrera, and anyone else who tried to get in touch with him these days. Will couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually spoken to his mother, or his father, or his sister. He texted, sent the occasional e-mail—they knew he was alive, and vice versa, but he didn’t want to speak to them. He didn’t know what he’d say.

Will felt like he was on the edge of a long, fast, bone-breaking tumble—into booze, maybe, or women, or just ugliness. He knew what was going to happen, and he was coming to understand that no one should know what’s going to happen.

And yet the Site was still up.

More than two hundred people in the Oracle riots. Twelve at the Lucky Corner.

Will had spent almost every waking minute since sprinting out of Union Square with Hamza trying to decide what the hell he was going to do. He’d considered going public. Had considered going to the cops, or the New York Times. He’d thought about sending money to the families of everyone who had died at the Lucky Corner, and in the riots. But it was hard to see how he could do those things without putting Hamza at risk, and that wasn’t fair.

The safest, best idea he’d come up with was just to pull down the Site, but when the moment came, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and he knew exactly why, if he could just be honest about it with himself.

He liked being the Oracle.

Beyond that, there had to be something more to this than just two guys making a fuckload of money. He still had so many predictions left that he hadn’t used. There had to be a reason for all of it, something he was supposed to do.

But the next step wasn’t clear. He was paralyzed. He was a prophet with absolutely no idea what came next, and maybe a few more people would die because he was too dumb to figure it out.

A kebab cart caught Will’s eye, steam billowing out from its grill into the frigid air, and he realized he was hungry. Eating had been sort of hit or miss, recently. It happened when he reminded himself that he needed to do it, not on any sort of regular schedule.

Will walked up to the cart and asked for a chicken pita; the cart’s proprietor, a swarthy man in a thick, grease-stained coat and a plaid hunter’s cap pulled tight over his head, earflaps and all, tossed some raw chicken on the grill to sizzle.

The cart owner looked up at the news ticker, still running in the distance, and squinted.