The Oracle Year(6)

“—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 just seem 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 this shit 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 option anymore. 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—but of 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 it through 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 assets valued in the neighborhood of thirty-five billion dollars, investing in a wide variety of concerns, from pharmaceuticals to agriculture 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 one general 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 they can 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 be talking 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 for us.”

“They didn’t,” Will answered. “The Ladies know what they’re doing. And besides, with what these hedge fund guys paid to talk to 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 account summary 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 us in about three minutes.”

“Unless something gets screwed up.”

“Nothing will get screwed up. Once it’s out of escrow, it’s ours, no matter what happens.”

Will smiled.

“Easy,” he said.

Hamza nodded.

Will’s computer chimed, and his grin faded.

“Shit, that’s them,” he said.

“Okay, okay,” Hamza said, “you’re ready?”

Will looked at his screen. He cracked his knuckles and set his hands on the keys.

“Ready,” he said.

Words appeared on his screen:

SWBG: Is this the Oracle?

Oracle: It is.

SWBG: We will require proof before we authorize release of funds from escrow.

Oracle: No. You will release funds now, or we will leave. You have thirty seconds.





He looked at Hamza. “Gave them the ultimatum,” he said. “Thirty seconds. Let me know.”

Hamza stared at his screen, chewing on the edge of his thumb. Seconds ticked by.

Will reached out his finger toward the keys, hesitated, then pulled them back. If this didn’t work . . . he couldn’t imagine getting up the nerve to try again, no matter what Hamza might say.