Chapter Ten: Balance Zero
He walked into the living room to find the satellite laptop he kept hidden in the pantry.
He needed to verify the funds and transfer them to a mixer wallet immediately.
He set the laptop on the dusty dining table and powered it up.
The screen flickered to life.
He plugged in the USB drive.
He navigated to the wallet interface.
His hands were shaking so hard he could barely type the PIN.
PIN accepted. Loading wallet balance.
Harrison held his breath.
Balance: 0.00000000 BTC.
Harrison stared.
He blinked.
He hit refresh.
Balance: 0.00000000 Bitcoin.
“No,” he whispered.
“No, that’s impossible. It’s cold storage. It’s offline.”
He clicked on the transaction history tab.
There was one transaction.
It was dated yesterday.
Sent: 450.00 Bitcoin.
Recipient wallet address.
Memo: Contribution to the Saraphina Caldwell Arts Foundation.
Harrison screamed.
He swept the laptop off the table, sending it crashing against the wall.
“How?” he roared at the empty room.
“How did she know?”
The silence of the cabin was his only answer.
And then the landline phone on the kitchen wall—a rotary phone that Harrison kept purely for aesthetic reasons, a phone that shouldn’t even have service—began to ring.
The ringing was loud. Shrill. Impossible.
The line had been disconnected for two years.
Harrison had canceled the service himself to ensure total isolation.
Ring.
Harrison backed away from it as if it were a bomb.
He bumped into the kitchen counter.
Ring.
He couldn’t ignore it.
It was calling to him—a siren song from the hell his life had become.
Slowly, with a trembling hand, he picked up the receiver and held it to his ear.
He didn’t speak.
“Hello, Harrison.”
A voice. Not Saraphina’s.
A male voice. Calm. Slightly bored. With the distinct nasal quality of a tech support agent.
“Who is this?” Harrison croaked.
“This is Kevin from IT.”
Harrison’s mind raced.
“Kevin? I don’t know a Kevin.”
“Sure you do. Kevin from the fourteenth floor. You hired me three years ago to set up a secure, untraceable crypto architecture for your—what did you call it?—your rainy day fund.”
Harrison remembered.
The kid with the glasses and the anime t-shirts.
The genius he had paid ten thousand dollars in cash to set this up.
“You gave her the keys,” Harrison hissed.
“I paid you. I made you sign an NDA.”
“Yeah, about that,” Kevin said, the sound of typing clicking in the background.
“See, Ms. Caldwell—or rather, the trust’s forensic accounting team—found the cash withdrawal you used to pay me. It was marked ‘office supplies’ in the ledger, but you took it from the petty cash account of Sterling Dynamics.”
Kevin’s voice turned cheerful.
“So, since you used company funds to pay for the setup, and you used a company laptop to generate the seed phrase initially, the wallet is technically company property. And since the trust now effectively owns Sterling Dynamics due to the insolvency proceedings—”
“You stole my money,” Harrison screamed.
“We recovered corporate assets,” Kevin corrected.
“Actually, Ms. Caldwell was very generous. She decided not to press charges for embezzlement. She just wanted the donation for her foundation.”
The typing stopped.
“She loves the arts, you know.”
Harrison slammed the phone down.
He ripped the cord out of the wall.
He looked around the cabin.
It felt like the walls were closing in.
He had to leave. He had to run.
If they knew about the cabin, the police weren’t far behind.
He grabbed his car keys and bolted for the back door.
He burst out onto the porch and stopped dead.
The gravel driveway was no longer empty.
Blocking his beat-up Ford Focus was a sleek, matte black Range Rover.
Leaning against the hood, cleaning a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles with a silk handkerchief, was Arthur Penhalagan.
Standing next to him were two uniformed New York State troopers.
Harrison dropped the keys.
They landed in the dead leaves with a soft thud.
