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I nodded. There was a long wait, and then Madrox’s phone pinged and he looked down at the message.
“Should be good to go. You wanna try it now?”
I nodded again and pulled out my own phone. This was it. There was no way now to avoid putting a giant target on my own back. It didn’t matter if I used the fanciest encryption software in the world; the second I phoned Gabe’s number, I would put the location of his new phone—and myself—firmly on the police radar. More importantly, I might have only minutes before the police noticed that Gabe’s phone had been swapped and reversed the process.
I held my breath. I dialed Gabe’s number. I waited, holding my breath, not sure if I was more scared that it might have failed, or that it might have worked.
There was a short pause—not more than two or three seconds. And then the phone in Madrox’s hand rang.
I let out a shuddering exhalation of relief, almost a laugh, but the action was too sharp, too fast—the sudden movement of my ribs made the pain in my side flare, bright and hot, so intense that for a moment I saw stars and thought that I might pass out.
“… you okay?” I heard, dimly, as though through water. There was a hissing in my ears.
“Yeah…” I managed, grinding the words out, trying not to give way to the huge wave of trembling sickness that was threatening to overwhelm me. “Stomach… ache.” It was kind of true—and at least that would give me an alibi if I puked. Madrox was looking at me with a mixture of concern, alarm, and suspicion, and I couldn’t blame him. In his shoes I would probably have suspected some kind of ruse too. I had to get this show back on the road.
“I’m okay,” I said, though I wasn’t, not in the least. I swallowed hard against the saliva pooling in my mouth and the bile threatening to force its way up my throat. None of that mattered now. I needed to get that phone off Madrox and get the code before anyone realized what had happened. “Honestly, I’m fine. Let’s do the transfer. What’s your Bitcoin wallet address?”
He reeled it off, and I pulled out the paperback from my bag, the paperback with the number of the private key written in it. My fingers shook as I typed in the digits, and I had to concentrate, making sure I didn’t mess up the long, complicated number—and then there it was, Gabe’s Bitcoin wallet—a wallet which represented every remaining penny I had in the world.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure if I could press the button to confirm the transfer, my hands were trembling so hard—and it wasn’t only the aftermath of that shocking wave of pain that was making me shake. It was the realization that this was it. This was my last roll of the dice—every penny I had, my last remaining bargaining chip. But I knew that in reality, I had played my last card the moment Gabe’s number was swapped to the phone in Madrox’s hand. That phone was now a homing beacon, leading the police straight to whoever held it. Nothing else mattered now—not the Bitcoin, not Madrox. Nothing but that phone.
I gritted my teeth. I forced every muscle in my hand to stop trembling. I pressed send.
Madrox looked down at his own phone, tapping his foot. Then an alert sounded and he opened up the burner phone, frowning at the screen. I had been expecting him to hand it straight over, but he didn’t. Instead he seemed to have changed tabs and to be typing something into another window.
When he looked up his expression was annoyed.
“You’ve not transferred enough.”
My stomach seemed to drop, followed by a furious jolt of adrenaline. Was he stitching me up?
“What the fuck do you mean?” The words came out shriller and more angrily than I’d intended, and as soon as I’d said them I wanted to bite them back. I heard, as clear as if he were whispering into the Bluetooth earpiece, Gabe’s voice in my ear. Don’t piss him off, babe.
Too late. He looked pissed off. Very pissed off.
“Twenty grand,” he said, and in spite of my own panicked alarm, part of me—the professional, social engineer part—could see he was as tense and upset as I was, as ready to believe he’d been conned. “That was the agreement. You’ve only transferred me eighteen.”
“What do you mean?” I was baffled. “I agreed to twenty because I had twenty. I checked the exchange rate when we spoke.”
“We spoke yesterday,” he said, irritable now, as if talking to someone fairly thick. The words you dumb bint hovered unspoken. “Yeah, this probably was worth twenty then, but the exchange rate’s gone down since then.”
“Gone down?” I looked at him blankly. “By—what—ten percent? How can that be?”
“It’s Bitcoin, innit,” he said, even more tetchily. “It changes every day. If you wanted to fix a price in Bitcoin you should have said—but we agreed pounds.”
“But—how is that my fault if the rate has changed?”
“Well, it’s not fucking mine, is it?” he said, and even through my fury, a small part of me was whispering that he had a point. “If it had gone the other way—ten percent up—you’d be in profit. Not my fault it’s gone south. You need to transfer the other two grand.”
“But I can’t.” I spoke blankly. “I told you—I agreed to pay twenty grand because I had twenty grand. But that’s it. I’ve got…” I looked down at the screen, calculating the tiny fraction of a Bitcoin left in the account. “I don’t know, like fifty pounds in my wallet? No more.”
“Well shit,” Madrox said, plainly annoyed. “What are you gonna do, then? Got a credit card? There’s an ATM in the service station.”
I ran my fingers through my hair, feeling desperate. Yes was the answer to his question, and at this point I had very little to lose by using it, but I was absolutely certain that my accounts would have been frozen by now, as Jeff had pointed out. All I would be doing would be giving the police a nice clear ATM picture of the state I was currently in.
“No,” I said at last. “No, I have absolutely no other money. I can give you…” I rummaged in the rucksack and pulled out the last few coins, counting them. “Four… five quid. That’s literally my last pennies. And I can transfer you the rest of the Bitcoin, but there’s absolutely no way I can get you two grand. Please.” I put everything I’d ever learned into the words, my voice shaking with a desperation I was no longer trying to hide. I had no options left now apart from appealing to his sympathy. “Madrox, please, please, I honored what I thought was our agreement. I did my best. I swear it. If I had anything else—a watch—anything—I’d give it to you.” I held up my wrists, showing him their bareness, and as I did, our eyes both fell on something—and the hollow at the center of my chest seemed to expand to engulf my entire body.
It was my ring. The ring Gabe had given to me when he proposed.
