Page 90 of The Librarians
Astrid rubs her hand over her thumping heart. “That would have been enough to open a couple of whole new branches.”
“It’s too bad Kit wasn’t more public-minded.” Hazel picks up a grape from the cheese board and peels it, a look of blank concentration on her face. “We thought that was it—he played his cards wrong, he got in trouble, he ran, he died in a plane crash.”
The peeled grape looks exposed and vulnerable. Is that how Hazel must feel, someone so self-contained forced to share so much that is painful and humiliating?
“The thing is, he’d accumulated a good deal of Bitcoin—the reason he embezzled was to meet a margin call so that the exchange wouldn’t start liquidating his Bitcoin positions. But when he died, no one could find his Bitcoin.
“The current belief is that he took them offline, so that they couldn’t be discovered or hacked. People have been looking for his cold storage, which can be a flash drive or even a piece of paper with his private key written on it.”
Astrid covers the lower half of her face with her hands. “Perry, too?”
“Perry, too.”
Astrid breaks out in goose bumps, even though this is not the first time she’s heard this. “Was that why he came to Austin time and again? But why Austin?”
“In March of this year, my grandmother got COVID for the first time. I came and stayed with her for three weeks. Kit joined me for a few days.” Hazel picks up another grape. Sliver by sliver, more pale green grape skin drifts onto the small white plate before her. “It was a strange thing for him to do. We’d already discussed a trial separation; my grandmother’s illness hastened its implementation, but not by that much. Yet after two weeks, Kit showed up. He said he didn’t want Nainai to think that anything was the matter—not yet.”
Her lips crook in an ironic smile.
“He left before I did. By the time I reached Singapore, he’d already departed on a trip to the UK. So our goodbye, when he left in an Uber for the airport from my grandmother’s house, was the last time I saw him. Recently, however, I was made aware of footage that showed him at the library, several days running.”
“Atourlibrary?” asks Sophie. Her hands have come up to her upper arms, her wrists crossed defensively over her rib cage.
Astrid looks down and sees that she herself is holding almost the exact same position. At this point, some details are new to her, but not the gist of the story. Yet the potency of the whole is amplified by the all too close wall behind her and the ever so slightly sinister light from the ceiling fixture above.
“At our library,” confirms Hazel. “This was before the surveillance cameras broke. On his last visit, Kit walked in with a box of books—and then walked out with what seemed to be the same box. And apparently he looked directly at the camera and did a chin lift, a sort ofI see you.”
She pops a grape she’s peeled into her mouth and chews meditatively. Astrid doesn’t understand how she can eat at a time like this—the woman must have an esophagus of steel. “Now that I think about it, he mentioned the library to me. He said he found it a good place to work. Had I paid more attention, I’d have found it odd: So much of his work involved talking toartists and clients; a coffee shop would have been a much better spot than a library.
“But at the time his remark barely registered. I was not happy that he arrived at my grandmother’s house without prior notice; I felt that his presence in fact made my grandmother more suspicious about the state of our marriage than she would have been otherwise.”
Sophie, at the head of the table, reaches out and squeezes Hazel’s hand. Astrid might have done the same if she didn’t feel so paralyzed—even if Hazel no longer loved her husband by the time he perished, she would still have been horrified by his fate, would still have agonized over the lack of closure on their relationship, especially since his criminal offenses came to light at the same time.
Hazel downs some of her club soda and looks up, as if hoping for strength from above.
Astrid’s heart pounds. She dares not follow the line of Hazel’s sight—there is no way she can make it appear natural.
Sophie, more hard-core than Astrid, does glance up, but only fleetingly. She finally takes a sip of her wine. “Are you sure that the cold storage for Kit’s Bitcoin is at the library?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know that it’s ever been there. And even if it was at one point, most likely it’s already been found. Possibly Perry found it—and was killed for his trouble.”
But if the cold storage—and the millions it holds—has been found, then why was there an intruder at Astrid’s place in the middle of the night?
“All the same, I’m going to mount a search,” declares Hazel softly.
She is as beautiful and resolute as Daenerys Targaryen, standing at the bow of her ship, sailing to Westeros—except the khaleesi should have stayed the fuck home!
Astrid sets her knuckles against her lips. Her teeth are chattering. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t think I have a choice. If it can be found, then the money should be used to pay back Perry’s family and everyone else Kit embezzled from or swindled.”
“What are you looking for, exactly?” asks Sophie, leaning forward, herhands on the edge of the table. “A piece of paper, a flash drive hidden in a book, or…”
“It could also be a book with an RFID tracker,” explains Hazel, “the kind that does not emit any signal until it’s been activated.”
Radio-frequency identification is hardly cutting-edge technology at this point—in fact, books in larger library systems often have RFID tags affixed as part of their processing. But the kind of tracker Hazel is talking about does not make its presence known until it is scanned with a particular frequency.
“Whatever it is, wouldn’t Perry and those others have already tried to find it?” asks Astrid.
