Chapter Text
The dark descended on the Pied Piper offices, and the solitary man in the space huffed. Gilfoyle stood up from his chair and waved his arms, and the lights switched on again.
“Fuckin bullshit lights,” he muttered and sighed. He took a sip from his coffee, long cold, and stared impassively at his screen. It was almost three in the morning, and the work he had started covertly a little earlier in the day was about to reach its conclusion.
“Here goes nothing,” he muttered, and entered a command.
ARE YOU SURE? the program asked.
“You bet your ass,” Gilfoyle answered, dexterously hitting the Y key and the enter key in a fluid movement. Numbers and signs flashed across the screen in the terminal window and Gilfoyle watched the flurry of movement with a sense of awe. He allowed himself a little smirk.
Gilfoyle estimated it would take them several hours to figure out what had happened, and by that time, he would be gone. He stood up, looked around. He wasn’t a sentimental man. He didn’t want to take a moment. He didn’t want to reflect on the last five years of his life, or the chain of events that had led him to this moment. He would make a clean break and leave em guessing. No goodbyes.
“Shit,” he muttered, picked up his stuffed Baphomet toy, and dropped it in Dinesh’s chair before leaving the office.
* * *
Dinesh barged into Richard’s office with an unceremonious “hey”. Richard, engrossed in his work, jumped in his chair then looked up, annoyed.
“I really wish you’d, like, knock, or e-mail, or something.”
“Okay boss,” Dinesh said, pronouncing it to rhyme with “asshole”. “I’ll remember that next time boss. In the meantime, do you know where the fuck Gilfoyle is?”
Richard looked at the time. It was nearly two, which was late even by Gilfoyle’s standards. “No,” Richard sighed. “I guess he’ll show up when he feels like it. Why, is Bitcoin being volatile?” Richard was sure Gilfoyle had removed the Napalm Death notification now people had stopped complaining about it, but maybe he’d found some other annying fucking noise to make this time on earth closer to hell.
“Bitcoin is always volatile,” Dinesh said. “right now, I’m more worried about PiperCoin.”
“What?”
“Check the account.” Dinesh strode back behind Richard’s desk and watched over his shoulder as he opened the program.
“Huh,” Richard said. “that’s… weird.“ He clicked around, looking at the account history. "So Gilfoyle moved all the deposits into a cold wallet?”
“Looks like it.”
“Ummmm. Where is the wallet located? God, not on a fucking laptop?”
“Don’t know.”
Dinesh noticed Richard’s neck started budding visibly with sweat, staining his checkered button down shirt.
“Could uhh could this just be like a security… or a test… like uhh you have clearance, can’t you…?”
“Whatever he did, I’m locked out. Why he did it, I have no idea. However, I’m not the systems architect or ICO expert. I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for Gilfoyle moving 37 million dollars worth of PiperCoin to an unknown location without telling the CEO about it and then missing work.”
“Have uh have uhhh uh uh have you uh”
Richard’s stuttering triggered memories of the modem dial up noise for Dinesh. He closed his eyes and shuddered.
“Yes I’ve called. I’ve also texted, hit him up on facebook and instagram, and tried facetiming him. I did briefly consider opening a mastodon account so I could send him a ‘toot’ but…” Dinesh paused for dramatic effect. “even I have limits.”
Richard audibly, echoingly, gulped.
“Are you going to be sick?” Dinesh asked. Richard looked up with large pale eyes, nodded slowly, and sank under his desk to throw up in his bin.
*
Jared was worried. It was midnight and almost everyone were still at work, fuelled by the vegetarian pizza he had thought to order and depleting the Red Bull supply. Richard looked manic, and hadn’t, as far as Jared knew, had anything at all to eat. As the technicalities of what had happened rather escaped Jared he had volunteered to go look for Gilfoyle, so he had gone to the address registered in the personell files (which Gilfoyle had made classified but had had to concede that Richard would have access to), then went to the hacker house, and was about to go to Gilfoyle’s favourite hangouts when he realised he didn’t really know any of them. He called Tara, who didn’t know where he was but promised to message him if she heard anything. Then he tried calling the number on the website of the SF chapter of the Satanic Temple, and spoke to a very friendly sounding man called Mark who also promised to keep an eye out and invited Jared along to their next mass. So there wasn’t much to it except to return to the office. He’d already sent Holden home (really, when was the boy not just in the way? Hiring him had really been a mistake) so he figured he wasn’t overstepping his boundaries by making Richard a sandwich. He glanced over at Richard, typing furiously in his office. He looked green and pale and not in the mood for a more adventurous sandwich, so he rustled up a comforting PBJ and gently knocked at his door, plate in hand.
Richard looked up, nodded when he saw Jared.
“Any news Captain?”
“Don’t. Uh. I’m. Uh. No. Nothing. Fuck.”
“I made you a sandwich.”
“Thanks. I’m not hungry.”
“Please, Richard,” Jared said. “you’ll be of no use to anybody if you starve yourself into exhaustion. What if you faint again?”
Richard looked up with terror in his eyes, apparently considering the threat of the possibility. He nodded and accepted the plate, started eating without enthusiasm. “Good. Thanks.”
“Richard. Do you think, maybe, we should call the police?”
Richard took a long, shuddering breath. “Oh, God. Oh, fuck. Do you know what will happen if we call the cops?”
“Well, hopefully they will help us locate Gilfoyle?”
“Listen, Jared,” Richard said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “he transferred 37 million dollars worth of people’s investments and savings into a cold wallet we don’t know where the fuck is and we don’t have the password to. It looks like he fucking stole that money. And it’s not… hedge fund or investor money, this is real money that matters to people. This? The company? Will be a crime scene. And he’s not here. I am. You know who the people who own that money will come collecting to?”
Richard started sweating. Jared fought down the urge to mop his brow with a tissue, folded his hands tightly. Not for the first time, he wished he could take Richard’s pain, endure it for him. But he was working on that in therapy. The codependency, the romantic fantasies. He was Richard’s COO, not Richard’s boyfriend. There was a time he’d hoped that maybe something might happen between them, but that had long passed. He needed to be helpful to the company, that was what he was here for.
“We could file a missing persons report.”
“Ha,” Richard said. “he’s a 38 year old single satanist Canadian. The cops won’t start a manhunt unless they have a reason. They probably won’t even bother putting his photo up on their Twitter account and write ‘anybody seen this asshole around?’.”
“Well,” Jared said, reasonably. “if - and this is a big IF - he’s on the run, the longer we wait the more of a headstart he’ll have.”
Richard stared at Jared. “I know that. I fucking know. I just, I just…”
Priyanka knocked and entered Richard’s office. “Richard, can you come take a look at this?”
Richard smiled, face lighting up with hope, shot Jared a see?-look and scrambled up from his desk. He and Jared walked out into the main office space, where the engineers were huddled around Lauren and her monitor. The monitor showed a loop of a fat guy at a hot dog eating contest, cramming them down, while a robotic voice said a sentence over and over in gibberish.
“What? What the fuck is this?”
“I thought I’d managed to trace back everything he did and reverse it, then this happened,” Lauren said.
“What, uh, what, uh, what–”
“It’s Urdu,” Dinesh said, tersely. “it just goes, ‘eat my dick, motherfuckers’.”
There was a long pause, the silence only studded with the looping Urdu profanities.
“Jared,” Richard finally said in a small voice. “can you please contact the authorities?”