“You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean Viktor has done some questionable shit, but this?” Rohan subconsciously tightening his grip around the page, “There’s no way it sticks.”
“Clearly you haven’t been keeping up with the news. Did you see the date? There won’t be a trial, Viktor killed himself last week.”
Rohan couldn’t believe it. Since he had begun work on his book he had shut out almost everyone from his past, but how could he not have known one of his friends had ended up in jail? Worse yet, gone on to kill himself.
All he could manage to get out of his throat was, “Why?”
“His legal costs were mounting and he started to run out of money. We told him he could get a job making a quarter mill a year coding anywhere he wanted, but he said he’d rather die than work for someone else again. I guess he meant it,” Gavin said drily.
Rohan gathered himself before continuing, “But that still doesn’t explain why you’re here. Why didn’t you reach out earlier? Now there’s nothing we can do.”
“What would you have done if I had called you three months ago? We hadn’t heard from you in over a year. Not like we expected you to leave your book tour to help with the case. Which, nicely done by the way, your mid-tour departure probably brought the book some welcome publicity.”
Cheeks tinged red with embarrassment and more than slightly confused, Rohan continued, “So what the fuck are you doing here then, Gavin?”
“The reason Viktor downloaded all those articles, wasn’t to dump them on P2P networks or whatever garbage they were claiming. He was doing a study to determine whether conclusions published in the academic journals had been affected by the source of funding.”
“What’s there to study? It’s obvious they are.”
“But he was getting very vocal about it, and it was garnering some attention in the press. Viktor was a big deal in certain circles, remember. He had evidence that Monsanto was influencing GMO research, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline apparently were doing the same with vaccines. Shit like that.”
Rohan released a puff of smoke, “So they put an end to it… Well, at least that part makes sense. But what are you planning to do about it? We’ve come a long way from our days of fighting the good fight. I think I left my cape and visor back in the states.”
“It’s nice that you’ve still got your sense of humor, but we need you for your connections and your capital Rohan, not your wit.”
The familiar words made Rohan smile and he began to sense a potential purpose, recalling the discomfort he had felt just before his book reading. His time in Colombia had been fruitful, the bar had given him a project and he relished the laid-back siesta culture. But a project was not a mission, and this had the smell of something entirely different. As soon as he saw Gavin’s devious smile, he knew this was bigger than he imagined.
“Viktor wanted to bring about positive change in the human condition, and he was very careful about the means. It had to be a net positive, with the least amount of harm done to any innocents. Nothing we do can bring him back, but we can continue his legacy. And we can do it, with a little more… shall we say, panache. This organization will be in his honor, but it won’t be fettered by his caution. We’ll work with a little more reckless abandon.”
“And what exactly do you plan to do?”
“Well, for starters, we could take down a couple banks.”