“Yeah, it’d just drip out endlessly into different budgets. Maybe some officials would fight over it. That’d probably cost a bunch in legal fees on top of everything else, which would subtract even more of the funds. The politicians would tug at both ends before any kind of resolution was arrived at. So the ten million would be more like three before they actually did anything with it.”

“And then it’s liable to disappear into some politician’s pet project.”

“That’s a likely outcome, yes. Or a compromise of three different projects. I could imagine a local or regional politician successfully claiming a portion of it.”

I said, “So there are no guarantees of justice.”

“No guarantees, nope.”

“But you could guarantee justice. I’d trust you.”

She shrugged. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. That’s a heavy responsibility.”

I said, “And if we delete that code on the screen, nobody gets it?”

She said, “Sounds crazy, but I think that’s the way it is, yes. It might actually cease to exist in any useable form.”

“But, with a Swiss bank account, the bank gets the money, until someone claims it.”

“But that’s not how crypto works. Here, there’s no bank. The money’s just up there on the internet, floating around.”

I said, “So that’s what money looks like in the future.”

She shrugged. “I guess we’re already in the future.”

“I still trust you, in the future.”

We looked at each other. I raised my eyebrows, she raised hers.

She took a pen and a notepad from the mayor’s desk. I read the string of numbers and letters off the screen, dictating as she wrote onto a piece of paper. We did that again just to be sure. Then, she ripped the page out of the notebook, and put it in her pants pocket. She nodded to me, and I pressed the delete key on Marbot’s computer keyboard.

The two lines of expensive gibberish disappeared and only a cursor was left blinking alone on the screen.

Chapter Sixty-Four

After that things got busy.

The affair blew up and became a scandal. A proper investigation was conducted, by serious professionals with bullet-proof resumes. Thousands of hours of testimony were taken, recorded, transcribed, printed, and bound into heavy volumes. For months, France woke up to over-excited reports. Some of them were official, others leaked from the investigation. At least a third of it was true.