They were turning on her. All of them.
She seized her phone and unlocked it, ignoring heading after heading of new message notifications.
John Rhames: Call now.
Fabian Romani: Have you read it? I’ve reached my limits, Heidi.
Frank Bolton: If any part of this is true we’re fucked.
Board member after board member.
And that was just the beginning. PR, legal, even chemistry and engineering and R&D. They’d soon fall apart. It’s a lot easier to dissent when everyone’s doing it. People were going to start quitting in droves. The downhill spiral had begun.
Didn’t matter anymore.
They couldn’t freeze her accounts. Not yet. That’d take lawsuits, or intervention from the board, but nothing’s immediate. For tonight, at least, she was safe. Despite their messages of concern, she still had Fabian and Frank wrapped around her finger, just like John had told her in her office. She had Hugo, too, and especially so, considering he hadn’t texted or called yet. There’s not much that an older man won’t do for a younger, beautiful woman if she’s played her cards right, embedded herself in his psyche. All those meetings four years ago had helped with that, meetings of a different kind. John had resisted her subtle advances in the beginning, which is why he had the wiggle room to protest and test her. The others would need some effort to break free from her spell, and that wouldn’t happen all at once.
So for a narrow window she had full control over nine figures of liquid cash, cash which angel investors had pumped into a company she knew full well had nothing close to a finished product.
It was the first time she’d ever admitted that to herself.
She couldn’t dwell on that, though, because someone came into the dining room.
She looked up, and her automatic mechanisms kicked in. She smiled widely and flushed colour into her cheeks, warmth into her eyes. ‘Hi, honey.’
Darren Waters was responsible for getting her the initial start in Silicon Valley. He was ten years her elder, a kind and respected surgeon, curly-haired and handsome with thick-rimmed glasses that framed a pleasant face. He’d somehow found that rare and elusive balance of being a socialite who was also polite. That was still the case, even though she no longer needed the high-powered connections to get her foot in the door, hadn’t for the last few years. But the optics were good, and the media wrote favourably of them, so she had yet to stop pretending she loved him, kept him around as her husband, like a show pony.
She thought, Why complicate things now?
Darren rounded the huge table, came to rest behind her with a hand on her shoulder. She wasn’t able to turn the tablet off in time, lost in other thoughts, but he said, ‘I already gave it a read.’
She forced her tear ducts to life, peered up at him with wet eyes.
He touched a pair of fingers to the underside of her chin. ‘We’ll get through this, baby. You’re the strongest woman I know.’
‘I love you.’
‘I can make some calls. See if anyone’s willing to spin a puff piece. I’m owed a few favours.’
She smiled. ‘It’ll be just fine. I need to make a couple calls of my own, though. As I’m sure you can imagine…’
He leant down and kissed her. ‘Of course.’
He took his cue and walked away, but before he left the dining room he looked over his shoulder, his voice softer now. ‘I know you. Know how gentle your soul is. But…why do you think they’re all saying…those things?’
She fixed him with her most manipulative stare. ‘I don’t know, baby. I’ll get to the bottom of it. I promise.’
He nodded, satisfied with her answer, and left.
Her face fell into a mask of nothingness, and she called Frankie Booth.
48
Game faces on.
Righteous indignation activated.
Anything else was surrender, and surrender was death.
Out the front of the warehouse gym, King and Slater parked the Peugeot hatchback they’d hot-wired and stolen. For obvious reasons they’d needed to abandon the van. They hadn’t had time to find a twenty-four hour car rental service, if those even existed, so they’d stolen a ride off the street. They planned to have it back by the morning.
King stormed inside, Slater not far behind. Together they slipped past the unmanned reception desks and hustled across the wrestling mats to where Frankie sat on a folding chair between two punching bags. The bags still swung gently on their chains. Frankie must’ve taken out some of his pent-up anger on the leather.
When he saw how fast they were moving toward him he leapt to his feet, twitchy. He started reaching for something concealed near his waist. ‘Both of you just relax.’
‘Yeah, Frankie,’ King barked. ‘Yeah, that makes sense. Telling us to relax. You know how close your boys were to just shooting us dead and dumping our bodies?’
‘They wouldn’t do that.’
By that point they were close enough to reach out and grab him, but they didn’t go that far. They pulled up short, mean-mugged Frankie from ten feet away. He hadn’t finished the reach for his waistband, hadn’t pulled out whatever was underneath. Which was good, because then they’d have to kill him before they knew if there were any others he’d recruited.
Slater raised his voice, too. ‘“They wouldn’t do that.”’ He scoffed. ‘Wouldn’t have been much more than what they already did. The meatheads were okay. They were sort of just following along. But that Carter guy…I mean, what the fuck, Frankie. Did you know he hates blacks?’
Frankie’s eyes were wild. ‘What? What are you on about?’
‘He spewed all sorts of shit at me when we were getting forced out of the van. Towards you, too. Called you a wop. Said all the blacks and all the Italians are the same. All shit-for-brains. Then they were gone.’
Frankie shook his head. ‘I’ll kill him for this.’
King said, ‘What’s Carter told you?’
‘Carter ain’t answering.’
King didn’t respond.
Neither did Slater.
Frankie ran both hands through his hair. ‘On the phone. Before. You said, “After the job…”’
King
