Pursued

by Tracy Wolff

  “You may not be under any obligation, Darlene, but you’re going to do it anyway. Because if you don’t, my attorneys will be filing for injunctions today against your paper, you and the reporter who wrote this drivel. And if you run this article as is, without getting to the truth of the matter, I will sue you. By the time we’re done, Bijoux will own the Los Angeles Times and all of your assets. Now, you have until eleven o’clock to provide me with a copy of that article. Or the Los Angeles civil court system will be hearing from us.”

  He hung up the phone without giving her the chance to say another word. He’d heard more than enough.

  For long seconds, Nic could do nothing but stand there, staring into space and imagining the worst-case scenario if this thing went to print. Bijoux would lose everything it had gained under Marc and Nic’s leadership. They’d be crucified in the press—and in the international human rights community. They’d be sued by God only knew how many consumer groups and diamond retailers. And they’d be investigated by numerous federal and international law agencies. Not to mention the fact that if any of that happened, it would break his brother’s heart.

  Which was why Nic was going to make sure that it didn’t. He and Marc had worked too hard to build up this company after they’d taken it over ten years before. They’d faced their father’s disapproval, their board’s disapproval. Hell, even the industry had frowned on Marc and Nic’s determination to use only responsibly sourced diamonds.

  In the interim years, the industry had grown much more supportive of what he and his brother were doing—largely because of the growing interest from human rights groups in places like Sierra Leone and Liberia. New laws had been passed making trading in conflict diamonds illegal, but just because it was illegal didn’t mean that less reputable companies didn’t still buy up conflict diamonds. It only meant they did it in secret instead of on the open market as they used to.

  He and Marc did not do that. They did not buy conflict diamonds. They didn’t work with anyone who dealt in conflict diamonds. And they sure as hell didn’t cover up their illegal activity by passing the diamonds off to consumers at a jacked-up price.

  The accusation was absurd, completely and totally ludicrous. But that didn’t matter. Once it was out there, once the general public got hold of it, Bijoux’s brand would be annihilated and everything he and Marc had worked so hard for would be destroyed right along with it.

  There was no way he would let that happen. Not to his brother, not to his employees and not to the family business he’d worked so many long, hard hours to develop. If the Los Angeles Times really wanted to pick a fight with him, then it’d better come at him with everything it had. Because he was about to make it his life’s mission to bring those bastards down.

  “We have a problem.”

  His brother looked up as Nic blew right past Marc’s assistant and entered his office with a slam of his door.

  “What’s going on?” Marc asked, looking faintly alarmed.

  Operating on instinct, and rage, Nic slammed his hand down on the desk hard enough to rattle everything resting on top of it—including Marc’s laptop and cup of coffee. Then watched as his brother grabbed the coffee and put it on the credenza behind him despite the obvious tension in the air. Such a Marc thing to do. Staying calm when Nic was still so furious he could barely think, let alone form coherent sentences.

  When he turned back to face Nic, Marc was completely composed, but he figured that wasn’t going to last long. His brother might be the cool one of the two of them, but he was even more ragingly protective of this business than Nic was. Once he heard what was going on, Marc would lose it as completely as Nic had.

  “Tell me.”

  “I just got off the phone with a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. She’s doing an exposé on Bijoux and wanted a comment before the article goes to print.”

  “An exposé? What the hell does she have to expose?” Marc stood up then and walked around the desk. “Between you and me, we’re in charge of every aspect of this company. Nothing happens here that we don’t know about, and we run a clean company.”

  “That’s exactly what I told her.” Nic shoved a hand through his hair as he tried to make sense of the situation for what felt like the millionth time. They were good to their employees, treated them well. Gave them raises twice a year, bonuses once a year. Hell, they’d built a state-of-the-art facility on the edge of the ocean, one that provided everything from free health care to free day care and three meals a day for their employees.

  He and Marc were invited to weddings, christenings, birthday parties…and they went, every time. Fostering a sense of community, of family, within the company was incredibly important to him—probably because he’d never had much of a family beyond his brother. The fact that someone would be so disgruntled, so angry, so vengeful, that the person would deliberately sabotage them like this…it made absolutely no sense.

  “And?” Marc ground out the words. “What’s she exposing?”

  God, Nic didn’t want to tell his brother this. Didn’t want to see how devastated he was going to be at the accusation. Not when Marc had poured his heart and soul into making Bijoux not only a success, but also a company with a heart and a social conscience.

  Still, it had to be done, and Nic might as well rip the bandage off as quickly, as cleanly as possible. “According to her, she’s exposing the fact that we’re pulling diamonds from conflict areas, certifying them as conflict-free and then passing them on to the consumer at the higher rate to maximize profits.”

  Marc’s mouth actually dropped open, and for long seconds he did nothing but stare at Nic. “That’s ridiculous,” he finally sputtered.

  “I know it’s ridiculous! I told her as much. She says she has an unimpeachable source who has given her credible evidence.”

  “Who’s the source?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me that.” Nic fought the urge to slam his hand into the wall as frustration welled up in him all over again.

  “Of course she wouldn’t tell you that, because the source is bullshit. The whole story is bullshit. I know where every single shipment of diamonds comes from. I personally inspect every mine on a regular basis. The certification numbers come straight to me, and only our in-house diamond experts—experts whom I have handpicked and trust implicitly—ever get near those numbers.”

  “I told her all of that. I invited her to come in and take a tour of our new facilities and see exactly how things work here at Bijoux.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said she had tried to come for a tour, but PR had put her off. It’s too late now. The story is slotted to run on Friday, and they really want a comment from us before it goes to print.”

  “Friday’s in three days.”

  “I’m aware of that. It’s why I’m here, freaking out.”

  “Screw that.” Marc picked up his phone and dialed an in-house number. They both waited impatiently for the line to be picked up.

  “Hollister Banks.” The voice of their lead counsel came through the speakerphone. He was obviously out of his earlier meeting—and just as obviously hadn’t yet gotten the urgent message Nic had left for him. He sounded far too cheerful.

  “Hollister. This is Marc. I need you in my office now.”

  “Be there in five.”

  His brother didn’t bother to say goodbye before hanging up and dialing another number. “Lisa Brown, how may I help you?”

  Nic listened as Marc told their top diamond inspector the same thing he’d just told Hollister.

  “But, Marc, I just got in a whole new shipment—”

  “So put it in the vault and then get up here.” The impatience in his voice must have gotten through to her, because Lisa didn’t argue again. She agreed before quietly hanging up the phone.

  It took Lisa and
Hollister only a couple of minutes to get to Marc’s office, and soon the four of them were gathered in the small sitting area to the left of his desk. No one said a word as Nic once again recounted his discussion with Darlene Bloomburg.

  He got angrier and angrier as he told the story. By the end, he was literally shaking with rage. This was more than just his company they were screwing. It was his life, his brother’s life, his employees’ lives. If Bijoux went down for this—and he’d been in marketing long enough to know that if this story ran, they would absolutely take major hits no matter how untrue the accusations were—it’d be more than just Marc’s and Nic’s asses on the line. His employees would be under investigation and, if the hits were bad enough, also out of jobs. All because some ignorant reporter with a chip on her shoulder couldn’t get her facts straight.

  As he tried to channel his rage, he promised himself that if this story ran he would make it his life’s mission to get that reporter fired. Hell, he’d get her fired even if it didn’t run. She should have known better than to make this kind of mistake.

  “Who’s the source?” Marc asked Lisa after she and Hollister had absorbed the story—and its implications.

  “Why are you asking me? I have no idea who would make up a false claim like this and feed it to the Times. I’m sure it’s none of our people.”

  “The reporter seemed pretty adamant that it was an insider. Someone who had the position and the access to prove what he or she is saying.” It was the third time Nic had said those words, and they still felt disgusting in his mouth.

  “But that’s impossible. Because what the person is saying isn’t true. The claims are preposterous,” Lisa asserted. “Marc and I are the first and last in the chain of command when it comes to accepting and certifying the conflict-free diamonds. There’s no way one of us would make a mistake like that—and we sure as hell wouldn’t lie about the gems being conflict-free to make extra money. So even if someone messed with the diamonds between when I see them and when Marc does, he would catch it.”

  “Not to mention the fact that there are cameras everywhere, manned twenty-four/seven by security guards who get paid very well to make sure no one tampers with our stones.” Everyone in the room knew that already, but Nic felt the need to add it anyway.

  “What this person is saying just isn’t possible,” Lisa continued. “That’s why Marc insists on being the last point of contact for the stones before we ship them out. He verifies the geology and the ID numbers associated with them.”

  “There is a way it would work,” Marc interrupted, his voice a little weaker than usual. “If I were involved in the duplicity, it would explain everything.”

  “But you’re not!” Nic said at the same time Lisa exclaimed, “That’s absurd!”

  Nic knew his brother almost as well as he knew himself, and if there was one thing he was certain of it was that Marc would never do anything to harm Bijoux. The two of them had worked too hard to get the company to where it was to let a little extra profit ruin everything. They already had more money than they could spend in three lifetimes. Why risk it all, especially in such a despicable way, for some extra cash?

  People died mining conflict diamonds. Children were exploited, beaten, starved, worked nearly to death. No amount of extra profit was worth propagating such blatant human rights violations. No amount of money was worth the stain dealing in conflict diamonds would leave on his soul.

  “Marc’s making sense. It’s what they’ll argue,” Hollister said, and though it was obvious by his tone that he disagreed, Nic could tell his ready agreement bothered Marc.

  Not that Nic blamed Hollister. This was more than a company to them, more than profits and bottom lines. More even than diamonds. Their great-grandfather had started Bijoux in the early twentieth century and it had been run by a Durand ever since.

  When Nic and Marc took it over, they’d had to act fast to repair the damage their father had done through years of neglect and disinterest. It wasn’t that he’d wanted to run the company into the ground, but he’d always been more interested in the adventures—and the women—the Durand money could buy rather than the day-to-day work of being CEO.

  Which was why Nic and his brother had worked so hard to rebuild things. For years, they’d put their lives into this company and in a decade had managed to take Bijoux from a floundering behemoth into the second-largest diamond distributor in the world. They’d brought it into the twenty-first century and had created a business model that would help those who couldn’t help themselves and that wouldn’t exploit those who needed protection most.

  “I don’t care what you have to do,” Marc told Hollister after a long pause. “I want that story stopped. We’ve worked too hard to build this company into what it is to have another setback—especially one like this. The jewel theft six years ago hurt our reputation and nearly bankrupted us. This will destroy everything Nic and I have been trying to do. You know as well as I do, even if we prove the accusations false in court, the stigma will still be attached. Even if we get the Los Angeles Times to print a retraction, it won’t matter. The damage will have already been done. I’m not having it. Not this time. Not about something like this.”

  His words echoed Nic’s thoughts from earlier, and the similarity was eerie enough to make the situation really sink in. From the moment he’d heard about the article, he’d been operating under the assumption that they would find a way to stop it. But what if they didn’t? What if it actually got printed? What if everything they’d worked so hard for actually went up in smoke?

  What would they do then?

  What would he do then?

  Marc must have been thinking along the same lines, because there was a renewed urgency in his voice when he told Hollister, “Call the editor. Tell him the story is blatant bullshit and if he runs it I will sue their asses and tie them up in court for years to come. By the time I’m done, they won’t have a computer to their name let alone a press to run the paper on.”

  “I’ll do my best, but—”

  “Do better than your best. Do whatever it takes to make it happen. If you have to, remind them that they can’t afford to go against Bijoux in today’s precarious print-media market. If they think they’re going to do billions of dollars of damage to this company with a blatantly false story based on a source they won’t reveal, and that I won’t retaliate, then they are bigger fools than I’m already giving them credit for. You can assure them that if they don’t provide me with definitive proof as to the truth of their claims, then I will make it my life’s work to destroy everyone and everything involved in this story. And when you tell them that, make sure they understand I don’t make idle threats.”

  “I’ll lay it out for them. But Marc,” Hollister cautioned, “if you’re wrong and you’ve antagonized the largest newspaper on the West Coast—”

  “I’m not wrong. We don’t deal in blood diamonds. We will never deal in blood diamonds, and anyone who says differently is a damn liar.”

  “I already made those threats to the managing editor,” Nic said after everyone absorbed Marc’s words. “And while I agree they’ll sound better coming from our lead counsel, we need to do more than threaten them. We need to prove to them that they’re wrong.”

  “And how exactly are we going to do that?” Lisa asked. “If we don’t know who they’re getting information from, or even what that information is, how can we contradict them?”

  “By hiring an expert in conflict diamonds.” Hollister had obviously gotten with the program. “By taking him up to Canada where we get our stock, letting him examine the mines we pull from. And then bringing him back here and giving him access to anything and everything he wants. We don’t have any secrets—at least not of the blood-diamond variety. So let’s prove that.”

  “Yes, but getting an expert of that caliber on board could take weeks,” Lisa protes
ted. “There are barely a dozen people in the world with the credentials to sign off unquestioningly on our diamonds. Even if we pay twice the going rate, there’s no guarantee that one of them will be available.”

  “But one is available.” Nic glanced at his brother when he said it, knowing very well that Marc would not appreciate his suggestion. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and he would do anything—anything—to stop this from happening. Including dig up his brother’s very painful past. “She lives right here in San Diego and teaches at GIA. She could totally do it.”

  Marc knew whom Nic was talking about, and he didn’t take the suggestion well. Big shock there. Nic waited for him to say something, but when Marc did nothing but stand there silently, Nic couldn’t help goading him. “Dude, you look like you swallowed a bug.”

  “I can’t call Isa, Nic. She’d laugh in my face. Or she’d deliberately sabotage us just to get back at me. There’s no way I can ask her to do this.”

  Nic rolled his eyes. “Weren’t you the one saying we can’t afford to screw around with this? Isa’s here, she has the experience, and if you pay her well and get a sub to carry her classes, she’s probably available. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

  “You should give her a call,” Hollister urged.

  “Yeah, absolutely,” agreed Lisa. “I’d forgotten about Isabella Moreno being here in San Diego. I’ve met her a few times and she’s really lovely—we should totally get her. I can try to talk to her, if you’d like.”

  “No,” Marc told Lisa harshly, after a few uncomfortable seconds passed. “I’ll take care of getting her on board.”

  He didn’t sound happy about it, but he looked resigned. And wary. Which was good enough for Nic. His brother was an arrogant bastard, but Bijoux meant everything to him. He’d get Isa on board, even if it meant he had to crawl to do it.