She couldn’t say no to him.
The car, not a limo but a sedan with tinted windows to attract less attention, took them directly from Sydney Airport to IBH Ivory. Tess looked curiously out at the city, lively in the comfortably warm spring day, high-rise buildings shining in the early afternoon sun. Ian couldn’t stop watching her, thinking about all the places he wanted to take her to when this was over.
They drove through the city until they reached streets lined with commercial buildings alongside hotels, tall buildings among lower, older ones—Tess thought she saw a harbor in the distance, to her left, but she wasn’t sure—and whether it was disorientation, finding herself halfway across the world, or the sheer size of the impressive city, she couldn’t get a clear grasp of where she was.
When the car finally slowed down, it was near a wide, two-story building. Unlike those around it, which boasted shops and restaurants on their pavement levels, this one was somber, its facade purely practical. The only entrances to the reddish-brown brick building were a door and a truck-size entrance from the main street, the latter of which their car now drove through.
Ivory, an environmental protection company, was one of several such companies set up in a number of regions around the world by IBH World Synergy to understand their environmental needs and find solutions that could help create a sustainable existence, and through which it could provide resources for areas hit by natural disasters. As such, Ivory was different from the corporate heart of Ian Blackwell Holdings in a number of aspects. One of them was that it was separately audited, along with the rest of IBH World Synergy’s subsidiaries, later in the year.
But not only that. All of Ian Blackwell Holdings’ subsidiaries were connected to a central system that allowed their resources and specific sector-relevant and region-relevant performance parameters to be monitored by the international company’s Blackwell Tower headquarters, to ensure its efficiency and long-term stability. All but IBH World Synergy and its subsidiaries, which had their own independent monitoring system. Eight months earlier, the two systems were linked by a virtual connection that was still in the pilot program phase. And that pilot program began where the company that created the connection was, Australia. Hence, IBH Ivory.
Which explained why Brett had chosen it. Working from inside Ivory gave him a layer of separation between him and Ian Blackwell Holdings’ corporate heart, reducing the chances of anyone who might notice what was happening tracing it to him while still affording him the access he needed.
As such, it was perfect for his point of origin.
It was also his weakness. He must have been certain what he was doing would in fact be invisible to external scrutiny, other than perhaps for someone who knew what to look for. Someone like Tess, whom he had recognized as a threat, but was now convinced was no longer around. And he must have thought he would know if anyone tried to go after him by entering Ivory remotely through the new virtual connection, which he had made his gateway between Ivory and the rest of Ian Blackwell Holdings, and that he was monitoring.
But Tess was still there, still after him. And she wasn’t planning to get into Ivory remotely. She was right there, in its building. This was her turn. IBH Ivory was a remote corner Brett used thinking he was hidden in it, and she was about to break into it without him ever knowing she was there. She was about to go directly to his point of origin, and to the algorithm he had prepared that was designed to trigger the domino effect that would destroy Ian Blackwell Holdings in a way that would point the finger to the man she loved as the culprit. But she was no longer going to simply unravel Brett Sevele’s work.
She had a different idea in mind.
Ivory was dormant, some of its dedicated staff in the field, poised to help in the dry weather that was threatening wildfires, and most of the others off for the weekend. Ian didn’t have an office there, and the CEO readily offered them his. They declined. Tess asked to see the company’s computer room, under the pretext of curiosity about the new system being tried there, and since the person monitoring it wasn’t there, she suggested she would gladly do so by herself, she did after all have the necessary background. Ian, in the meantime, chatted with the CEO, suggesting he wanted to see some more of Ivory’s work while he was there, thus making sure everyone present would focus on him, not his wife.
But the pretense wasn’t necessary. The CEO was ecstatic that Ian was there. It had been a long time since Ian Blackwell himself had visited the company, and he was not one to miss such a rare opportunity. And so Ian found himself being given the tour by Ivory’s eager employees, while in the cool computer room Tess connected her laptop to the mainframe and went to work.
By the time Tess began to feel the jet lag, she already had her own system connected to Ivory’s in a way that would not raise any suspicions. The way it looked, Brett had indeed never considered the possibility of anyone actually connecting to Ivory directly. By his own admission, he himself had only done so remotely, through whatever system he had set up in his home, fully trusting his cunning and expertise. Hubris, she thought, was never a good thing.
“Where are we staying?” She stifled a yawn. They were sitting in the back of the car, which picked them up from Ivory and was now driving among modern skyscrapers through the bustling streets of the city’s central business district.
Ian glanced at her. She’d been through too much and had been pushing herself too hard. As resilient as she was, it worried him. “We have an apartment here in Sydney,” he said. “Graham is already there.” Ivory was not his only company in Australia or in the region and having the privacy of his own apartment was valuable to him.
She settled back and closed her eyes.
“We’re here,” Ian said just moments later, and Tess opened her eyes as the car entered the private car park of a skyscraper, not really taking note of her surroundings as they walked into a private elevator up to the penthouse.
“Mrs. Blackwell, Mr. Blackwell,” Graham greeted them enthusiastically when the elevator door opened again. Tess was glad it was him there, and not someone she didn’t know.
“Would you like anything to eat?” he asked. “I can make anything you want, we’re pretty much set for a siege here.”
“I just want to sleep,” Tess said, stifling another yawn.
“I concur,” Ian said and guided her inside. She looked around her in astonishment. The place was huge, spanning the entire top floor of the skyscraper, and certainly not like any apartment she’d ever seen.
“You’ll stay in the master bedroom,” Ian said. “I’ll sleep in one of the other bedrooms.”
“No.” She turned to him. “You stay in your bedroom, and I’ll take one of the other rooms.”
“But . . .”
“It makes the most sense, Ian. You should sleep in the bedroom you’re used to. And we’re just staying here temporarily, it doesn’t matter.” She yawned again.
Ian let it go, more than anything wanting her to get some rest. He motioned to Graham and led him to the bedroom closest to his, going inside with him to make sure it would be made comfortable for his wife.
Chapter Twenty-One
She came out the next morning to find Ian Blackwell himself in the kitchen, making breakfast. “Aren’t you jet-lagged?” she asked him, coming to sit on the other side of the kitchen counter.
“You get used to it after a while.” He handed her coffee, hot and strong with half a teaspoon of sugar, the way she liked it.
“And you’re making breakfast.” Scrambled eggs were sizzling in a pan, and the juicer in the corner was making fresh orange juice.
“I didn’t always have people to do things for me, you know,” he said, placing before her a plate with an assortment of heated rolls.
“I didn’t think about that.” She sipped the coffee. It was good. “Where’s Graham?”
“Having some jet lag issues. I thought I’d let him sleep in.”
“You don’t usually take him with you, do you?”
He shook his head. “Rarely when I travel on business, unless it’s for a duration. I do take him, and sometimes Lina, too, when I spend time in some of my other properties. But this apartment is normally maintained by someone arranged for by Ira.”
“You brought him because I’m here.”
“You’re used to him taking care of us at home, I thought this will make traveling easier. Especially since this is your first time.”
“That’s thoughtful of you.”
Her smile made his heart accelerate, trip, then try in vain to gain its footing again. He had to put some effort into focusing again. “You sure you don’t need to go back to Ivory?” he asked her.
“Not for now, no. Maybe not at all. I used the direct connection to create a link I can use to work remotely without going through the virtual connection and without him knowing I’m there.” Her brow furrowed in concentration. “I want to map exactly where and how he’s working inside Ivory, and then comes the tricky part. Backtracking through the virtual connection into Ian Blackwell Holdings’ corporate monitoring system and through it to all the subsidiaries he’s touched, and mirroring what he’d done up to a point I can let my own ghost-web form against his. Same as his web but with the opposite effect. And, of course, I need to get to his points of origin, his real one and the one he’s set up to implicate you, and then I need to disable them so that they won’t crash your company.”
“Both origins?”
“Yes, just in case he has a way to work with only one of them if the other one doesn’t work.”
“What’s first?”
“All at the same time, intertwining in each other’s dead intervals, that is when each task is doing something it doesn’t need me for.”
He nodded. That didn’t sound simple, but she didn’t seem at all worried.
“Robert says Brett doesn’t suspect anything,” he said, coming into the living room, his phone in his hand. “He came to look for me at the office, and Becca referred him to Robert, who told him I didn’t want to involve anyone in this delicate situation so I left to make the necessary arrangements myself.”
“To dump me.” She was sitting on a sofa with her laptop. Relaxed. With every day that passed the bruises were increasingly no more than a background reminder of what had happened to her, no longer needing numbing.
“Pretty much, yes.” He contemplated her. “Are you comfortable here?”
“I miss the library.” She looked at him. “And my soft, comfy reading chair. And the fireplace.” Which he’d started having on in those autumn evenings that were already cool.
“That last one at least I can do something about,” he said. He went to the closest console and turned on the air conditioner, then came over to the fireplace and started a fire.
She followed what he was doing with a wide smile. “I’m speechless.”
“It’s the little things, you know,” he reflected with a grin of his own and returned to sit on the sofa nearest hers, and to his own laptop. He’d spent the day working with his East Asia audit teams through his Tokyo-based assistant, continuing what he’d left in the middle of.
They worked quietly, comfortable together. As the sun set, painting the sky outside in brilliant colors, Ian finally emailed his comments to items he wanted included in some of the audits to his assistant, with notes to Becca in San Francisco, and then sat watching the remarkable woman who was intent on saving his company and him. Her strength amazed him. To have gone through what she had and still become the woman she was. He wondered what she had been like as a child. Naive, that’s what she had said. Protected, as any child should be.
Suddenly something occurred to him. “Tess, do you have anything left of your parents? Anything of what you had when they died?”
She raised her eyes to him, surprised. After some time, she shook her head.
“What happened to it all?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea. All I know is that my parents were buried in Montaville, I checked the records later.”
“What were they like?” he asked, his voice soft. He wanted to know, but he didn’t want to hurt her.
She clearly hadn’t expected the question. It took her a bit of time to answer him. “They were nice. Just my mom and dad.” Her gaze was quiet. “They were very protective. They . . . loved me.” She shifted restlessly, pained, and he regretted asking.
“What were your parents like?” She needed to deflect the next question that might come, push away the memory of the family she used to have.
He saw it. But he would have answered her anyway. “My parents still live in the same town I grew up in, in California. They’re schoolteachers.”
“Are?” She was surprised. “There's no mention of your parents anywhere.”
“Unfortunately, this day and age their life and mine need to be kept apart in order to protect them. Robert and Muriel know them, and Graham has met them, and that’s it. My parents like their life, and I don’t want it disturbed.”
He saw the questions in her eyes. She cared. And he wanted to share this with her, what he had never shared with any other woman. “I was a small-town kid, probably would have been something like that myself, a teacher or something. I was even all ready to start college with that in mind. But when I was eighteen the community bank my parents were in changed its policy, because of a new manager who wasn’t happy with the bank’s profitability. Their mortgage was called in without warning, as were those of other families in town, good, hardworking people. My parents tried to fight back, but they didn't have the power to go against a bank, and no one gave a damn enough to even listen to them. And these were people with jobs, with two modest but certainly stable salaries.”
She saw the anger, the pain in his memories, and wanted to be there with him, to sit beside him. To touch him, she realized with shock.
“The house I grew up in was foreclosed on. Too many other houses were also already empty, so it couldn’t even be sold. It just stood there. My parents tried to convince the bank to let them stay, continue paying the mortgage. After all, it would benefit the bank, and it was better than letting the house run down. But they were refused. The head of the local branch, a guy sent from Los Angeles, and bitter for it, made things worse.” His eyes were on the fireplace, but it wasn’t just a reflection of the fire burning in it that she saw in them. “With all the stress, my father got a heart attack and couldn't work for a while, although the school was kind about it, the only kindness my parents saw back then. Instead of starting college, I ended up getting a job outside town, and I swore I’d get them the house back. But even after my father had gone back to teaching, and with the additional money I earned, the bank didn’t budge, and I became angry. For the first time in my life I understood the reality of this world.”
He raised his eyes to hers, pure force in them. “I did everything I could to earn as much as I could, and two and a half years later I bought the house back and moved my parents back in. But I never returned to that town, to the life my parents wanted for me. I pushed on. Three years later I took over the bank, got the town back on its feet. Then I tore the bank apart, sold it in pieces, made sure those I wanted gone would never work again. Including that branch manager. That’s the only company I ever completely destroyed.”
“And that’s how you became Ian Blackwell.”
“Yes. And, by the way, my parents aren’t called Blackwell. Once I decided not to go back to my old life, I changed my last name to that of an ancestor of my mother’s. A name that died off somewhere along the line, a man who did exactly what I did but in different times, and in less . . . lawful ways.”
She considered what he’d told her, and he saw the realization down on her. “Us. This marriage. Your parents know.”
“My parents have been happily married for more than thirty-eight years. Nothing of what I did with my own marriage suits them. But they know my life, and they accept my reasons for doing what I did, even though it saddens them. They wanted me to
have what they do.”
Contemplating this, she tucked her feet under her and curled up comfortably on the sofa, her soft hair spread on its back, the fire a flickering gold in her eyes. She looked, he thought, so very alluring.
And no longer quite so forbidden to his touch.
He pushed the thought away. This wasn't the time. Not until she was ready for it to be. “I will arrange for you to meet them when this is over,” he said. “They will be happy to finally meet you.”
She shook her head. “How can they be? I'm not what they wanted for you.”
She was everything they wanted for him. She was everything he wanted for himself. Her eyes were on his, her gaze sending emotion throughout him. She would be his, he knew there was no other way for him. He would do whatever it took to have her, no matter how long it took.
“They will love you,” he said softly.
She only spoke again after her heart settled a bit. “How do you meet them?” she asked.
“They spend all their vacations in my properties worldwide, anywhere they choose but the house you and I live in.”
“Not where you are watched most.”
He nodded. “Imagine what would happen if it became known they are Ian Blackwell's parents.”
Her brow furrowed as she considered this, him. “You’re trusting me.”
“You are trusting me,” he answered.
The furrow deepened. “Why did you do this, enter into this contract? I mean, really. Why?” It was her turn to ask.
He was glad she did this, ask him personal questions about himself. It meant, he hoped, that she was finally allowing the distance between them to close. “My parents have been married for so many years,” he said, “and they are still so very much in love with each other. They can't really do without each other. I ended up comparing every relationship to what they have.”
“Was there no one?” It wasn’t like he’d had the life she had.
He shook his head. “Once I began building myself, that was my focus, not a relationship. I was driven by anger, a sense of injustice, the knowledge that I need to be able to protect my parents and myself. And once I became, well, Ian Blackwell, that's what the women I met all saw. I imagine if someone would have caught my attention earlier I might have given it the time, made the effort, but no one had.”
A Tangled Web Page 24