She was a basically honest woman, and was therefore surprised to discover the extent to which the devious could mislead those who did not suspect them. She’d earned Baldur’s trust early on; he’d researched her past and watched her performance at work and correctly concluded that she was industrious, reliable and not particularly ambitious. Exactly what he wanted in a personal assistant.
It was an artifact of Baldur’s vanity that it never occurred to him that someone like Hulda could change. He never imagined that she could learn to dislike him and what he believed so much that she would do things of which her own friends and family would swear she was not capable. She had learned, and it had become easier with time. Murna had coaxed her, lead her along, and finally pushed her over the edge into living a full-fledged lie at work by telling her that in truth Baldur used an evil bit of sorcery himself to gain an advantage over the unsuspecting.
At first Hulda had balked at this last idea. It was true that she loved her aura readings and her tarot cards, and she did have a fondness for crystals and astrology. It was all a bit of sparkly fun, and she hoped that there was a little truth buried in the entertainment. The idea of a bit of magic in this world appealed to Hulda, and, at the very least, it didn’t hurt a soul. It was a surprising leap from all that, however, to accepting that her boss had actual psychic powers and had trained himself to make money off of them in the stock market. There was nothing iffy about this claim. Real powers, real stock, real money.
Hulda didn’t know that much about investing, but she had a decent brain and figured she could learn anything if she had to. All one had to do was open a modest little account with most online firms in order to access the massive amount of free information that they offered. The more Hulda learned, the more she decided that Murna was right. Baldur used a form of sorcery, and he was getting rich beyond belief by doing so.
This knowledge had made Hulda more scared of Baldur, of course, but also had made her angrier at him. Once Murna convinced her that the man’s powers lie only in the next few seconds, Hulda became more likely to talk back to him, and to argue when he sent demeaning comments her way. She knew she shouldn’t, but she just couldn’t help herself.
Hulda knew that Murna had come to her in disguise, and she understood. She had not questioned that need, not until she had contacted Murna, her Irish girlfriend, with worry for a young woman working for Baldur in Ireland. The conversation made it apparent to Hulda that Murna knew the people in Dublin that Baldur worked with. How did she know them? That was when Hulda had become worried that she was the one who was being played, for reasons that she could not imagine.
Watch what you ask for, she cautioned herself. She had expected Murna to lie to her, or to ignore her, or at best to explain why Hulda was being tricked. Instead Murna had become Nell, and she had let Hulda see who she really was—an Irish woman playing a dangerous game. Nell’s goal wasn’t to bring Baldur down as much as it was to help friends of her own who saw a dire and distant future. Baldur was a means of funding their goals, and Baldur’s financial plans were a threat that had to be kept from getting out of control lest he destroy what they were trying to do.
So. Hulda had not been tricked, not really. She was just a more insignificant pawn than she had thought, in a much bigger game than she had realized. Nell, the real Murna, loved her and had trusted her with secrets no human should ever have to know. Nell needed Hulda to do more, to be there to play an important role, because the stakes were huge and as of last week Hulda knew it. Hulda needed to become bolder on behalf of Murna’s cause.
Unfortunately, Murna’s message of importance did not have the desired effect. Hulda was finally scared. Truly knees-feeling-like-water, could-hardly-make-her-muscles-work scared. It was probably why she got sloppy, why she hurried into Baldur’s trading room to hide the device that she always removed later, lest it be stumbled upon or, worse yet, scanned for and found. She didn’t want to get caught because she was afraid, and she was afraid because it all mattered so much more than she had ever guessed.
Baldur found it right away. Poorly hidden, it practically fell into his hand as he brushed against a shelf. The device recorded audio and video, and he studied it suspiciously before he yelled for Hulda.
“Who has been in this room?” he asked.
He still trusted her, blamed her only for being a poor gatekeeper because he couldn’t imagine her doing worse. Then he saw the fear on her face and he knew.
“What the hell is going on here? Are you spying on me? Why?” He was still struggling to get his arms around the very idea.
“No, it’s not like that,” she said, trying to force her brain to stop acting like it was drowning in molasses and to think of what it could be like. “I’ve been trying to learn something about investing. I didn’t think you’d want me in the room. And I wanted to watch you work.”
That was good. It flattered him. “See, the device doesn’t transmit anywhere.” It didn’t. When the timing permitted, she used simple cameras and recorders as a safeguard because they were harder to scan for and detect. Just record for now, and then go transmit from somewhere else. It was the advantage of having an insider who could come and go as she pleased.
He studied her face carefully, juggling what he wanted to believe with what he feared.
“Why didn’t you ask me questions about investing if you were so curious?” he inquired coldly.
“I didn’t want to bother you.” Then, in a quiet embarrassed tone, “I thought you’d laugh at me.”
He smiled, that bit of condescension back in his eyes, and Hulda knew that he was so firmly back on the ground that he liked that she had his trust now.
“Yes, yes I suppose I might have, just a little. So, the assistant wants to learn the master’s tricks, huh? Very well.” He threw the device on the ground and crunched it firmly under the heel of his Italian leather shoe. “You won’t be needing this again and I trust you’ll never bring in anything similar. You may sit and watch today, and occasionally point forward, with my permission, as long as you say nothing. Two of my colleagues will be arriving shortly, and we will be working with very short-term trading, directing the buying and selling of stocks within seconds or minutes.”
Something suddenly occurred to him. “Have you photographed us before without our permission?”
“Yes.” She had read once that including all the truth you could along with a lie helped. Her answer came out with conviction, but then she saw the anger grow in his face and thought it best to back off. “But the camera didn’t work. I guess I didn’t do it right. The instructions were confusing. That’s why I wanted to try again.”
He smiled at her ineptness. “Well, lucky for you there will be no need point forward for you to understand difficult mechanical devices. I’m not sure how much you’re going to learn by watching us, and you should know that we have skills you simply don’t, but you may watch and you may ask me a few question later after the others have left. Okay?”
“Thank you.” The relief in her voice could not have been more honest, and it served to satisfy Baldur that he had handled the crisis with all the magnanimity befitting a man soon to be as important as he would be.
******
Toby was always surprised when people were reasonable. One would think that would be the default, but in Toby’s experience too many others enjoyed the sheer power of being able to make somebody else’s life more difficult, for no better reason than just to prove that they could.
y1 had managed over the years to weed out a lot of those inclined to behave in this fashion, sending them on their way to make lives miserable elsewhere. Nonetheless, he was pleased that his group elected not to give him a rough time concerning his about-face on the speed required in bringing d4 to a stop.
“You don’t often come to the rest of us and say ‘Please trust me on this,’” one economics professor from an Ivy League school remarked. “In fact,” she added, “I don’t think that you’ve ever done so. I’m in
clined to believe that you must have a very good reason.”
Others echoed her sentiment, and so ways had been easily found to expand and revise the study so that results would now take months longer to compile. Toby had been prepared to share some details with a few of the most influential in y1 if he needed to, but he was relieved when that wasn’t required.
It left him the time to apply some of his own considerable understanding of the world’s wealth to helping the inexperienced computer geeks at Ullow, who were in well over their heads. Not that they weren’t all bright lads—they were. They all had the sufficient background to make money, given enough capital to start with and clear direction on how to invest it. However, every one of them lacked that subtle sense of how to best hide it. Yes, Toby was teaching them how to bend rules, how to steal bases, so to speak, how to go far into the grey areas of certain sets of regulations.
y1 was devoted to fairness when it came to money. The organization he ran had no problem with anyone honestly earning wealth through their own hard work, abilities and creativity. It did, however, have a huge problem with anyone who gained or grew their wealth by any means not fairly available to all. Toby believed in what he did with all of his heart, and he would never have dreamt of doing with his own money the things that he was now teaching Jake, Brendan, Ronan and Fergus to do.
What makes a man abandon his principles? Over the past few weeks Toby had learned one answer, and it was to find yourself on the side of a greater good. So easy to lie to yourself about things like a greater good, he thought. How many religious wars had gotten off on that foot? How many indigenous people had been conquered and subjugated? How many of those different in any way had been persecuted? Greater good was a dangerous concept, generally used to justify doing what a person would otherwise consider wrong.
Yet here he was, invoking it for no less of a cause than the continued existence of his own species. Actually, forget his species. Toby laughed at himself. He was doing this for all of the mammals. He thought back to his high school biology class. What kind of world would it be with just bugs, fish, birds, reptiles and lots and lots of different kinds of worms?
If Cillian’s worst-case visions came to pass, the whole class of mammals would be relegated to being one of evolution’s short-lived bad ideas, simply because one hoity-toity species had taken over the Earth and figured out ways to go zipping all over the globe spreading something deadly to every continent before it could kill itself off like nature intended.
Toby didn’t think that the dogs deserved that sort of fate. Neither did the wolves or the horses or the bears or the squirrels for that matter. That’s whom he was bending the rules for, he told himself. What kind of man would refuse to set up a few offshore bank accounts if that’s what was needed to assure the survival of bunny rabbits?
On impulse, he found an incredibly cute picture of a basket of kittens online and set it up as his wallpaper. It was good to remind himself of why he was doing this. Point forward, he was engaging in these shenanigans on behalf of the kittens. Who could argue with that?
******
Ever since his mother had died, Cillian looked in on his father at least once a day. He always tried to make eye contact, he said a few words to him, and made himself touch the old man’s thin, dry skin because he had read somewhere how important human touch was for everyone’s emotional health. The truth was that in years past his dad had never showed him even that much affection, and most of their conversations had consisted of the father telling the son how to behave. Cillian supposed that he felt love for the man anyway, but only in the sense that children instinctively love a parent that doesn’t harm them, and sometimes love a parent that does.
During most of Cillian’s daily visits, the dad failed to notice his son, but occasionally there was something in the eyes that spoke of recognition. Other times the man would mutter, or flinch at Cillian’s touch. On rare occasion he smiled when Cillian brushed his hand against his cheek. Cillian never quite knew what to expect.
Doyle oversaw the coming and going of the nursing staff and all things related to the elder Mr. McGrane’s care. There was always a nurse on duty, of course, and it was almost always a she. She could generally be found reading a book or watching television quietly while the old man dozed. The nurses seemed to come and go so fast that Cillian could never remember their names, but he would sometimes offer to sit with his dad a bit, just to give the woman a break.
He saw no reason to change his habits once he was informed that he was being officially ousted from the house. If it was the doing of the old man, and not of Doyle himself, then the frail shell sitting before him now knew nothing of what his more conscious self had decreed. Cillian reached out to touch the parchment skin of his father’s hand as Doyle came in the room, obviously annoyed to see him.
“What are you doing here?” Doyle asked.
“What I do every day,” Cillian answered in a soft voice.
“So I’ve heard. I don’t know why you bother. He has no idea that you are here or who you are and he wouldn’t like it if he did,” Doyle said.
“Yes, I can see that he doesn’t know me now. Hard to believe he becomes so lucid every once in a while that he can give you clear directions about what he wants.” Cillian had always tiptoed cautiously around this issue, seeing nothing to be gained from challenging Doyle’s claims to receiving ongoing instructions. Now, however, Cillian felt that he had nothing to lose.
“I do your father’s wishes,” Doyle said, with a quiet fierceness in his voice. “I’m far more the type of person he wanted for an heir than you ever were.”
“I agree completely,” Cillian said.
“You do?”
“Of course. Any fool could see that what you say is true. My father genuinely liked you before my mother died, and he never really liked me. In a reasonable world you would deserve to be treated as a son of sorts.”
“You think so?” Doyle was perplexed. “But you intend to fight me for your inheritance, anyway, don’t you? Of course you do. So let me remind you, that day out at the gazebo, I don’t know what was going on but I have some fairly disturbing video that I would have no trouble making widely distributed. Cillian McGrane, even more deviant than we thought. It would still grab a few headlines.”
Cillian actually laughed. “Doyle, you’ve got to get out more. First of all, my having sex with a man on video would hardly interest anyone, much less my merely hugging someone. Have you been on the internet lately? And do you have any idea how many athletes, newscasters, musicians, actors and otherwise generally famous people are openly gay now and really very few people care?”
“That’s not true in Ireland,” Doyle said stiffly.
“Plaster your damn pictures all over the Irish press if you want,” Cillian said. “I couldn’t care less. Not that it matters, but that man isn’t my lover. We were involved in a sort of, uh, I guess a healing ritual is what you could call it. Accuse me of a fondness for New Age wackiness if you want. That’s hardly newsworthy either. Doyle, you can’t hurt me. That’s a terribly liberating thought.”
“I can make you leave and take a good bit of your wealth,” Doyle said flatly.
“Yes, you can and probably will. However, I’ve received a fine salary of my own and an extremely generous living allowance over the years, not to mention free room and board. I suspect you were responsible, because you wanted me to have enough money that I lacked incentive to challenge you for the rest. You know what? It worked. But what you don’t know is that I’ve been tucking away more than you realized and investing it far more successfully than you expected and now there is easily as much in my name as there is in my dad’s. So please, take his share and have a nice life.”
“You are serious, aren’t you?” Doyle said.
“I am. It’s why my own father was never so fond of me. I do hope that you treat him well. Tell me, is he really this ill or do you just keep him heavily medicated?”
“I’m outraged
that you would suggest such a thing,” Doyle said.
“Does he ever really have those lucid moments we all hear about, or do you just make them up?”
“I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”
“That’s what I thought,” Cillian said. “There isn’t a nurse who has worked here long enough to successfully accuse you of lying about either issue. Speaking alone, that is. But in aggregate, if one assembled testimony from the dozens of women you have hired and then fired, they can make a pretty strong case.”
Doyle gave Cillian a sharp look.
“I was going to discuss this with you in a few days, but now seems as good a time as any. You should know that I did speak to my lawyers about fighting you for my dad’s money and this house, primarily because I was annoyed at the way you were trying to force me out. My lawyers persuaded me that because you have his power of attorney, I would lose the case. So what we decided to do instead, was the one remaining decent thing that I can do for my dad.”
“You want to help your dad?”
“I do. We were never close, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do right by him. So, you and I are going to draw up an agreement. I will agree to drop the very persuasive civil suit that I have put together that accuses you of fraud and negligence in my father’s care, and in exchange you will do the following three things.”
“What three things?” Doyle asked.
“You will place my father in a facility of my choosing where he will receive independent care that you will not oversee. I’ve chosen a place that is big on therapy, and eschews medication when possible. Perhaps there is some life left in him yet and he ought to get to live it. This will be paid for entirely out of the funds that you are keeping.”
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