I cleared the browser cache and search history on the computer and decided that it was time to head home. Glancing at my watch, I saw that I still had thirty minutes to reach home, which meant that my timetable was tight but doable. On the way out of the library, I grabbed my phone, plugged in my headset, and turned on the latest Laura Marling album. It was nice to do some easy listening; the pain pills that I’d popped this morning had worn off hours ago, and my face, side, and neck were throbbing. Maybe I’d overdone it a bit today.
“Shit.” Hurrying to the bus stop, I cursed in annoyance to see that I’d once again missed public transport as the E1 pulled out of Ealing Broadway. I thought momentarily about trying to outrun the bus to the next stop while it waited at a light, but realized that I would look like an idiot, with shorts and a laptop bag. Dana would say that looking like an idiot was nothing new for me, but I would have replied that I had a reputation to uphold. As someone who doesn’t look like an idiot.
By the time the bus pulled into my stop by the site of the former Red Lion pub, I knew that I was going to be late. I might only be fifteen minutes late, but I knew that for Dana it would be the principle—that I hadn’t kept my word—that would matter. Beyond that, she had been taking care of Olivia all day, and I was sure that she’d want a rest. I was happy to hear that there weren’t any arguments spilling out of windows as I passed the rows of buildings leading to my flat. Girding myself for Dana’s inevitable tongue-lashing, I paused at the door and glanced at Greenford Park Cemetery in the distance. At least that was one set of neighbors who wouldn’t be creating any disturbances.
When I walked through the door, I could smell the enticing aroma of some kind of bread in the oven, and my stomach sank. Dana had always been a great cook, but she reserved bread baking as a relaxation technique. Unfortunately, over the past couple of years, she’d become an even better baker than she was a cook.
“You’re late,” Dana said in a flat voice from the kitchen as I heard Olivia crying from somewhere in the living room.
“I think that I’ve nailed the Swedish procurement, if I can just sort out one or two tiny discrepancies with this conference center…” I trailed off as Dana gave me a “don’t change the subject look.” I regrouped and continued, “I’m sorry, Dana. I had to stop by the library…and I bought this for Olivia.” I held up the bear and put on my best adorable grin.
“Ahh…so you didn’t just break your promise to get home, but you also lied to me about what you were doing as well. Did you at least pick up a book for Olivia when you were at the library?” Dana’s voice was cold. “I spent the last three days at home taking care of Olivia and worrying while you were in the hospital, and the first thing that you do is hare off for an entire day.” I could tell that she was angry from the slight southern twang that crept into her voice. She’d lost most of it during university, but when she got upset, it tended to come back, even ten years after she’d last lived in Florida.
“Dana, you’re right,” I said, deciding that the only way to live through this was to metaphorically fall on my sword (and hope that a real one didn’t appear this time). I wasn’t happy about it, though, seething internally about her admonishment. It was as if she was conveniently forgetting that the reason that I was so focused on finishing up at work was so we could go on the vacation that she had insisted on, and she might take into account that I had a legal threat hanging over my head. “I should have been up front about what I was doing, and I should have cut out the extra activities so I could get home to be with you and Olivia as soon as possible. Let’s go to church tomorrow. I’ll go to confession before Mass to deal with the lie, and then we can go grab some brunch afterward.”
Dana closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. I saw her inhalation catch and felt guilty as I realized that she had been on the verge of crying. When she opened up her eyes, she had composed herself, and she replied, “Julian, you shouldn’t be going to church just to get out of my bad books…but I’ll take what I can get, and any trip to confession is good for you.” She paused for a moment. “I see how much you worry about everything, and I think that if you spoke to Father O’Hanrahan more often, it would do you good.”
Then we were both distracted by a squeal of joy as Olivia came tearing around the corner as fast as her chubby legs could carry her, golden hair streaming in the air.
“Bread! Bread! Bread!” she squealed excitedly, pointing at the oven. The girl loved bread, so at least there was one person in the house benefiting from the lack of domestic tranquility. Olivia paused for a second with a puzzled look on her face and then, finally noticing me, yelled, “Daddy!” Scooping my daughter up into my arms, I felt knots in my shoulders that I hadn’t even realized I had unclench, and I laughed, silently asking myself if I really had my priorities straight.
CHAPTER 14 1800–2200, Saturday, August 1, 2015
***Kelly***
Kelly was in a good mood as she popped into the office early on Saturday evening. She had really enjoyed going out with the girls last night, and they had ended up having a few glasses of wine and bouncing from one trendy night spot to another along Old Street. They might be pushing thirty, but Kelly thought to herself that the trio had garnered more than their fair share of envious glances from the other girls and hungry looks from the guys. Moreover, the hot guy (Brad?) that she’d woken up next to this morning was all the proof she really needed that she still had it, and she’d spent the rest of the day with an extra skip in her step.
It hadn’t been just a good time last night; the girls had come up with a plan, and it was nice to see that they still could work well as a team. As part of setting that plan in motion, Kelly had volunteered to come into the office tonight to get started on some electronic digging. First, she intended to round up pictures and details of each one of the project team members; that way, they could be sure to target the right people at the meeting. Second, if they weren’t able to mark everyone at the meeting, then as a backup plan, she was going to send the details to Ena so that the other woman could arrange for private detectives to keep an eye on the bid team. Finally, if the detectives found any dirt on the bidders, then Tara was going to do everything in her power to manipulate the legal system to get their bid approved one way or another.
Kelly booted up her laptop and went to the kitchen to grab a diet soda but ended up needing to grab a full-calorie cola as she recalled that it was the only thing Ena had ordered last time the partners’ office had run dry. She frowned, considering for a moment how much Ena had eaten the night before. The young woman that she’d met at uni had been horrified at the idea of putting on any weight and had spent hours a week at the gym when she should have been in bed sleeping. However, lately she had started to pack on the pounds, and while she wasn’t fat, she certainly wasn’t the toned athlete that she had been. Kelly wondered if there was some other problem that Ena might want to talk about.
Filing away that thought for later, she arrived back at her desk to see that her system had fully booted up, and a wave of her hand triggered the biometric facial recognition on the high-end desktop that she’d personally built a few weeks before. However, before she could even launch a web browser to start her dirt digging, she was surprised by a number of alerts popping up on her screen. Someone had triggered one of her custom-developed search probes.
She’d been worried that someone might get suspicious of the unrelenting success that the firm was experiencing and go poking too far into the company’s business. To head that concern off, she’d written a program that included a database of information about OMG, its previous clients, and key data about the client partners. She’d then written a script that checked regularly for any increase in the search ranks of those entries that were triggered within a short period and from the same geographic region according to IP address information. She’d had a few hits over the past couple of years, but they’d all turned out, after just a bit of cursory investigation, to be obvious false alarms or harmle
ss reporters. Kelly had a bad feeling that this was not going to be another false alarm.
She looked at the data. It indicated multiple hits from the same IP address in Ealing, pinging off of the firm and three of its past clients. Kelly knew that it wasn’t simply a coincidence, and her stomach sank. She spent a couple of minutes putting together a database query and hit enter. A second later, the result came back, and if she’d been almost walking on air when she came into the office, she crashed to the ground now as the query listed previous clients and persons of interest by distance from the suspect IP. At the very top of the list was a familiar name: Julian Adler.
Kelly congratulated herself on having added the basic details for the members of the pharma bid team that she’d already met into the systems right away; otherwise, she might have missed this. Now she set up a web crawler program to compile detailed pictures and background information on all four of the team members, the company’s board, and any other in-country staff, just for good measure. Kelly finished by setting up a batch job to dump the data onto a secure FTP server that the partners could access from their phones, and then she gave Tara a call on her private number.
After half a dozen rings, she heard the phone beep and announce, “You have reached the phone of Tara Grady. Please leave a message after the beep.” Kelly sighed mentally, wondering why Tara always had to be so serious, and left a message.
“Tara, I think we have a bit of an issue. The CCTV picked up someone prowling at the mailbox. I think that they may have been on some pills. I’ll pass along the details via the usual courier service,” Kelly enunciated. She felt a bit of a thrill at the cloak-and-dagger nature of using the code words that they’d agreed on previously for the monitoring system, and she was sure that Tara would understand the invented-on-the-fly reference to the pharma company.
Kelly tried to reach Ena as well, but she ended up leaving a similar message. Although the need to do the background research had been underscored by the evidence of Julian’s snooping, the plan had always been for her to go into the office to collect data on the bid team. Now that this task was accomplished, she didn’t feel any pressing need to stay. Her thoughts drifted back to Brad from the night before and, feeling her tummy flutter a bit, she picked up her phone and searched for his number.
***Tara***
Tara was furious. Picking the shattered pieces of her phone off the floor, she retrieved the SIM card and stuck it in her pocket. She’d put it into one of her spare phones later, but right now she needed to hit something. At first glance, a casual observer wouldn’t pay much attention to the medium-sized, brown-haired woman—especially next to her two bombshell partners. However, a closer observation would reveal that she had gorgeous muscle tone, and Tara was especially proud of the well-defined shoulders and biceps that she’d developed in the last couple of years. She didn’t remember exactly what had drawn her to take up boxing, but a few years ago she’d started feeling increasingly irritable in meetings, and she had been surprised when she’d found herself drawn to a punching bag during a routine visit to the gym.
She’d ended up flailing at the bag in a manner that seemed pathetic in retrospect. But when she was done, she’d felt calmer than she could remember feeling for ages, not regretting the aerobics class she’d missed. Within a few weeks, she’d located a trainer that had shown her enough technique not to embarrass herself when she boxed; she’d never looked back.
Her irritation had continued growing over the last couple of years, and nowadays she had to spend half an hour in the morning and evening working on a body bag or speed bag to take the edge off. As a result, she’d had a small workout area installed in the corner of her apartment; she walked over to it now. As Tara slipped off her socks and began to warm up on the body bag, she calmed down enough to consider the circumstances that had led to her current bout of pugilism.
She’d been relaxing in a pair of sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt with a glass of wine and a law journal after her usual evening workout, catching up on some interesting legal precedents. She had left her phone on silent, so she wouldn’t be disturbed, and it wasn’t until she got up to grab a refill that she’d seen the missed call from Kelly. Knowing that Kelly was meant to be in the office, putting the first stage of their plan into action, she immediately pressed the voice mail button.
A few minutes later, Tara’s fists were curled and her biceps were twitching, but it wasn’t the prospect of a client doing threatening amounts of research into OMG that worried her. They’d had plenty of reporters contact them, and they’d always managed to eventually deflect any probes before they got anywhere close to discovering the firm’s hidden weapon. Tara had been confident that even if this potential client started digging too much, based on the strangeness that had afflicted everyone involved with this bid, there were ways legal and extralegal to extricate the firm from any serious scrutiny. Indeed, even if this joker somehow found out the truth, who was going to believe that their business’s success was based on magic? If worse came to worse, they could always just pack in the bid, chalk this up as a learning experience, and leave the failure of their ritual as an unsolved mystery. Or so she had thought.
No, Tara recalled, what had really made her mad was her subsequent conversation with Ena. Tara had just closed her voice mail and poured her second glass of wine when the phone began vibrating in her hand. Glancing at the screen, she saw that it was Ena and pushed the answer button. “Yeeeeeeesss?” she inquired of the other Irishwoman.
“Tara, that dumb little bitch screwed us!” Ena shouted down the phone.
“Calm down, babe. What’s wrong? I got her message too, and I don’t think there’s really a problem. Maybe this is a false alarm, or maybe the guy won’t be able to find anything. Worst-case scenario, we pull the bid. It would be a first for us, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world,” Tara said, trying to calm down her nearly hysterical friend.
“Yeaaaah…about that. When I was closing the deal on the property in Vauxhall that we’re trying to flog at the moment, I may have had to step outside of our usual parameters to seal the deal,” Ena replied sheepishly. Tara didn’t think this was a good sign, considering the other woman’s previous indignation.
“Babe. Elaborate,” Tara said sweetly while her temper started to bubble and her face flushed. She didn’t show a blush as easily as the other two partners, with their pale complexions, but right now she suspected that a mirror would have shown her face with a distinctly red tint.
Ena replied with a rambling rush of words: “Look, this wouldn’t have been a problem if that little nerd had taken care of business. I’ve done this lots of times, and we’ve always been able to close the deal. You always have your nose in a law book, and Kelly is always on her computer. I’m out there closing the deals, and sometimes I have to make things happen.”
“Spit it out, Ena. What did you do? And if I hear any more blame for me coming out of you, I swear that you’ll regret it!” Tara roared into her handset.
“gresom, dso,” Ena mumbled.
“Now!”
“Sorry, Tara, my mouth was full,” Ena said meekly before continuing. “I may have…ummm…promised to get the Vauxhall property turned around with a long lease that met the client’s return on investment target within a month. It’ll be a month on the tenth,” Ena finished, all trace of her initial bluster melting away like butter in a frying pan.
“Ena, that’s one of our usual terms. We always agree that, and if we don’t fill the property, then we agree to pay their loss of profit until we do. If that was all that was going on, you wouldn’t be calling me. I don’t want any more evasion, Ena. I want to hear the problem so that we can start dealing with it,” Tara said, her knuckles white against the sides of the phone as she clamped her iron will down on the rising desire to simply throw the hunk of plastic across the room and scream.
“Well, we aren’t paying loss of profit. I may have…agreed to pay the entire rent. For two years. Up front.” The redh
eaded woman’s voice actually broke, and the final word squeaked out. She sounded more like a pubescent boy than a millionaire businesswoman in her late twenties.
Tara’s mind spent a moment doing the figures. She’d never been as good at math as the other women—her skill lay more in writing and understanding complex legal constructions—but as each digit clicked into place in her head, she felt herself going numb. The Vauxhall building was in a prime location near the Thames, so it fetched nearly £85 per square foot per annum…of necessity, the building had to be large to do its job…and the total square footage was rated at twenty-five thousand square feet…so…
“Jesus H. Christ, Ena! You’ve just cost us £4.25 million, you fat, dumb bitch!” With that exclamation, Tara had sent her phone flying across the room to shatter into a hundred pieces, and that brought her pretty much up to the present.
While her lawyer’s mind went back over the conversation, she had continued pounding the body bag in front of her, and now that she’d worked up a good sweat, she began to calm down to the point that she could properly analyze the situation again. That’ll wipe out every asset the company has, and then some. We’ll need to liquidate huge chunks of our investment portfolios, and we’ll lose even more in the process. It’ll be like the last two or three years never happened. Tara wasn’t going to stand for that.
CHAPTER 15 0600–0745, Sunday, August 2, 2015
***Julian***
The young man in front of me was sobbing. He was probably eighteen years old, five foot five, and didn’t weigh more than a buck twenty-five soaking wet. He was wearing cut-off denim shorts and a tight, white sleeveless T-shirt, finishing the outfit with a pair of pink sandals. I see other people’s nightmares every time I close my eyes and unfortunately, the same scenes play out in front of me again and again. The one I was experiencing tonight was one of my least favorite.
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