Annihilate Me 2: Omnibus (Complete Vols. 1-3, Annihilate Me 2)

by Christina Ross

  “And I believe that you’re living in Stephen and Meredith Rowe’s house,” Alex said. “Not just Stephen’s. Let’s just be correct about that.”

  “For the time being, I suppose that’s true. But it won’t be when he divorces her, which he will. He told me that he will. And I believe him and I will protect him because I know what I see in his eyes when he looks at me.”

  “Lust?” Alex said. “Or love?”

  “You know,” she said with a little toss of her head. “We can end this right now if you’d like. I have no time for vague shades of hostility, even from the likes of the great Alexander Wenn.”

  “And I don’t have any time for bullshit, Janice. So, here’s what else we can do. We can sit down on Stephen and Meredith Rowe’s lovely sofas and talk about how you can walk away with twenty million dollars cash in your pocket. That is, of course, if you give us the information we need to crush the man who doesn’t love you, who will never love you, and who also will never marry you. Because if he did love you? If he loved you the way that I love my wife? Oh, he would have dumped Meredith Rowe, just as he promised you he was going to do, say, about a year ago. Because that’s what love is, Janice. It’s sacrificing everything you have to be with the one you love most. But you already know that. You’ve already thought long and hard about that. So, you know, all of this really comes down to you. Whether we talk is your choice. Because in the end, I’ve already won.”

  “And what the hell does that mean?” she said.

  He reached into the front pocket of his khakis and pulled out the iPhone Tank had asked him to put there earlier. He lifted it in front of himself and showed the face of it to Janice. “I’ve been recording you,” he said. “Well, I was recording your voice through the thin material of my pants, but now I’m literally recording you. And you’ve just admitted to being in love with Stephen Rowe, that you’re living in his and his wife’s house, and that you two have been having an affair. Is that enough for me to take Rowe down? With the right press behind me, I know it is, if only because of the scandal that would ensue. But here’s the thing, Janice. I really, really hate Rowe. I can’t stand him. I want to see the man squirm, not just because he has taken my positions at Wenn, but because of certain, unforgivable things he said and did to my wife that went beyond the pale. And since I know that you’ve got the real goods on him, you’re going to have to come through with them if you want my twenty million.”

  And at that, Janice Jones, who once stood so poised and ready to strike, visibly balked, but only for a moment before collecting herself and smoothing her hands down the sides of her pants. She lifted her head and studied us with new eyes. Though I knew that she’d never admit it out of pride, I could tell that she’d never seen this coming—and that we’d formally just shoved her into a corner.

  “The clock’s ticking, Janice,” Alex said with his phone still trained on her. “So, what do you want to do? Come clean with us? Give us something that I can really use to bury Rowe forever? Assuming you have anything, of course—but we’ll get to that. Or are you going to be stupid and just throw that kind of money away?”

  “If I tell you anything, how can I even trust that you’ll come through with the money?” she said.

  “First of all, let’s be clear before we go any further. Do you have something I can use against Rowe? Something that would destroy him? Deface him? Ruin him?”

  She glanced fleetingly at the phone. “Maybe.”

  “Right now there are no maybes, Janice. Either you do or you don’t. Which is it? What do you have on the man who doesn’t love you? The man who’s just been stringing you along?”

  When Alex said that, when the truth of his words finally managed to sink into her heart and her soul, that’s when everything changed. I could feel a shift in the air, a new tightrope of tension that hadn’t been between us before. I looked at Janice, and it was as if I could see her standing on the tip of a precipice of doubt trying to make up her mind and jump off of it.

  “You wouldn’t believe what I have on him,” she blurted. “I was saving it for myself should I ever need to use it against him. So that he would be forced to divorce that bitch of a wife of his. So he would be forced to marry me.”

  “And what would that be?”

  She wavered for a moment before she spoke.

  “I won’t ask again, Janice—your money is hanging in the balance.”

  “Fine,” she said. And then, in a fit of passion and rage, she told us everything she had in her possession, which for a moment, left Alex and me speechless.

  “You know that you’ll need to prove all of that to me before I hand over my money to you, right?” Alex said to her.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Good. And by the way—it will be ten million up front, and ten million more for the follow through I have in store for you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll tell you in time. But first I need to know whether you can prove it.”

  “I can prove it,” she said. “All of it. That’s not an issue. But if you don’t come through with that money, Wenn, and I mean all of it, I’ll come after you for illegally taping me. For trying to bribe me. For flying out here to harass me. Everything you’ve done to me is caught on that phone. So here’s the deal—if you do plan to use that recording against Stephen, it’s not only him or me who should feel cornered here. It’s also you because you’ve broken the law.”

  And at that, Alex just smiled and eased back against one of the sofas. He patted the seat next to him, and with my heart hammering in my chest given the exchange I’d just witnessed, I joined him.

  “Look, why don’t we all have a seat and just relax?” Alex said to Janice. “Stop looking so stressed out. You already knew your relationship was a sham, so own it. End it. Walk away from it a wealthy woman. Trust me, if you do come through, I’ll destroy this message in front of both of us. I’ll even go so far as to smash the phone into tiny bits if it’ll make you happy. Because all I want is what only you can bring, and all of us now know what that is.” He shrugged at her. “So, bring it. Or not. Your decision, but if you want my money, you need to decide now.”

  * * *

  The next day, when we arrived back in the city, it was late afternoon, but Alex wasted no time in putting into action the end of Stephen Rowe.

  At our apartment, he went to his office and called for an emergency board meeting to take place the following day at noon sharp.

  With each board member he spoke to, including Rowe, he said that if all weren’t present at the meeting, he would have to take certain matters into his own hands, which—as he made clear—meant going to the press with information that should be kept quite. “For Wenn’s sake,” he said. “Because if this gets out, it will burn Wenn.”

  That was just enticing and mysterious enough for the entire board to agree to cancel their previous engagements so that they could be there. As for Rowe, Alex gave him no time to talk. He simply delivered the news, and hung up on him.

  “And now what?” I asked him.

  “Right now, Rowe is in full panic mode. I guarantee you that he’s trying to reach Janice Jones as we speak. He knows this has to do with him, and he’s going to ask her if we somehow got to her. Whether she answers her phone is the big question. If she does and she decides to tell him the truth—about our offer and about flying back to New York so she can provide the evidence that will condemn him—we might be screwed.”

  “Because in the end, her love for him could win out,” I said.

  “That’s right. And also because he might say everything she wants to hear if she does talk with him.”

  “All of this is enough to make my stomach hurt.”

  He wrapped his arm around me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never should have invited him to take a seat on the board. But like Janice, he won me over, too.”

  “And now she’s at her apartment, presumably gathering the evidence you need to use against him. We
won’t see any of it until tomorrow morning, which means that neither of us is going to sleep well tonight—if at all. What if she has second thoughts? What if she was bluffing about what she has in her possession? I can’t stand it, Alex. With the board meeting set, there’s too much on the line. You could lose this if she doesn’t come through. You’d be shamed in front of all of them—and Rowe? He’d just be allowed to gloat.”

  “Look,” he said. “Let’s have dinner. And then we’ll have a drink and try to relax. Because there’s nothing either of us can do now, Jennifer. We’re just going to have to trust in her promise to come through for us. If she doesn’t, she’ll be giving up plenty.”

  “But if she does, she’ll forever be losing Stephen Rowe. Which is more powerful? The man, or the money?”

  “After the way Janice came after us when we first entered her apartment?” He shrugged. “I seriously don’t know.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

  Early the next morning, it was pouring outside, and the water pounding against the windows seemed almost stinging to me. The weather was horrible—a gloomy mess that I hoped didn’t portend on some ethereal level what the day was about to offer us.

  I joined Alex in the kitchen, where he was reading the Times.

  “Have you heard from Janice yet?” I asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “But she was supposed to have called you by now.”

  “She may be having second thoughts. Or she may have woken late and is just now having her coffee. Or she’s still in bed. Who knows with that one—it’s still only seven o’clock. I don’t know that woman’s rituals, and noon is hours away. What I do know is that she knows what’s expected of her. If she doesn’t follow through, then she forfeits the twenty million, and we go with Plan B.”

  “Will that be enough for the board?”

  He hesitated before saying, “I’m not sure.”

  “Call her,” I said.

  “I’ve already called her twice.”

  “She didn’t answer?”

  “It went straight to voicemail.”

  “She’s supposed to be here in an hour to show us the evidence. And to collect her first payment after we view it. Yesterday, we got the money in cash for her. It’s in a suitcase. It’s all set up—she knows that.”

  “Let’s hope she does show,” Alex said. “Because without her, I may have set us up for failure, Jennifer. She gave us her word that she’d follow through, but what is her word worth? I sure as hell don’t know. If she doesn’t show, everything will be riding on how the board reacts to what she said to us in her suite. The audio and the video I have of her are powerful, especially because she admits to having an affair with Rowe even after I pointed the phone at her face. But without Janice in that boardroom with us? Rowe could argue that the voice I play and the woman on the video are just a hired actress because, according to him, Janice Jones doesn’t exist. I know that’s how he will think and react. So, there you have it. What I have on him is nothing compared to what Janice Jones says she has on Rowe. And to truly nail him in ways that will cast him out of our lives for good? We need her. We need her now. And if she doesn’t come through, I’m not sure what will happen.”

  * * *

  As the hours passed, it became increasingly clear that Janice Jones had no intention of showing. Alex had called her repeatedly and left her voicemails each time, though his calls were never returned.

  In a last-ditch effort to reach out to her, he sent Tank over to her apartment, but the doormen turned him away—and warned him not to come back or they’d call the police and charge him with harassment.

  “For whatever reason, she’s shut us out,” he said to Alex when he called. “Somehow, Rowe has wooed her back into his arms and shoved her out of ours.”

  “And here I’ve gone ahead and called an emergency board meeting, betting that she’d take that money—which, by the way, she said that she would. So, great—I’m now certifiably fucked.”

  “Maybe not. Let them listen to the audio. And then show them the video. Make sure you point out that you are indeed standing inside Rowe’s condominium in Vegas. We weren’t expecting to rely so heavily on what you captured on your phone, so what I need you to do now is to inspect the video and see if there are any photographs of Rowe, Meredith, and their children there. If there are—if there is something on that video that will directly implicate him as the owner of that condo, and Janice Jones is in it—then you’ve got something to work with.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Alex said.

  “None of us thought you’d even need to. To turn down that kind of money, Stephen Rowe must have made her feel pretty rich.”

  “Apparently so. I’ll see you here in fifteen. We need to get to Wenn at eleven so we can discuss the situation with Blackwell and see if she has any insights into how to handle the board.”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  After Alex ended his conversation with Tank, he went to the video, and, with me watching over his shoulder, viewed it three times, but it all was for naught. We saw no personal photographs, nothing that would suggest that the condo in the video was in fact his. The only people who would know for sure were Stephen and Meredith Rowe. With Stephen out of the question, Meredith might be the answer.

  “Do you think we should call her?” I asked him. “Show her the video? She’d know if it was theirs, and she’d wonder why that woman was in her home.”

  “Meredith? We could call her, but here’s what you need to know about people like Meredith, Jennifer—she would go to the ends of the earth to cover up what her husband has done if only because she and her family are considered American royalty, not unlike the Kennedys.”

  “Then threaten her with it. Tell her that if her husband doesn’t stand down from Wenn, you’ll leak the video to the press.”

  “She’d just deny it,” he said. “I know people like her—that’s what they do, and with the public behind them, they’d believe her over me in a hot second.” He looked at his watch and stood. “We need to leave. Tank will be waiting for us in the lobby.” He kissed me. “So, let’s just do this. I have a lot of goodwill with the board. Let’s see how they react to the video, and also to my accusations.”

  * * *

  When we left for Wenn, the rain had stopped, and the sky was beginning to clear. Bits of sunlight were peaking through the swirl of dark clouds, illuminating the cars on the street along with the street itself. Drake drove us while Tank turned around in the front passenger seat to ask if we’d seen anything personal on the video.

  “Nothing,” Alex said.

  “You’re positive?”

  “We watched the video three times. I’m positive. But in Blackwell’s office, I’ll hand it over to you so you can have another look.”

  A tense silence stretched between us after that, and in that silence was a sense of disappointment that thrummed between all of us. It was so profound, I could feel it in ways that were as crushing as they were deflating.

  I glanced over at Alex, who was sitting silently with his iPhone in his hand, clearly hoping that Jones might finally come through with a call and that she would indeed offer what she’d promised us in Vegas, and also on the flight to New York.

  But for reasons I would never understand, she didn’t.

  At the last minute, she’d inexplicably backed out of our deal, and left Alex in a lurch because of it. While I didn’t know what would occur in the boardroom when we entered it, I did know that what we had on Rowe was nowhere near as powerful as what Jones said she had on Rowe.

  Why had she snowed us? What had been the point? She could have told us in Vegas that she had nothing on Rowe, and that would have been the end of it—which is why none of this made sense to me. Why the lie?

  Or had it been a lie?

  If it hadn’t been, the only thing I could wrap my head around that would explain her disappearance was that she’d spoken to Rowe after we left her apartment in New York. She’d told us
that she was in love with him, and that she wanted to marry him. If she told Rowe what we were up to, he may have skillfully swayed her away from us with the sort of words she would have needed to hear to make her back away from a twenty-million-dollar payday. But what was worse for Alex was that, if she did speak to Rowe, he now knew exactly what was coming at the board meeting.

  And if that was the case? He’d be prepared to shut Alex down completely.

  As the limo pulled up alongside and stopped in front of Wenn, Tank stepped out and Alex turned to me with a grim look on his face.

  “Let’s go to Blackwell’s office,” he said. “We’ll play her the audio and the video. She may catch something we might have missed. Maybe Tank will see something he hadn’t seen before. Right now, we need to use everything we’ve got.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  When Tank opened Alex’s door, Alex stepped out and I followed him out of the car. We swiftly moved across the sidewalk, into Wenn’s lobby, and across it to the bank of elevators. It was ten past eleven. We had fifty minutes to come up with something before Alex greeted the board. And if we came up with nothing?

  Today was about to go to hell.

  * * *