No Dreams Allowed: A Billionaire Romance

by Sonora Seldon

The voice of the senator from Nebraska fell into the silence. “You’re certainly not the playboy I took you for, Mr. Dallstrom, I’ll say that much. So what else do you have to tell us today?”

  The camera closed in on Dave’s face and he looked tired suddenly, so tired.

  “Thank you, sir. As for the rest of it, I’ll get into details shortly and answer all your questions – but first, I should mention that in addition to the company’s foreign activities, Dallstrom Defense Systems has conducted illegal operations within this country as well.

  “As one example of this, and not remotely the most serious one, my father’s company has maintained a network of paid informants within the federal government for the past twenty years. In addition, Einar Dallstrom personally made massive under-the-table donations to fund the careers of helpful politicians, including many of the politicians in this room.”

  That was it for Senator Bloxom in the back row. “I cannot believe what I am hearing, I don’t care what proof he claims to have, and I refuse to sit here and listen while this hearing is turned into a circus!”

  He stood up and bent over the chairman’s shoulder to say, “Luther, I’m sorry, but this has gone far enough and I’m leaving!,” apparently not caring that the chairman’s microphone picked up every word. Then he stormed out and eight of his fellow committee members followed him out the door.

  Only four senators stayed to hear Dave out, including the man from Nebraska.

  Dave smiled, weary but game. “Specifically, the politicians who just left.”

  Senator Clifton spoke up, cutting into the babble of conversation that suddenly filled the room from wall to wall – spectators, aides and assistants, the camera operators, everyone was talking at once, but he shut it down and he didn’t even need to raise his voice.

  “Everyone who wants to stay and hear more needs to settle down now.”

  Everybody shut up, nice and neat.

  The chairman spoke into the sudden silence – mild, calm, almost as if he was talking to himself and not a nationwide television audience.

  “While I was eating my scrambled eggs and toast this morning, my wife told me she had a feeling I was going to have an interesting day. At the time I wasn’t convinced, since these hearings are generally necessary but dull affairs, but I should have known she was right.”

  The man allowed himself a smile. “Always listen to a good Midwestern woman, son, because those ladies know what they’re about.”

  Dave smiled, really smiled, just for a second. “I know that from personal experience, sir.”

  “Yes, I understand that young lady I’ve seen with you on the magazine covers is from Kansas – tell me, Mr. Dallstrom, where is she right now? Does she know about all this?”

  Dave sniffed, held it together, and got the words out. “I hope she’s watching right now, sir, and I hope she can forgive me.”

  Senator Clifton nodded. “Prairie women have big hearts, son, so don’t give up on her just yet.” He settled back into his chair and added, “So, Mr. Dallstrom, are you prepared to continue now, or do we need to take a break?”

  I didn’t catch Dave’s answer to that, because I was busy burying my face in a pillow and crying for him until I couldn’t breathe, until I couldn’t stop shaking, until I couldn’t look at him there on that rented TV in that rented room without wondering how a sweet guy with a heart-breaking smile and a big dream had ever come to this.

  You didn’t have to do it, cook. You didn’t have to go down with the monsters.

  28

  But Dave felt he did, and he talked for hours.

  I took breaks now and then to walk around the room, to peer out the curtains at a world that had gone insane, or to close my eyes and make it all go away. I went into the bathroom to wash my crying-red face and streaming eyes, and when I came back out to see Dave answering another question and taking the fall yet again for another sample of death and corruption and general craziness engineered by his father, I cried again for his courage.

  Senator Clifton called for a brief lunch break in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t dare hustle down the street to McDonald’s and maybe miss something – and I also so did not want to face anybody at all, not while this was going on and I couldn’t seem to stop bawling. So I raided the snack machine down the hall instead. I loaded up on good and decent American nutrition like potato chips, Snickers bars, and Oreos, I carried my swag back to the room, and I dropped down onto the bed to face more endless questioning and testimony.

  I also took a look at that Youtube video.

  It wasn’t hard to find, it already had 800,000 views. I watched Dave sitting there on that couch in his penthouse apartment, the couch we’d shared so many times. I watched him lean forward into the camera, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped in front of him as he spilled the awful truth to the world. And no, I didn’t cry when I saw those things.

  I cried when I saw he was wearing his red “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry at the Jayhawk Tavern” t-shirt, that he’d worn back when he’d just been the new cook and I’d just been his boss.

  I swear, I don’t normally cry so much.

  But I wiped away my tears and I watched that video. I also kept watching the TV, watching Dave bury the monsters deeper with every word, and I tried not to think about how he was digging his own grave too.

  Along with everything else, I also noticed what he didn’t say.

  He detailed exactly where and how the company manufactured nerve gas – including the fact that Einar Dallstrom’s scientists had come up with a whole new formula for the stuff, available only from Dallstrom Defense Systems and designed to do an even better job of killing people, yay – but he never mentioned Milena’s name, or the name of her village. He didn’t mention Eastern Europe at all, and I realized he was deliberately not giving up even the slightest clue that might lead the authorities to Sergei and Anton and their people.

  Wow, Einar, that whole ‘using people’s emotions to buy safety for you and yours’ thing runs both ways, doesn’t it?

  Dave also didn’t mention his sort-of uncle and his kind-of brother when the subject of Michigan came up.

  He had a lot to say about “the Michigan operation,” though. He also had pictures, and more than one spectator hurried out of the room when he showed the gruesome, stomach-churning photographs of what happens when your dad decides to dump his new, improved version of nerve gas on a Michigan paramilitary group holed up in their backwoods compound.

  The room was so quiet. One of the committee members – according to the onscreen graphic, she was “Sen. Karen Brookneal, D-California” – shook her head and just stared at the pictures of twisted bodies and faces caked with bloody foam as she said one word.

  “Why?”

  “Senator, I knew nothing of what happened in Michigan until the night before my father died, many years after the event. At that time, he told me he’d been concerned that the situation could develop into “another Waco,” and that federal authorities preparing to enter the compound to arrest the militia members on weapons charges were in danger of losing their lives.”

  “So he thought an appropriate response to those concerns was to murder American citizens with nerve gas? I don’t care what crimes these militia members allegedly committed, nothing justifies this. Absolutely nothing, Mr. Dallstrom.”

  “You won’t get an argument from me on that, Senator.”

  Senator Brookneal sifted through the photographs, each one more awful than the last. “Mr. Dallstrom, I’ll also call your attention to the fact that these men had their families with them at the time of this incident – women and children lived in that compound, Mr. Dallstrom, and they died too. All of them.”

  Dave’s face was white. He stared at his microphone, his voice was flat, toneless, hopeless. “Yes, ma’am. In all, thirty-three bodies were removed from the site, including family members. There were no survivors.”

  Another senator spoke up. “And that brings up another thi
ng that puzzles me, Mr. Dallstrom – how did your father pull this off? Who knew, and what happened to the evidence? Where did those bodies go? When agents from the FBI and the ATF entered the compound, they found it empty, did they not? As I recall, the general assumption at the time was that the militia members got word of the impending raid and fled over the border into Canada – so what really happened?”

  “Senator Keller, no one knew the truth. My father told the facility in Kamchatka where the gas was manufactured that he needed a large sample for testing purposes. He personally transported the container to Michigan, where he installed it in one of the company’s aerial drones. He told the federal agents it was a new type of digital surveillance unit that would give them updated information on the layout of the compound, which was two miles away from their base of operations. After the drone flew over the compound and dispensed the gas, he sent in private contractors to remove the bodies –”

  Sergei and Anton.

  “– and these contractors were told nothing beforehand, only that they were there to perform ‘clean-up.’ They did not know what they would be cleaning up.”

  Wait a minute – the bastard kills off Milena and her whole village, lets Sergei find her, and then sends him into another situation just like it with no warning, just with orders to “clean up” the awful mess?

  I have never wanted so desperately to kill a dead man.

  Dave shook his head, sighed, and I could see he was so tired. “The contractors took the photographs you’re looking at, and then they flew the bodies out of the country that night and dumped them into the ocean.”

  I waited for someone to ask who these ‘contractors’ had been, but Dave was saved from lying about them when a senator from Idaho spoke up.

  “Mr. Dallstrom, I’m curious about one matter more than anything else – why would Einar Dallstrom be a party to this, to all of these flagrantly illegal and immoral actions? I met the man a couple of times, and while he frankly came across as a foul-mouthed, obnoxious blowhard, I wouldn’t have taken him for a murderer – so how did this happen? How did he turn down a road that led him to do such terrible things?”

  Dave shrugged. “I can’t say for certain, Senator Ridgeway, my father didn’t often share with me about much of anything – but I think it started small. When I was a kid, I could tell he was crooked, that shifty things were going on with his business – I never knew or cared to know the details, but I don’t think it amounted to much more than bribery and corruption in general back then, along with a determination to make the shiniest and deadliest killing machines available and to overprice them by as much as he could get away with … but over time and after years of news coverage about hijacked planes and bombed-out buildings and murdered Americans around the world, things changed for him. He changed.

  “In the last few days before his death, he told me that even before I was born, it came to him that increased security wasn’t the answer – that no amount of stricter security regulations would be enough to protect this country in the long run. He said he realized the problem had to be tackled at the source, with the people who committed the bombings and the hijackings and the killings – and he started, well, communicating with them.”

  Dave toyed with his water glass, but didn’t drink from it this time. He just looked at it while he spoke out about how his father had become one of the monsters.

  “Then he began doing business with certain groups and individuals – buying them off, using them against each other, and then he sold them weapons, and … it snowballed after that, I guess. After a certain point there was no going back, and so he just went all the way down into the dark.”

  He rubbed his eyes, exhausted. “Not that it excuses what he did, not by any means, but I think that’s how it happened.”

  Silence filled the committee chamber, until Senator Clifton spoke. He sounded tired too.

  “Mr. Dallstrom, we’ve been at this for hours now. Given the time of day and other circumstances, I believe we’ll have to call a halt to these proceeding shortly – but first, I want to be clear on a few things.”

  The senator leaned over his microphone. “Son, do you realize that over the past few hours, you may well have talked yourself into federal prison?”

  Dave shrugged. “I assumed as much, sir.”

  “And that many of these illegal actions you’ve described today could be construed as treason?”

  “There’s no use trying to call them anything else, sir.”

  Then the chairman leaned back and tapped a pencil against the side of his chair. When he spoke, I heard a whole of plain country lawyer in his voice.

  “And yet you committed none of these actions yourself, did you?”

  “No sir, but that hardly –”

  “And you first learned of the corruption and other illegal business dealings when you were a child and not in a position to do anything about them?”

  “Yes, but –”

  “And you in fact knew nothing of the worst of these matters until quite recently, is that correct?”

  “That’s right, but that doesn’t excuse me from responsibility – this was all done by my father and my father’s company, sir. I own the company now, so now it’s –”

  “And as soon as your father’s death left you in charge, you started shutting down the illegalities and selling off any parts of the company associated with them, right? Is that not in fact exactly what we’ve all watched you do on the news over the past few months?”

  Dave stared up at him, his jaw tight. “That doesn’t bring back the dead, Senator.”

  “Neither would imprisoning a brave young man for trying to do the right thing on behalf of the dead, but –”

  The senator from Nebraska paused as an aide whispered into his ear. “And Mr. Dallstrom, I’m afraid I’ve just been told that federal marshals are waiting for you outside. I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, I think you showed a ton of guts in coming here today.”

  “Sir, speaking of courage, could you do something for me?”

  Senator Clifton raised an eyebrow. “And what would that be, Mr. Dallstrom?”

  “Senator, the bravest person I know is that woman from Kansas you asked about earlier – she’s the one who made me see I had to come here today, and I can’t imagine what she must be going through, and what it will be like for her after this … can you help her out, sir? Her name’s Cassandra Hamilton, and if you could get in touch and see if there’s anything you do to help her get through this situation, I’d appreciate it.”

  Tears blurred my view of the TV – again – but I heard what Dave said next just fine. “She’s prairie tough, Senator, but even the strongest of us need help sometimes.”

  “Mr. Dallstrom, I’ll see what I can do. Good luck, son.”

  The next time I saw Dave was a few minutes later, on CNN. A federal marshal snapped handcuffs around his wrists, cameramen jostled for position as they filmed every awful moment, and then two more men wearing jackets labeled “U.S. Marshal” helped Dave duck into a black Suburban waiting at the curb outside the Senate’s Dirksen Office Building. I watched the federal marshals pull out into traffic and drive my Dave away to a cell, somewhere, for who knew how long.

  Months? Years? Forever?

  And that was the moment when my best and worst selves, my common sense and my instincts, all agreed and spoke up at the same time.

  Cassie, that was your man they took away just now. He made things right and killed the monsters just like you told him to – so get your ass off this bed and go help him, you idiot.

  I packed my stuff and cleared out. I threw the key card to the front desk clerk and I never saw her again. A taxi took me to the nearest car rental place, where I swiped that black credit card with no limit while it still worked – I didn’t know just when it would happen, but I figured the feds would be freezing the assets of Dallstrom Defense Systems sometime soon. One Ford Mustang convertible later, I was taking care of a couple of quick errands around
town for Dave, and then?

  The Mustang’s GPS told me it was 697 miles from downtown Chicago to Washington, D.C. That was true enough, but that GPS also claimed it would take me over ten hours to drive those 697 miles.

  Oh, I don’t think so, GPS – sit back and watch how a wild Kansas woman drives.

  29

  Wolf Blitzer said Dave should be locked up for the rest of his life.

  Anderson Cooper said he was a hero.

  I only knew I had to get to him, and I blitzed across the states between Chicago and D.C. fast enough to give that poor GPS unit and its adorable British accent a seizure.

  And yes, taking a plane would have been even faster than blindly bolting down the interstate, fueled by caffeine and fast food and panic – but then I wouldn’t have had time to find out that most of the country seemed to agree with Anderson Cooper.

  When I stopped for gas in Indiana, I flipped open my laptop and saw CNN had Dave’s arrest bannered across its website as ‘BREAKING NEWS,’ with a headline beneath saying “Massive Public Outcry in Support of Dallstrom Whistleblower.” While I stood in line at a Taco Bell in Ohio, my phone informed me that the hashtag #freeDave was trending on Twitter to the tune of 17,000 tweets in the last hour. By the time I got my second speeding ticket in Pennsylvania, rumors ran wild that Charlie Hunnam would play Dave in an upcoming movie about all this insanity.

  But Dave was locked away and didn’t know about any of this. He didn’t know he had friends, he didn’t know he had lawyers – I’d taken care of that before I left Chicago – and most of all, he didn’t know I was coming.

  For all he knew, he was alone and Cassie Hamilton was on her way back to Kansas in search of a future that didn’t involve people who were in federal custody on treason charges.

  I ran that Mustang into the ground on my way to Dave’s side, but getting to D.C. turned out to be the easy part.

  Getting in to see him was much harder, because the Justice Department and the FBI and the NSA and all the other agencies that wanted to bury Dave in a cell forever didn’t care that he was the darling of the internet. If it hadn’t been for Senator Clifton throwing his influence around on my behalf, I might still be waiting.