All Chapters of Rise Of The Trillionaire: Robert Jackson: Chapter 101
- Chapter 110
144 chapters
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ONE
Both men were put forward on the same morning by the federal prosecutors.Simultaneous. Coordinated. Two separate facilities. Two separate rooms. Two men who had spent months behind concrete walls telling each other the same story that Victoria Castellano was untouchable, that their loyalty would be paid, that the outside world was shifting in their favour even when the facts were against them.The session of Leonard was conducted by Agent Chen.At eight AM she came in with two prosecutors and a folder which she put on the table between her and Leonard without opening it. She let him look at it. She could see his eyes move across the cover. She had spent more than two decades of her life learning that there was so much you can figure out about the action of a person by the manner in which they looked at an open folder bearing their name.Leonard stared at it as a man stares at something, which he has already determined not to be afraid of.She opened it.She took him systematically th
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWO
On the second day Maxime broke.Not the third. He had asked for seventy-two hours and already used forty-eight out of it. The gap told Agent Chen all that she needed to understand about how the mathematics had sorted itself out in his head overnight. A man who needed the entire three days was still wrestling with himself.On Wednesday, his attorney reached out to the prosecution team at seven AM.Maxime was ready.Agent Chen moved quickly. Two decades of federal work had taught her that cooperation had a temperature, and the window closes the longer you wait. At nine AM Maxime was at the same sparse industrial-cleaner smelling meeting-room under the same harsh institutional light, at the same table.Two days later he was different. Not broken. Resolved. The countenance of a man who has made a choice which he can never unmake, and has ceased to struggle with the reality of it.He spoke four hours without interruption, His lawyer touched his arm only once to explain a point of law.He w
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE
On a Thursday, Leonard discovered.Not from the prosecutors. Not from Agent Chen. He discovered the way news of the prison always spreads through a medium to which no man can trace it, but everyone knows exists, the special channel of transmission that runs through the institutions and conveys the news more quickly than any other official system ever built.A guard was passing his cell at six in the morning a man whose name Leonard had never learned said three words."Your friend talked."That was all.After the guard had walked away down the passage Leonard sat on the edge of his bed a long time. The facility was carrying out its morning routine about him. Doors opening, footsteps, the sound of the faraway kitchen block opening its doors to begin its working day.He sat and said those three words, and felt the ground going under everything he had built his belief upon.Maxime had talked.He turned it over. Searched for a version where it wasn't true, or where it didn't mean what it o
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR
It was on Tuesday when the indictment came down.The lawyers in Victoria were aware of it coming. They had been looking forward to it, and they had been aware of Maxime since he had agreed to cooperate. Three weeks of tough preparation filing pre-emptive motions, developing procedural arguments, finding every conceivable challenge to the chain of evidence.None of it was enough.The reconstructed case by the FBI was so airtight that their initial case had not been. Clean evidence chain. Corroborated testimony. Financial records that linked all material transactions directly to Victoria's decision-making. The judicial contact, mentioned by Maxime, had already been interviewed by federal investigators, and, confronted with the definite and recorded evidence against them, He cooperated with even less resistance than Maxime himself.At nine AM the indictment was filed.Multiple counts. Fraud in three jurisdictions. Corporate spying surrounding Zenco and two other corporations that Victori
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE
The meeting was requested by the agent Chen.She called Marcus on the phone and requested thirty minutes with Robert to be at a time that he chose. No urgency in her voice. No crisis framing. Marcus passed the word and Robert replied that it would be Thursday morning and Marcus confirmed.She arrived exactly on time. She came alone. No prosecutors. No folder of documents. Just Agent Chen in her plain jacket and her composed face and the quality that there is something she has done and she is coming to draw a proper conclusion.She was only met by Robert in a small conference room and not in his office. It felt right. The office was where the pressure and strategy lived. This was something else.They were facing each other. Dave was present in the building and Robert had not invited him to be with them. This was like a dialogue that was to take place between the two individuals who had been the core of it since the beginning.“The prosecution will go on through the courts,” Agent Chen
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SIX
Robert took a day.He didn't announce it. He did not write it in the calendar or inform his assistant, or write to Marcus. He woke on a Thursday morning before Roxanne was up and spent a good long time gazing at the ceiling in the grey silence of the bedroom.Then he rose up, and dressed quietly and departed.He had nowhere to go. That was deliberate. Every drive he had taken in the past eighteen months had a destination, a meeting, a facility, a building in which something was going to happen or had just happened. This drive had nothing at the end of it. He entered the highway and left the city, and was on the highway until the buildings thinned and the sky opened and the road before him was just road.He drove for an hour.He pulled up at a diner that was marked off on the right side of the highway without notice. A low building with a hand-painted sign and four trucks in the car park and the particular feel of a place that had been feeding people effectively over the last thirty ye
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN
It was Monday morning and Robert was walking back into Zenco.The building felt the same. The lobby and its smooth floor and the security office where Daniel was nodding his head at him the same way he always did. The elevator with its characteristic slowness up the stairs. The executive floor corridor with its particular smell of carpet and recycled air and the low, persistent hum of a building engaged in its own work. All of that was like all the other Mondays he had passed through.There was something different in him as he walked through it.Margaret noticed first. She glanced up off her desk as he crossed the door, and looked at his face just two seconds in the same manner in which she had been looking at it over the years reading it like one reads what one has read and now is examining to see if it has changed. She said nothing. But something small and certain and definite and Robert knew she saw whatever it was that he was carrying this morning and had evaluated it and passed t
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT
It was the last piece that Dave ask Carlisle to make.He went on doing it without first informing Robert. Not that he was holding it back on his part he had promised it, and was going to keep it. But because he wanted to have something tangible to report instead of something speculative to debate about. Robert had enough on his desk. Dave would deliver him the results when he is sure about it.Wednesday evening he sent Carlisle the brief by the encrypted channel. The request was specific. An extensive scan of the existing landscape. All other threads that is linked to the Victoria coalition had been cut. All the contacts that are related to the Leonard and Maxime networks. All operational components which were yet to be neutralized or resolved. An entire image as to what was still alive and what had actually melted down.Carlisle accepted the brief with one word. “Working.”He took seven days.During the eighth day the document reached the encrypted channel at six forty AM. Dave was a
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINE
The silence came without notice.There was no particular day when Robert woke up and said that things were different. There is no moment he could indicate and say this is where it changed. It came the way good things usually come so, it came slowly, painfully, as though it did not know whether it was welcome or not.The first sign was the phone.On a Tuesday evening Robert saw it. After dinner he was on the sofa sitting and his phone was lying on the cushion next to him and after forty minutes he had not picked it. He noticed the forty minutes only after they had passed. He sat with that for a moment. Then he left the phone where it was.Roxanne noticed it differently.She noticed it at night. She had months of her life lying beside a man whose sleep was not real, but operational and the sleep of a person whose mind had never gone out of the building, who was figuring and strategizing even in the dark, whose body was beside her but his mind was in some other place. She said nothing ab
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TEN
The first sign appeared in the financial press on a Wednesday morning.Small. Not obvious unless you were reading attentively or you were reading the corresponding part. A small story about a board restructuring at a mid-sized energy firm that was formerly member of the operational network of Victoria prior to the indictment. The restructuring was put as normal. The language was corporate and standard, designed to leave nothing for a casual reader to notice.Dave was not a casual reader.He left a printed copy on the desk of Robert without saying anything and stood at the window as Robert read it. It was a Wednesday morning outside the city. Deliveries. People walking fast. The common clockwork of a world that didn't know it was being watched.“Restructuring of the board,” said Robert. "Victoria's former network.""Read the next paragraph," Dave said.Robert read it. An unsolicited bid by an outside firm whose identity had not been announced. The board had refused to comment on the te