KNEEL FOR NO ONE: Once A Servant, Now A Billoniare

CHAPTER 5

Cole Tower at half past one was a building going about its business.

The security desk in the lobby processed visitors with the mild efficiency of a system that had been operating on the same instructions for thirty-two years. The young man behind the desk looked up when Elias walked in and prepared the standard greeting of a person about to ask for an appointment.

Claire was at Elias's left. Reid was at his right. Solomon walked slightly behind. All three of them carried the kind of quiet authority that precedes explanations.

"I'm here for the two o'clock board meeting," Elias said.

The young man looked at his system. "Name?"

"Elias Ade."

Something happened on the young man's face. A flicker of something he had been told but had not expected to actually use. He looked at the screen. Then at Elias. Then at the screen again.

"One moment, sir." He reached for his phone.

They did not wait for whatever he was arranging. Claire placed a document on the counter, one page, the founding chair confirmation issued that morning.

"He won't need to call anyone," she said pleasantly. "Please prepare a visitor pass for our principal. He'll be returning regularly."

The young man looked at the document. His training won over his confusion. He printed a pass and held it out across the counter.

Elias took it.

The elevator to the thirty-first floor was wood-panelled and had the particular smell of a building that has been well-maintained for decades. Elias stood in the centre of it and looked at his reflection in the polished doors.

He was wearing the same suit as yesterday. He had one. He would have more.

The thirty-first floor was a boardroom and three support offices. The boardroom door was glass and through it Elias could already see four people seated. He stopped outside it.

"Holt?" he asked Reid.

"Not yet. His EA confirmed his attendance an hour ago. He doesn't know what he's walking into." Reid checked his watch. "He should arrive in the next fifteen minutes."

"And Stella Maris?"

"She's in there." Reid indicated a woman near the far end of the boardroom table. "Grey jacket.

She arrived twenty minutes early."

Elias looked through the glass. The woman was reading something on her phone with the focused expression of someone reviewing a brief. She glanced up, looked at the glass doors, and when she saw Elias she went very still.

Then she stood up.

She crossed the boardroom in eight measured steps and pushed through the door and stood in front of Elias with the expression of a person who has been waiting for a train that everyone else long ago stopped believing was coming.

"You look exactly like him," she said. Her voice was controlled but only barely.

"So I've been told," Elias said.

She extended her hand. "Stella Maris. I've been keeping the seat warm."

He shook it. "I heard. Thank you."

She looked at him for one more moment, assessing, and whatever she found in his face appeared to satisfy the assessment. She stepped aside and gestured toward the room.

"Then let's begin," she said.

Frank Holt arrived at four minutes past two.

He came in with an aide and with the easy confidence of a man who had been the most powerful person in every room he'd entered for thirty years. He was looking at his phone when he pushed through the boardroom door and he was mid-sentence to his aide about a lunch reservation.

He looked up.

The room was fuller than he had expected.

At the head of the table, in the chair that had been empty since the founding, a man sat. Not a chairman he recognised. Not any face from any meeting in thirty-two years. A young man in a suit that was good but not expensive, with the kind of posture that had nothing to prove. 

Frank Holt's eyes went to Claire first, then to Solomon Briggs, then back to the man at the head of the table.

His aide was still talking.

Holt raised one hand sharply and the aide stopped.

The room was quiet.

"Who," Holt said, his voice carrying the very specific danger of a man who is not accustomed to being confused, "are you?"

Elias looked at him for exactly the amount of time it took for everyone else in the room to understand the answer before he gave it.

"My name is Elias Ade," he said. "I am the founding chair of this company. I am Edmund Cole's son." He gestured to the document in front of him. "I have confirmed identity, registered succession, and founding chair authority installed as of nine seventeen this morning." He looked at Holt steadily. "Please sit down. There are matters to attend to."

Frank Holt did not sit.

His face did something that very few people in thirty-two years had ever seen it do. It became unsure.

"This is not..." He started and stopped.

"It is," Stella Maris said from the other side of the table. Her voice was very quiet and had the particular satisfaction of a woman who has waited four years to say two words.

Holt's aide put his hand on Holt's arm. Holt shrugged him off.

"I want my lawyers," Holt said.

"You're welcome to have them," Solomon said from his position near the wall. "The filing is registered. It cannot be challenged on identity grounds. The biological confirmation is watertight.

The succession document has been authenticated by three jurisdictions." A pause. "If you'd like to contest any of it, I'm happy to provide our contact details. In the meantime, the chair has called this meeting and the bylaws are clear on what happens next."

Holt looked at Elias.

Elias looked back.

For a moment it was only the two of them in the room, the old man who had taken something, and the son of the man it was taken from, and thirty-two years of distance between them that was closing now at a rate nobody could slow.

Holt sat down.

Not because he had accepted anything. But because a man of his experience understood the shape of a thing when it had already happened, and spending energy denying the shape of a thing was a waste he could not afford when he needed to be thinking about what came next.

Elias noted the calculation in his eyes. He filed it.

"Agenda item one," Elias said. "The removal of four board appointments made without founding chair authority, pursuant to article seven of the founding bylaws."

He turned the page because the meeting had begun.