The Founder Who Ruled A Country

Chapter Seven: The Fund

Lucien had never spent a single coin of Valmorre's money on himself, and he was not about to start.

But the forty people who had worked for Lattice still could not find jobs. Every resume they sent disappeared into silence. Recruiters who had chased them for years stopped returning their calls, and one afternoon a senior developer with twins at home sent Zara a message that was mostly apology. A hiring manager had finally told her the truth. Vail Dynamics had put the word out across the industry, and anyone who hired a Lattice engineer would never do business with Vail again.

Lucien read the message on Zara's phone twice, standing in his kitchen among the unopened boxes. Then he understood something he should have seen months ago. Rayne and Vail had not built their power by beating him. They had built it by doing this to everyone, burying other people's work and taking the credit, one company and one career at a time. Lattice was only the latest.

His mother had asked him to build something of his own. She had never asked him to stand by while other people lost theirs. This would not be for him. It would be for them.

He took the private phone out of the drawer and made a call. The director of the Valmorran sovereign fund answered on the first ring. The man had waited two years for a single instruction from his prince, and he did not ask for a reason.

* * *

Over one weekend, the Valmorran sovereign fund quietly withdrew its holdings from the investment bank that bankrolled both Vail Dynamics and Senator Rayne's re-election campaign. There was no announcement and no press release. On Friday evening the money was there, and by Sunday night it was gone, billions of it, moved with the calm efficiency of very old money. The business channels called it a routine rebalancing. Nobody in Harbridge believed that for long.

By Monday morning, the bank had called in Vail's loans. By Monday afternoon, three of Rayne's largest donors had pulled out of his campaign, each citing a sudden change in priorities.

On Tuesday, Vail Dynamics announced layoffs, and its share price fell so fast that trading was halted twice before lunch.

On Wednesday, a new firm opened its doors in a converted warehouse on the east side of Harbridge, funded by an anonymous foreign investor. It had a plain glass door and no name on it yet. By noon it had hired all forty former Lattice employees on the spot, at better salaries than they had ever earned, and Zara Bennett was its chief technology officer. The developer with twins at home signed her contract at the front desk, then hugged Zara so hard she nearly knocked the bandage off her hand. Nobody asked who the investor was. After the month they'd had, most of them didn't care.

Bastian arrived at three.

He came through the glass door without knocking, his tie loose and his jaw tight, with two assistants scrambling behind him. The lobby was only half finished, cables hanging from the ceiling and boxes stacked against every wall, and he stopped in the middle of it and raised his voice.

"Who's behind this place? I want a name."

Zara looked up from behind the front desk, where she was assembling a monitor stand because the receptionist didn't start until Monday. "Our investor prefers to stay anonymous," she said pleasantly. "It's in the press release."

"Anonymous." Bastian laughed, but it came out wrong. "You expect me to believe some foreign investor appeared out of nowhere the same week my own bank turned on me?"

Then he saw Lucien.

Lucien had just come in from the loading dock with a cardboard box full of cables in his arms. He walked past Bastian without slowing down, set the box beside the server room door, and wiped his hands on his jeans.

Bastian stared at him. "You," he said. "You did this."

"I'm carrying cables, Bastian," Lucien said. "Shouldn't you be at your own office? I hear there are a lot of empty desks over there."

All around the lobby, the work had stopped. Developers leaned in doorways with laptops under their arms. A woman on a ladder held a light fixture perfectly still with both hands. Forty people Bastian had tried to bury stood and watched him, and not one of them said a word.

Bastian looked from face to face. Whatever he had come to say, he could not find it. He turned on his heel and walked out, and the glass door swung shut behind him.

For a moment no one moved. Then somebody near the stairs started to laugh, and a second later the whole lobby was laughing with them. Zara caught Lucien's eye across the room and smiled, the first real smile he had seen on her face in weeks.

* * *

But Rayne still had his warrant, and Casimir still had his vote.

Lucien stayed long after everyone else had gone home, finishing the wiring in the server room. It was nearly eleven when he rode the elevator down to the parking garage. The lower level was empty except for his car and the steady hum of the overhead lights, and his footsteps echoed off the concrete as he walked.

Then headlights snapped on at the far end of the row.

Two unmarked cars rolled forward and stopped across his path. Detective Pasco climbed out of the first one with four uniformed officers behind him, and this time he wasn't smiling. He had the look of a man who had been told exactly what to do and had decided not to think about it too hard.

Lucien stood still and let them come. He thought of Zara, safe at home with two Valmorran officers outside her door, and of the vote waiting for him across the ocean. He did not reach for his phone. One of the officers reached him first and turned him toward the car, not gently.

"Lucien Kerrigan," Pasco said, holding up a folded warrant. "You're under arrest for acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government."