War God in Disguise

Chapter 8

Mr. Rhodes studied him for a long moment — an ordinary man, greying at the temples, no reason to look twice at anything Jack did — and something in his expression suggested he wasn't quite as unobservant as all those years of careful invisibility had assumed everyone in this building to be.

"You move like someone who's done that before," Mr. Rhodes said. "Not like a security guard breaking up a fight. Like — " he searched for the word, didn't quite find it, settled for something smaller than what he meant " — like someone who used to be somebody."

"You're imagining things," Jack said. "Get some rest."

He walked back down the stairwell alone, three floors, mop and bucket waiting exactly where he'd left them, and told himself the same thing he'd told himself a hundred times over years of small, careful days: that this was an exception, that it changed nothing, that a man could bend the rules once without breaking the promise entirely.

He didn't yet know that forty-one calculated ways to end a hallway confrontation had missed one variable entirely — that somewhere across the street, a man with a scar through one eyebrow had a photograph on his phone from three nights ago, and was now, very patiently, waiting for a second one to arrive.

The offices of West Industries occupied four floors of a building that had once been the pride of the district — marble in the lobby, the family name etched in brass by the elevators, a photograph of the founder shaking hands with a minister who'd since fallen from grace and been quietly airbrushed out of the company's official history, though not out of the photograph itself, because nobody had gotten around to it and Grace had never found the will to order it done.

She sat now at the head of a conference table two sizes too large for the six people actually occupying it, watching Samson arrange his documents with the unhurried precision of a man who already knew how the meeting would end and was simply enjoying the formality of getting there.

"Q3 numbers," Samson said, sliding a folder across the table, "are not what the board was hoping for."

"Q3 numbers are what they are because Q2 forced us to write off the Halstead contract, which your firm recommended we take in the first place."

"A recommendation is not a guarantee, Ms. West." Samson's smile didn't reach anywhere near his eyes; it never did. He was a compact, precisely groomed man of perhaps fifty, the kind of person who'd built an entire career on being underestimated in rooms where louder men assumed quiet meant harmless. "I only raise it because the board is understandably nervous, and nervous boards ask questions I'd rather answer with good news than with promises."

"What good news would satisfy them?"

"An infusion." He said it lightly, as though suggesting lunch rather than surrender. "My associates have expressed interest in a minority position — thirty percent, non-voting, purely to stabilize the balance sheet through Q4. It would let you keep the company your father built, Ms. West, without the board breathing down your neck every quarter."

"Thirty percent non-voting today becomes fifty percent voting in eighteen months. I've read enough of these agreements to know how the second paragraph always contradicts the first."

Something flickered behind Samson's composed expression — not anger, nothing so crude as anger, more the mild irritation of a man whose chess pieces had just proven more troublesome than expected. "You're very careful for someone with a company bleeding thirty thousand a month."