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“Can we wrap this up?”
“Sure," Amanda smiled that soporific smile which gave Sophie the feeling the woman had never been upset about anything ever. “Keep up your mindfulness and gratitude exercises. They seem to be helping. Remember that you’re only at the beginning of your journey. You haven’t begun to settle in yet. I’ll see you next Monday evening.”
Sophie left in a huff, while trying to pretend she was not in a huff. Amanda watched her go with a little half-smile. It was all so predictable. Once in a while, she’d like to be thrown for a loop.
She wondered if the watcher would notice that Sophie had left early. They usually noticed everything.
BRING! BRRRING!
The vintage phone on Amanda’s replica Queen Anne desk rang with the imperious, slightly panicked tones of the old world. She answered it with one hand, not bothering to rise from her chair. The pad before her was empty besides a circle with a triangle in the middle of it, repeated five or maybe six times. She could barely be bothered to pretend making notes anymore.
Sophie was about the blandest, most boring little blonde ever to walk into her office. Amanda had not signed up for this job to listen to the whining of people who didn’t have problems. She’d wanted to talk to the real psychos. The real psychos didn’t have money though — at least, most of them. The real, real, real psychos had all the money in the world.
“Hello," she said, just in case it was a normal human being calling her, and not an absolutely psychotic monster in whose grasp she happened to find herself. “Amanda speaking.”
“Was your session productive, Ms. Mangle?”
Amanda Mangle. She couldn’t believe anybody thought that was a real name, but then again, her own therapist’s last name had been Apathy. So. You know.
“It was as productive as it could be. She doesn't suspect anything. She’s too self-absorbed to suspect anything. The woman, Ellen, seemed to distract her adequately.”
“Good.”
Amanda played with the cord, twirling the curled plastic wires around her fingers slowly.
“We’re going to need her to be ready soon. Can you get her on some medication to make her more pliable?”
“I think that would be counterproductive. I want her very much in her feelings, sensitive to fluctuations in the fabric of her life. If she’s medicated, she might have time to notice that things are not as they should be.”
“You are so very good at what you do,” the voice on the other end of the line purred seductively. “Let me know if there are any deviations from the plan.”
“Of course.”
Amanda hung up from the one interesting call she was likely to get all week. Biting her lower lip, she tapped the back of the phone with one manicured finger and wondered how far she was going to go.
All the way, probably.
All the fucking way.
Chapter 4
Seven days later…
“Carlyle, get your girl on a leash.”
Carlyle looked at Alex with the mild expression Alex had come to know and not trust in the slightest.
“Who am I leashing?”
“Whoever sent through twenty-four site refusals in the last thirty-six hours. I have half the management team knocking on my door. Thanks to… whatever her name is, we’ve lost permission to build across most of the eastern seaboard.”
“Miss Pierce is doing her job.”
“She’s doing somebody’s job. Someone who works in another building, for another company. This is borderline sabotage.”
“We’ve always had environmental compliance managers.”
“I’ve never noticed one before.”
“Maybe they never did their jobs properly before.”
“Their job is not to stop us from putting malls on the beach because of some bird called a shag.”
“Well. It’s their job to assess environmental impact. You remember what happened when the company that shall not be named pissed half the decade’s production into the gulf of Mexico?” It wasn't Carlyle’s habit to swear, but he liked dolphins.
“I remember that nobody else remembers. Their job was to convince people that the water was always oily, and I haven’t heard anything about it in a long time, so it must have worked.”
Carlyle put down his pen and looked at him with a sympathetic expression. “What’s going on, Alex? You don’t normally concern yourself with small matters like these. You don’t care where malls go.”
“True. I don’t. But I do care when someone whose name I barely know seems to be throwing a bag of spanners in our works. Fire her and hire someone else.”
“You don’t care about hiring and firing either. There’s something else going on.”
There were a lot of things going on. Alex couldn’t quite put his finger on any of them. His short positions had been squeezed into oblivion, which had put him in a bad mood. Three billion wiped from your cumulative wealth in a matter of days would not put anybody in a good mood.
Anarchy was in the air. And not the fun kind with metal bras and loose morals. The kind where guillotines started being produced.
