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Chapter Five - Ada
It was like something out of an apocalypse flick. The massive building was all but empty. The only sound was the distant squeak of the cleaning trolly.
I could see how most people would find it creepy, but I mostly found it to be relaxing, which was a relief because I wasn’t staying late for my health. The company was about to make a massive acquisition. The kind of account that could well bump them up from number three to number two overall.
It was like a restaurant getting another star. And it was something the senior partners would do anything to get. I had heard rumours of bones rattling from inside Smyth’s office, but somehow doubted that even he would turn to the dark arts. As to evoking the Dark One, it was a fair bet that both he and Smith already had I.O.U.s penned in blood. No good asking for another favor.
In lieu of calling on the Forces of Darkness, they instead elected their champion analyst, i.e. me, to go over every figure and decimal of the proposal the company had sent over. They were quite clear on the fact that I was not to show, or even tell, anyone else. The opinion had to be mine, and mine alone, with no outside influence. At best, all goes well, and everything is good. At worst, they have both plausible deniability as well as a scapegoat if things really went south.
I didn’t have to do it. I could have quit, refusing to have that kind of pressure put on me. But jobs were difficult to find at the best of times and I had already been poor once. I had no intention of doing it again.
I went through the company’s financials, three thick binders representing the past five years in business. They were doing well. The president, Amelia Greene, was already into the billions. By all projections, including the one I was just then forming, their new product could make them even more. They just had to get it with the right investment firm. It was a win-win with no obvious downside.
The company and the investors made buckets of money and the public got what was going to be, by all accounts, a really good product. The company was even into environmental concerns. The ‘Planet’ in ‘Greene Planet’ was no doubt a play on words. At least Mom would like that. Dad didn’t seem to care much about what I did or who I worked with as long as I wouldn’t get hurt and didn’t have to kill anyone. He would have more trouble with me becoming a cop than a corporate raider. I think we all knew where my mom stood on the subject.
Everything looked very much in order. To be absolutely sure, I skipped to the end of the last folder. Even if there were a few hiccups in between, it really didn’t matter much as long as they recovered from it. Every business goes through ups and downs, and like a good mystery novel, it was the end that really counted.
The more I read, the more a crazy thought came into my head. Kingsley had often talked about what he wanted to do. Part of the reason he applied to West Point was to study engineering. A lot of the ideas sounded pretty far fetched to me at the time, but still I listened. He even had blueprints.
He swore that as soon as he had financial backing, he was going to start building them. Had he finally found it with Greene Planet? The last I had heard from my beautiful man he was stationed in Afghanistan, fighting out ways to make tanks go faster and turn better. For all I knew he could be dead, taken out by a sniper who had just seen his uniform or blown to kingdom come by a roadside bomb.
According to the write up, the new vehicle Greene Planet was going to be rolling out was based on a long-term personnel carrier that had been specially designed to withstand roadside bombs. There were shields over the tires to keep them from being blown, specially designed deflective armor at the front and sides that was fireproof and most forms of shrapnel just bounced off, and a lower, wider chaise than on something like a Humvee that made the vehicle all but impossible to flip.
Kingsley wasn’t dead. If something had happened, news would have gotten back to me somehow. Besides which, the connection between us was so strong I was sure I would have felt it. No, he was alive and by the looks of it working as an engineer, first in R&D for the military, which only stood to reason, and then either for or with Greene Planet. I wondered how much he would be making doing that. Was he a millionaire? A billionaire? My mind spun with the possibilities.
