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CHAPTER
14
DEVINE SAT IN HIS SLIVER of a cubicle with his twin big-ass Mac screens. The somehow jarring sound of intense silence except for the quickened breaths of the highly intelligent and intensely motivated sitting all around him. It was a humbling experience to be in the presence of that much brainpower and drive to succeed. And it didn’t help that Devine’s arm ached and so did his shoulder where the brick wall had said hello. And his back from where Rick had popped him. But what the hell was pain anyway? It was life; you had to deal with it. He couldn’t do anything about it except swallow some Aleve.
No one had noticed his facial injuries or how stiff he held his arm and shoulder because no one bothered to look at him when they walked in. This was purposeful, because he was almost always the first one to arrive at work, and he knew that pissed them off. Their response was to ignore the early interloper. And then grind him into the dust with their own inspired labor. And all to make Brad Cowl even more money than he already had. But hey, when you had two jets and two yachts, another one of each certainly couldn’t hurt.
He hadn’t seen Stamos today, though he didn’t expect to. They were on different floors. He had her business email, though, and his finger had hovered over it on his computer, wondering if he should send her some message. Only he wasn’t sure what he would say.
He decided to just let it rest for now.
Devine had scanned the news but had seen nothing about three young men being found in an alley with the proverbial shit beaten out of them. WASP and his friends might have called the police and concocted some story about his having mugged them at gun-point or something. Only they didn’t know who he was, unless Stamos had hung around and told them.
He crunched numbers and composed reports and sent them to bits and pieces of the Cowl universe so other people could tear them apart and send them back and tell him what a moron he was, and to do a better job if he wanted to really dance with the big boys. And these salvos would go back and forth seemingly forever until the deal was done, or the market had closed, or the deal was scrapped, or someone important wet their pants and wanted to redo everything, or a better offer came in the door.
It’s not like it’s my money.
He looked at his watch. One o’clock. There was a dining hall on the third floor. It had great food, everything from tofu, plant-based burgers, sushi, couscous of every flavor and description, to grilled fish, all varieties of pasta, and veggie, vegan, and pescatarian offerings, along with meats for carnivores, and delectable desserts, all free, with cooks and eager servers just waiting to help you. And none of the Burners ever went there, because, one, they were afraid to get out of their seats, and, two, they were even more afraid that some executive would see them on the third floor in a place meant for people to eat, actually placing food in their mouths.
Almost all brought their lunch and ate it at their desks, getting crumbs in their keyboards and crap smeared over their screens. That could be disastrous if a smudge made a decimal point disappear, or turned a dollar sign into the mark of the euro, or the pound sterling. But they were apparently less afraid of that than appearing in the dining hall and losing a shot at the big time simply because they were hungry. And that was good news for the people who had cleared newbie status. They had the food all to themselves.
And before yesterday Devine would never have even thought about going to eat there. But yesterday had changed pretty much everything for him. His job was to act as a scout and to find important things. And to do that scouts had to keep on the move and go to places other people never would.
Devine rose and called out, “Anybody want to grab some chow with me on the third floor?”
They all looked up at him as though he had just suffered a stroke. Then they eyed each other to see if perhaps other people thought he was joking. Then they finally noted his facial injuries and several men and women stiffened. Perhaps they thought he had been in a car accident and was now hallucinating.
With no takers, Devine left the room and headed to the elevator.
I’m going to have a nice meal, while you wipe your candy bar and Cheez-It fingers over the whole of the NASDAQ futures.
He rode the car down to three, turned left, and entered the dining hall that looked one narrow step down from the Ritz, or the Plaza, or whatever was to die for these days. He didn’t know because that was not his world. He was just a workingman in the pay of the feudal lord.
He got his piled-up plate and his glass of fancy seltzer water and found an empty table, keenly aware that people were staring at him. Devine knew he was the only Burner in here. It usually took people four years to work up the courage to eat in here unless escorted by a superior. What an effed-up world.
He sat down, his back to the wall, and suddenly noticed that none other than Brad Cowl and part of his entourage were here. The boss was dressed in a sharp suit, white shirt, and no tie, a nod, Devine supposed, to it being the weekend. He said something and everyone at the table laughed like the guy was the greatest comedian ever. This audience clearly wanted to keep their place in the inner circle, and that meant busting a gut at the boss’s lame jokes.
Cowl’s gaze roamed the room. As it did so, he was waving, nodding, grinning, scowling, growing serious, then laughing and waving again.
It was as if to say, Look everybody, your king is here on a Saturday in the summer instead of on my yacht or at my country club playing golf . . . or banging my employee on a cheap desk, while I have an even better-looking lady skinny-dipping in my Olympicsize pool.
And then Cowl’s X-ray beam came lurching over to Devine. And the man’s features became unreadable. He lingered, one, two, three beats. He took in the injuries and the man himself. Probing, digging, creeping into unopened pathways that Devine might unknowingly have, like back doors on firewalls. Cowl had built a serious empire. To do that, you had to be smart and ruthless, more of the latter than the former, actually, because you essentially had to take what someone else had and not give a crap when they financially croaked.
And then Cowl’s gaze moved on, as he was laughing, scowling, grinning, waving, and even playfully flipping one man off. But he didn’t come back to Devine. And Devine wondered two things: why the look had landed in the first place, and what would come of it. Or maybe Cowl was seeing right through Devine and wondering about some problem in the Japanese bond market, or whether a tax audit was going funny, or whether the blond princess would find out he was screwing young, nubile financial whizzes on the fifty-second floor.
But, no, Devine had seen enough assholes in the world to know that Cowl was staring at him and seeing him, and there was a good reason for it.
And it was then that he realized his mistake, the one that had been nagging at him the whole ride in.
Sweet cheeks.He had called Stamos that.
The same term Cowl had used after screwing her barely a half hour before. Heat-of-the-moment thing on Devine’s part, bravado. And stupid, which bravado almost always was.
Stamos had told Cowl all of this, and Cowl, smart and paranoid asshole that he was, had put two and two together and decided that Devine had seen things last night he should not have seen.
Thus the stare. And in that stare, he read decisive action coming.
So Devine went back for seconds because this actually might be his last decent meal.
Retired General Campbell would probably have to recruit a new spy.
