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“You! You’re so buttoned-up, usually. It’s strange to see youso freely expressing emotion. It reminds me of the time Data—Forget it.”
“Data from Star Trek? Were you about to compare me to an android?” He didn’t know whether to laugh or to be offended.
“No!” She was trying and failing not to laugh as she turned her face away to look out her window. “I would never do that.”
He waited a beat and asked, “What do you think is happening with the shares?”
His uncharacteristic display of emotion, be it human or android, must have worked. “I don’t know yet, but...” She turned and looked into his eyes, searched them, as if trying to decide whether she could trust him.
“Do you remember an episode ofThe Next Generationin which Data befriends Tasha Yar’s sister, only to find she was set on betraying them all?” he asked.
Her brow wrinkled. “I thought you were Team Star Wars.”
“I am. But I’m well-read. Well-viewed. When it comes to science fiction, anyway. At the end of that episode, Data is talking to Riker. He’s confused. He doesn’t understand these human concepts of friendship and trust. Riker tells him that without risk, there can be no friendship.”
The sense that she was trying to see into his soul deepened. He waited. Allowed her to look—allowed himself to be seen. It was difficult.
Finally, she said, “Are you callingmean android now?”
He chuckled. “No. I’m just saying that although we’ve had our differences, you can trust me in this matter. If one of the board members is doing something underhanded, that’s bad news any way you look at it.”
It felt like a triumph when she started talking. “Noar strikes me as unusually obstructionist, not just as it relates to my project here, but in terms of handing overanyinformation about Morneau. I’ve spent weeks trying to extract data from him to no avail, then I stumbled on him having a one-on-one meeting with Daniel Hauser. It made me suspicious in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. I did some digging and found that Daniel’s shares came from his aunt, and that his aunt was a close friend of the late queen.”
“All true.” Matteo could have told her that and saved her the digging, but fine.
“So I asked Mrs. Hauser if I could pay her a visit. I said I wanted to talk to previous board members as part of my work. I didn’t even have to ask about Daniel. She came right out with it, told me the moment we sat down that he was in the process of selling his shares to Noar. They had clashed over it, and she was upset. She hadn’t known if she should go to the king, or to the rest of the board.”
“What does all this mean?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“All right. I do not, as previously established, hold Noar in high regard, but let’s think this through. So he has the Hauser shares, or soon will. It’s not as if they’re even close to being a controlling share.”
“Right. You’re right.” She nodded—a little too vehemently.
“But?” he prompted.
“You’re going to think I’m paranoid.” She was back to staring out her window. He could practically see the wheels turning in her mind.
“I’m not going to think that. Your first hunch proved correct, did it not?” He wanted to see what she was seeing.
“What if Noar has been running the company down so it’s worth less?” she asked. “And now that he has shares, he’ll stop being useless, and run up the company’s value?”
“But it’s a private company. It doesn’t trade on an exchange. Shares are worth what we say they are.” He thought, anyway. But he wasn’t an expert.
“Yes and no. Even if a company isn’t privately traded, it still has value that can be assessed in more or less objective terms. There are accepted inputs, formulas we can use. We know that in Morneau’s case, its value has gone down. When we look at five years ago versus two years ago, for example, it’s decreased by fourteen percent. And even if that figure isn’t perfect, we’re looking at the same things at the two points in time, using the same inputs to arrive at our starting and ending numbers—it’s an apples-to-apples comparison. So we can say with confidence that Morneau’s value has gone down. We’ve been attributing that to the decline in demand and/or increasing inefficiencies of process. I’m here to sort that out, and to address those factors to the extent that I can. And I have no doubt those factors have contributed.”
“But perhaps Noar has also contributed?” And if so, how much?
And more importantly, how would his meddling—or lack of it—affect the looming layoffs?
She shrugged. “I can’t seem to get anyone to give me last year’s valuation. Or the raw numbers so I can do it myself.”
Why was the idea of Ms. Delaney doing a bunch of math in order to single-handedly calculate the value of Morneau so . . . stirring? He could picture her holed up in her room at the Owland Spruce, wearing those ridiculous pajamas that were nowhere near warm enough for an Eldovian winter, surrounded by spreadsheets. Or perhaps not spreadsheets. Perhaps she used some kind of specialist accounting software that made her computer screen look like it belonged on the bridge of a starship. Perhaps—
But that was not the point here. “This is an interesting theory. Might it also explain why Noar was being so beastly about your being here? Because he didn’t want your work to turn things around too soon? Before he had the shares in hand?”
“You thought he was being beastly?” She seemed oddly cheered by the prospect.
