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No fucking idea.
* * *
Liam
Stumbling out of bed,I headed for the coffee machine. The clock on the oven said eleven o'clock.
I loaded a pod and started the machine.
It had taken forever to fall asleep last night. At four in the morning, I had finally given in and taken one of the sleeping pills I'd relied on after losing Roberta. That did the trick.
I put an ice cube into the coffee cup. In a few seconds this would cool it enough for me to chug and start a second.
My phone powered up with missed calls from Josh and Veronica, no doubt wondering why I wasn't in yet. I didn't bother to listen; instead I punched out a text to Veronica saying I'd be in after lunch.
Then I composed the harder one; the one to Amy.
ME: You are released from your consulting
I washed down two Advil from the cupboard with the last of my coffee. It was a bright, sunny day outside, opposite my disposition. I prepared a second cup of coffee and took it out on the patio.
Yesterday's sports section was still open on the table. The top story was some idiot sportswriter wanting to rehash the Patriotsspygatescandal from a few years ago, as if it was the ultimate unfairness. Our team had been caught spying on another in 2007, learning their defensive signals for a competitive advantage. It was clearly illegal, but Boston, being such a sports-crazy town, was full of people who didn't believe it really happened, like this jerk in the paper. It'd been over a decade ago, and he still couldn't let it go. The idiot probably thought the moon landings were faked as well.
The gears in my head turned slowly this morning. It took me several minutes to realize the parallel. I slowly sipped my coffee and mulled the possibility.
What if Team Winterbourne was spying on us? It could explain everything. I’d personally fucked up our Springbok chances by fighting with Amy, but each of our other failures in the last six months could be explained if Winterbourne was bugging us.
At first I’d thought we were just operating in a crowded space and losing the deals by cautiously underbidding. But losing every one to Winterbourne didn’t stack up with that hypothesis. The odds were too great.
That little redhead who followed me around was probably part of it. It could be more elaborate corporate espionage. They might have put a tracker on my car.
Shit.
Our phones could be bugged. It had happened to a firm in New York almost a decade ago, and that kind of surveillance had only become easier since then with miniature cameras and microphones——all the new techno-wizardry.
A half-year ago, we'd been out of our offices for a week around the holidays, having new carpeting installed. It would've been the perfect opportunity for them to install bugs in our building, and the timeline matched up as well. That was right when things had started to go south.
I need an expert for this.
* * *
Amy
The problem was intractable.I’d looked at it eleven different ways, and nothing worked. We couldn’t take the Winterbourne money——Liam would sue us and win. Lighthouse wasn’t interested, and we’d exhausted our list of other potential investors. Woolsey at the bank was no help.
Tiffany’s would run out of money before long if we didn’t cut back our orders for raw materials, but that would cripple our growth. And the halted growth would doom our chances to raise additional capital with any reasonable terms.
A little before lunch, the knock came on my door. I wished I could hide for the rest of the day, but I wasn’t going to be so lucky.
“Come in,” I said reluctantly.
Grace bounded into my office. “You won’t believe the call I just got from the bank,” she said, her eyes twinkling. Grace was easily excited, so it didn’t mean much.
I wasn’t up for games this morning. “What?”
She waited for me to guess, but gave up after a short pause. “The money arrived at the bank.”
“Come again? We were supposed to sign the papers at the escrow office later today, right?”
