Chapter 104: Day Four
"Day Four," she said. "Ask the Hacker what she has been hiding from VeilWard’s board for eleven years."
"Yes."
"Sit down."
He sat on the couch.
She sat in the desk chair, turned it to face him, and did not cross her legs.
"VeilWard Media Holdings is publicly owned. Twelve seats on the board. I hold three. My mother held two before she died. The seven seats I do not hold are held by people I have been quietly outbidding on every executive vote that has come through the table for eleven years. I have not won the votes. I have made the votes expensive."
"Why?"
"Because the executive table that decides who sits in the seven SSS chairs is not the Guild executive table. The Guild table is twelve voters. Five of those twelve voters sit on the VeilWard board. If I had won the votes, the executives would have noticed I was the bidder. By losing the votes expensively, I made it look like there was a buyer I was racing, and I made that buyer look like Mitsurugi. The Mitsurugi family has spent eleven years cleaning up after a buyer who does not exist. I have spent eleven years building leverage against the five voters by knowing every motion they have failed to pass."
"Why?"
"Because your father told me to."
She paused.
"He didn’t tell me to build the leverage. He told me there would be a night I would need to deliver a vote that the executives could not unmake. The vote was going to come from a board I had not sat on yet. He told me to find a way to sit on it. I sat on it. I built the leverage. I have not delivered the vote yet. The vote is for Day Sixteen."
"What does the vote do?"
"It removes one executive from the table during the operation. The one who would have voted to kill you on Day Sixteen. Without my vote, the Guild executive count goes from twelve to eleven for sixty seconds. In those sixty seconds, your father does what he is going to do. After the sixty seconds, the executive comes back. By then it does not matter."
"You’re going to remove an executive for sixty seconds."
"I am going to remove him. Not kill him. Remove him from the channel. He will be in a private meeting that has been arranged for him by a holding company he believes is owned by Mitsurugi but which is owned by me. He will not be able to leave the meeting in time to vote. The meeting will be very pleasant. He will not know what he missed until he is back at the table the next day."
"What if the meeting fails?"
"It will not fail." He sat with it, and she watched him sit with it.
"You’ve been planning this since you were twenty-six."
"Yes."
"You let everyone think you wanted me because of the stream."
"I wanted you because of the stream. The stream was the cover for what I wanted you for, which was to be alive on Day Sixteen. The two were not separate for me. I do not know how to separate them now."
He faced her, and she did not turn away.
"Kimmely," he said. "Why did you keep the recording?"
She knew which one he meant and answered without pretending not to know.
"Because I was twenty-six years old when your father walked across a ballroom and dropped a sixteen-day clock on me, and I had been carrying the clock for eight years before I saw you on a stream in a motel in a sector I had never been to. The recording is from the night I realized which son. I was twenty-eight hours into being right about which son. I was not in my best mind. I kept the recording because I wanted a thing that could survive my panic. It has. I have used it once. On Soma. To prove who you were to him on a night he was three steps away from killing you."
"You used it on Soma."
"In the bar. The night with the bourbon. The recording got played for him at three-fourteen in the morning over a glass he left unfinished. He walked out of that room alive, and so did you. You never saw that part. That does not make it less real."
Caleb held still.
"That’s why he extracted me later."
"That is why he extracted you. He was checking the recording matched the body. He decided it did. He has been on your side since the bar."
She got up.
She brought him a glass of water from a small fridge under the desk. She did not touch his hand when she gave it to him.
He drank. She sat back down.
"There’s a last thing."
"Yes."
"I’m not asking for anything from you on Day Sixteen. I am asking for one thing on Day Five. Your father has scheduled you to confront Vance at the disposal yard tomorrow night. I want to be on the channel when you do it. I will not interfere. I will not speak. I want to hear it because Vance was the first man on the eleven-name list who I cleared as honest, and if he turns out to have been positioned by someone else, I have eleven years of work to redo. I need to hear what he says with my own ears, not through a filter."
"Okay."
"You will not see me again until Day Sixteen. The next time you do, you should bring something I can use."
"What kind of thing?"
"You’ll know what it is. You always do."
She walked him to the elevator.
She did not touch him on the way out.
He took in the photograph on her desk as he passed it.
It was a photograph of his father.
Marcus was thirty-one in the picture. He was standing in front of a charity-gala backdrop holding a glass of something clear. He was smiling at the camera like a person who had just walked across a ballroom thirty seconds earlier to drop a sixteen-day clock on a girl too young to know what she was being handed.
The girl was not in the photograph.
She had taken it.
