Yesterday

Suddenly, I'm not the half the man I used to be
There's a shadow hanging over me,
Oh, yesterday came suddenly

 

“Do we have a plan?” Trixie asked as she watched the financial files finished the copy sequence to her flash drive.

“Yes, I think so. You’re handling your guy and I’m handling my ex-guy, and for now we’re letting your partner handle her cousin.” Beth gave her a weak smile.

“You’re sure that’s the best way?”

“No, I’m not sure,” Beth said slowly. “But it’s a way.”

“Okay, Remember, neither of us is saying anything to anyone at the CIB about finding the technology, or anything else until we figure out how this case has been compromised.” Trixie gave the flash drive a yank and then secured it in zippered compartment in her purse. If all went well, she’d have plenty of time to meet Jim for dinner and ask him about the files.

“Agreed.” Beth leaned forward to shut down the laptop computer. “There is one more thing …”

Trixie looked up. “What?”

“I’d consider it a personal favor if you could persuade Mrs. Langham to loan me the Lille Bette for a few hours.”

“Why?”

Beth pointed to the laptop. “I need to dispose of a few things.”

Trixie’s eyes widened. “You're going to throw that overboard? You realize if it’s ever recovered there’s a good chance they’ll be able to recover the hard drive. You’re much better off disintegrating the drive and then –” She stopped. Biting her bottom lip she gave Beth a hard look. “Things? You’re not throwing that laptop overboard. Exactly what things do you need to dispose of?”

“It’s better if you don’t know.”

Trixie’s PDA beeped to let her know she had a message. She called it up and stared at the photo that Sean and Amy had discovered of Jared Somer outside Allison’s funeral. Slowly the pieces were coming together.

“Beth,” she said slowly. “What happened between you and Jared Somer?”

 

 

The reputation of Vespucci's Ristorante Italiana as one of the area's favorite culinary establishments had been well-earned. The owners had spared no pains in establishing a pleasant setting, hiring an attentive staff, and providing superb cuisine. Privacy abounded, with discreet booths for business discussions as well as other, more personal, liaisons. On this particular evening, Mitsy Thornhill arrived at Vespucci’s to meet Mike King for a discussion of Kingston’s failing balance sheet. She ordered a glass of wine to help bolster her confidence, mentally adding the robust wine list to its tally of assets. The wine helped bolster her confidence as she led the conversation about Kingston's approaching collapse.

After draining her second glass of wine, she hesitated and covered the glass with her hand when Mike picked up the bottle to refill her goblet. “Are you sure you understand what I've told you?”

“Yep, it's pretty clear. Kingston is financially insolvent. Unless I make some drastic changes, in approximately ninety days, the only recourse will be to file for bankruptcy.” He shrugged and lifted another forkful of pasta to his mouth.

“Don't you care?” She'd watched him carefully throughout the evening. After realizing that he did indeed understand the precarious situation of Kingston, she could not understand why he didn't seem to be the least bit upset.

“Not really,” he replied.

“There are employees who will lose their jobs,” she explained. “That includes your relatives, your mother and sister and --”

“Tinsley Gaitley is not my sister!” His fork clattered against the pasta bowl before landing soundlessly on he cloth tablecloth.

“Margaret Gaitley is your mother.”

He picked up his fork and put it back down twice before answering. “My mother analyzes chess moves, can tell you the value of pi to over thirty decimal places, and modifies tablet computers to run on solar power. She can find another job.”

“If she's that talented, then why is Kingston in so much trouble? Why won't she work with me to cut expenses?”

He took a deep breath and expelled it slowly. His lips pursed and his eyes narrowed. “When mother looks at a balance sheet all she sees are numbers. She could tell you what they all add up to, if there is any rounding, and she’ll spot an error immediately. While she can tell you if there is a profit or a loss, she can't tell you why. She understands the math—you spent more than you made. But she’s clueless about people. She can't make the connection required to equate math to business and managing people. She understands if your costs of goods sold are too high, but can't make the leap to why the revenue numbers might be down.” He paused and shrugged as he tried to explain his mother's business weakness. “She has no instinct as to how to handle people, she only wants to tell you the outcome of dozens of scenarios. She wants to try each and every scenario, but can't understand which is the right choice for the business.”

Mitsy knit her brow, thinking how much easier the business concepts seemed to her than being able to calculate the formula for pi in her head. 3.14 was and always would be 3.14, anything more than a formula carried to three decimal places, or a tenth of a cent, was down in the weeds. “What do you want me to do?” she finally asked.

Once again Mike shrugged. “Doesn’t sound like it matters what you do. Can you turn a company around in ninety days?”

Mitsy carefully considered her answer. It would be insane to try, but she remembered the stories she’d heard going all the way back to her preschool days, and what her parents experienced in turning around Control & Venture when they’d taken over from her uncle. It was in her blood to try.

“Yes. If you give me free rein to make changes, I can turn it around.” Her voice sounded much more confident than she felt.

“Okay, then. Go for it.” He moved his hand in a circular motion. “Turn it around.” He turned back to his bowl of steaming marinara.

“Just like that?”

He stopped with a forkful of pasta in midair on his way to his mouth. “I thought you said you could do it, what’s the problem?”

“You’re going to have to let people know that I’m in charge, for one thing,” she said. “For another, I’m going to start letting people go. Including your fami ---” She stopped and corrected herself based on his previous reaction. “That includes both Tinsley and your stepfather. It may even come down to your mother. Is that going to be okay with you?”

“My mother is off-limits,” he replied. “You can fire everyone and anyone you want, but you and my mother are the last people standing before we shut the doors. Capisce?”

She nodded. “I'm going to need to consult a lawyer.”

“Okay.” He continued to eat.

“A good friend of mine is an excellent attorney, Charlie Prescott. He recently started his own firm and I think he might give me a break. If he can't help us out, then I'm certain he can give me some good advice on who we might use. Whoever it is, they're going to need to understand employment laws in New York as well as intellectual property rights, patents, and copyright. Kingston has some valuable patents and hopefully we'll be able to continue to file for some more. It may mean ...”

“Mitsy,” he finally held up a hand and stopped her. “Hire whoever you need. Do whatever it takes. I don't care.”

She leaned back in her chair and watched as he resumed eating. She wasn't sure at all that she'd ever met anyone quite like Mike King.

 

 

“Whatever you say, boss,” Sean pressed the button to disconnect the phone and with a puzzled look on his face he turned to his partner.

“Belden wants us to hang around for a few minutes. She also said to watch for an important fax coming in the next few minutes.”

“Did you say a fax?” Amy was surprised now. “No one uses fax anymore.”

Sean shrugged. “That's what she said.”

To emphasize the words they both picked up on the familiar whirring of the office fax machine and turned to look towards the unit. If he remembered correctly it was the only fax they'd ever received. He crossed the room and picked up the paper, frowning as he read the message.

“What's it about?” Amy asked.

Sean placed a finger on his mouth signifying that Amy should be silent. “It's just the instructions from the Guggenheim,” he said. “They'll be running point on security at the fundraiser so we won't be attending in an official capacity.” Shaking his head back and forth and keeping his finger raised, he caught her puzzled look and beckoned for her to cross the room. “Nothing new for us, right?”

“Right,” Amy replied hesitating as she started reading the fax. Her eyes widened as she took in the words clearly written by their boss.

“How long did Belden say it would take her to get here?” Amy asked choosing her words carefully. “I'm hungry.”

“We can order in if you'd like,” Sean said. “Chinese?”

Amy wrinkled her nose. “We had Chinese for lunch, remember. What about a pizza?”

“Sure, call it in to Sabitino's and I'll run down to the corner and pick it up.”

“Everything on it okay with you?” Amy asked, picking up the phone.

“Everything,” he confirmed.

 

 

By unspoken agreement they’d halted further conversation as the waiter removed their dinner plates. After Mitsy refused dessert and Mike ordered tiramisu, the conversation resumed.

“Mike, if your mother is challenged by business matters, how did Kingston survive for so long?” Mitsy finally asked.

“Dad,” he replied succinctly. “Dad was the business brains, but he hated it. He always wanted to merge with FireKing. That’s my cousin Maggie's company.”

“Why didn't he?”

“He didn't get along with her husband, Richard Hoffman. First, they started having some differences, and then Dad died. After that ...” he stopped and drained his glass of wine before continuing.

“One of the reasons it was so easy to walk away from Kingston is Dad never really ran it like a business. When Dad ran things, everything worked, but I don’t have any idea what he did to make it work. All I ever cared about was writing software programs. Even when I was working with ---” he stopped abruptly and shook his head. It was obvious that some parts of his family's past were still hard to talk about.

“That’s what you have me for,” Mitsy offered after the moment of awkward silence had passed. “The business side of things is all that I do know, and trust me, I know it upside down, backwards and inside out. If you want to try for a turnaround, we can do it—I can do it. If you want to sell out to your cousin, I can make that happen. Even if you just want a graceful exit from the business altogether, I can do that too, but don’t let it all just blow up on you. After all it is King-ston Technologies, and you’re Michael King, the CEO and owner.”

Mitsy considered the arrival of the dessert perfect timing. She wanted Mike to chew on that particular thought while he enjoyed the delicious Italian treat. Anything to keep the business from being an utter failure was a win in her book. Besides, the last thing she wanted for her own career was to have her one experience outside of the family business to be a failure. She needed Mike to succeed in whichever option he chose.

 

 

Sean beat Trixie back to the office with the pizza by less than five minutes. She waved off their offer to share in their impromptu dinner and dumped a sack full of cell phones onto the conference room table. “These are the replacements,” she informed her team. “Did you finish everything?”

Sean and Amy both nodded. “Our BLISS units are in multiple pieces and flushed down every toilet I could access within a ten block radius,” Sean advised.

“I swept the office for bugs,” Amy added. “It's clean.”

“You're sure?” Trixie asked.

“Positive. I even swept Charlie's offices and the offices on each side of us.”

“You did all that?” Sean looked at her in admiration. “Good thinking.”

“The ceilings are dropped but still fireproofed so I'm thinking that anyone above us or below us wouldn't have any chance planting a device that we couldn't detect.”

She reached for one of the burn phones that Trixie had placed on the conference room table. “Are we really going to be using these?”

“Yes, let’s get the numbers we need programmed. I have to meet Jim soon.”

“You remembered to pay cash, right?” Sean asked as he picked up the phone. He felt a pang of loss for his BLISS unit. These were old school with nowhere near the technology and functionality their Government issued PDAs contained.

“Cash,” she nodded. “I ended up buying them at several different places as well. We need to change them again in a couple of days.”

“How are you going to explain your changing phone to your friends,” Amy asked. “Won’t they get suspicious?”

Trixie snorted. “They’re already suspicious. But I’ll take two of them, one for personal use and one for work. Still do your best to keep everything off the grid. Did you disconnect our computers?”

Amy nodded. “What are we going to do about working on the case?”

Trixie grimaced. “We'll have to figure that out, but unless I'm wrong ... we're just about done. We just need to get the proof.”