I feel the enormity of the situation settle on his shoulders and wish I could remove it. That’s a burden no one needs to carry alone.
Octavius reaches into his suit pocket and pulls out a thumb drive, looking at it for a moment before holding it out to Payton, who is closest to him.
“I have every email, text, recorded phone conversation, and in-person meeting saved on that. I also have details of the explicit plan of attack and how it was orchestrated to look like an accident but could be peeled back to reveal all the ways you were negligent with the slightest digging. It’s all there, and I know who you can take it to who will actually act on it without four years of investigations needed.”
“How did you get all of that? Were you in on it from the beginning?” Zander asks, his gray eyes looking steely and accusing, the set of his mouth hard.
“I was brought in after the mine collapse in South Africa. I was just a partner on some other investments and projects, but they wanted me to get close to you. I didn’t know what was happening before that, but they gave me access to the information. I needed some context for what was going on, and they were very accommodating. I would never have gone along with what they did, no matter my feelings.”
Payton stands from his chair and rounds Hayes’s desk, pulling out a laptop and plugging in the thumb drive. “This better not be some elaborate way to infect our network with a virus,” he grumbles. He taps the keyboard a few times, his hands deftly moving through commands and pulling up documents from the drive while his face is bathed in the light from the laptop screen. “There’s enough information on here to take the four years you estimated to go through it all. Shit.”
“Won’t you be implicated in this right along with your partners?” I ask, worry lacing my words.
“I have plans in place for that inevitability, but I have to go down with the orchestrators or it will look like I was the leak all along. Even if the main conspirators go down, it doesn’t mean I would be safe with that target on my back. It’s a necessary means to an end and gets me out of this fucked up partnership.” There is relief laced in his words, and his willingness to both come clean to avoid this catastrophe and go down with those who put this plot together feels very truthful.
“And that’s where we come in for you, is it?” Hayes says. “You want to secure your future before you get raided by the FBI and your career options become extremely limited.”
“The best thing you can do is plan for every possibility, right? Why stay shortsighted when I can take my future in hand now?”
“You’re complicit to the atrocity that already took place in South Africa. Why stop now when you could see us taken down for good?” Hayes asks, removing his arm from my shoulders and leaning forward.
“I never wanted anyone to get hurt.” Octavius leans back into the chair and scrubs his hands across his face. “I’ll do anything to make sure they don’t get to repeat the loss of life and destruction, including letting you assholes know about it with enough time to step in and keep it from happening, even if it means I’ll be dragged down with them.”
“What exactly is planned for tomorrow at the Georgia mines? Are they going to blow something up, or is it more insidious than that?” Zander asks, not bothering to address Octavius’s comments.
“There will be a few steps skipped in the safety processes, a few charges left in opportune places, and a coordinated attack to shut down the systems in place at the mines. It would be complete devastation if they were successful, both in shutting down your operations here stateside and in drawing a big spotlight onto every operation you hold the world over. Two industrial accidents in the span of a few weeks isn’t a coincidence.”
“He’s actually downplaying the scope of what is really planned,” Payton says absently from the desk. He’s scrolling furiously, the light of the screen playing across his face in waves as his eyes skate back and forth taking in the details. “There are several layers of plans if this one fails to bring about the outcome they want, each escalating in severity.”
“And all they have to do is turn over that information to the right authorities and it will be stopped before anyone can get hurt?” I ask, my hands clenched around Hayes’s arm. The last thing I want is for them to act too slowly and see innocent people hurt. Again.
“You probably want to send some trusted people to the operations as soon as you can to make sure every last interloper is removed and do a top-to-bottom systems check to ensure nothing was left behind as a sneaky surprise. The planted workers came from Gage Geological and were unceremoniously let go when you acquired the company, so there were plenty of hard feelings toward you that didn’t need to be coaxed out. There should be an exhaustive list of every person that was placed at one of your holdings.”
“Found that and already emailed it to the right people at headquarters to have their access cut off and start the removal process tonight,” Payton says.
I look out the window at the black night dotted with city lights. It’s nearly midnight and they have more than their share of work to do before sunrise to ensure whatever is planned can be stopped. I’m exhausted, but I don’t want to leave Hayes’s side. The mere thought causes me to yawn, which I try to hide by covering my mouth.
“Let’s get you to bed, angel,” Hayes says quietly. “You have a full day ahead of you and don’t have to sit through this mess.”
“I don’t want to go home, or to Mama’s,” I whisper back, while Payton tells Zander more of what he’s finding on the thumb drive.
“We’ll sleep here tonight. I don’t want you too far away, either.”
“I’m so sorry this is happening.”
“You don’t have anything to apologize for, it’s me who should be begging you to forgive me for putting business before you tonight. I’m sorry, angel.”
I shake my head. “Don’t be. There’s no way you could have anticipated this. And some things just need your attention right then and there, no matter what else you have going on.”
Despite the stress of the situation, he manages to smile for me now. “Let’s get you to bed.”
twenty-nine
Hayes
Ittookallnight,but we managed to use Rex’s information to stop another accident.
Now we wait to see if there are any surprises he didn’t know about that could still fuck us over. We shut down the mines, pulled all personnel, and created a buffer zone just to be on the safe side. Zander and Payton brought in the SVPs while I was making sure Paige was comfortable, and then we went to work. We contacted the FBI and the police in the areas where our mines are located, shared all we knew, and pulled every trusted Olympus employee out of bed in the middle of the night to work on our own housekeeping. We’ll be dealing with this situation for a long time but having the ball rolling to ensure we don’t have rats within our organization, chewing holes in our holdings and making trouble, is a good start.