Page 14 of Billionaire Corruption

My father nodded. “He was ill, from the journey, and stumbling around the port, trying to find his bearings. He knew nobody, had nowhere to go. Then he was robbed, someone hit him over the head, stole all his money. The blow stunned him only for a few seconds, long enough for the thief to take his money. He got up to see the person running away. It was a woman. He tried running after her, but she disappeared into the crowd.”

He took a breath. “He had nothing, in a strange city. He wandered the streets, with no money for food or shelter, hungry and sick. By chance, he saw a dog licking what turned out to be blood, running down into a gutter. He followed the trail of blood and discovered a butchery in one of the side streets. He hung around, biding his time, and managed to steal some meat. That kept him going for a while.”

“Raw meat?” I pulled a face.

My father glared at me.

“You have no idea what it is to be starving, poor, desperate. Your generation has had everything handed to it, given to it. The best school, the finest education money can buy and what do you do with it?”

“So, the point of this story, is, what exactly?” I tried to stay calm.

My father, on the other hand, was getting angry.

“The point, you bloody child! The point is….” My father was shaking with anger, then he took a deep breath. When he spoke again, his voice was full of contempt, and icy cold.

“You do what it takes, to stay alive. To live another day. Whatever it takes.”

He sat down on the leather couch facing me.

“My grandfather always said, you try to live another day. And then another. And the one after that.”

He leaned back into the seat. “He never lost that sense of survival, the knowledge that it could all be taken away from him at any moment. He trusted nobody, did no-one any favors.”

I recalled that my father said his grandfather was a hard man, who never spent money on houses or cars. It was only once he passed away, at the age of seventy-two, that his family discovered the millions in the bank, which he kept for rainy days. His four children, among them my grandfather, had always thought they were poor, that there was no money for expensive schools or clothes or holidays. The four children had shared a room growing up, two bunk beds filling the small room, and constantly had to hear how tight money was. My grandfather ran the pubs and my father had grown up in bars, surrounded by hard men who spent their lives drinking and lamenting their fate.

“We McKinneys make our own fate, you hear? We don’t let others decide our future.”

I wondered if my dad was perhaps a little drunk. He tended to become emotional when he was drinking.

“Are you still in here?” my mother knocked on the door and peeped inside.

“For goodness sakes, I’m about to serve the hors-d’œuvres!”

“We’re coming, we’re coming,” my father said, getting up from the couch.

I got up with him and we joined the rest of the party.

Elise looked at me as I came into the sitting room.

“What was that all about?” she whispered to me as soon as she could.

I shrugged off her question, but my father’s words did stay with me. I pictured the New York harbor as it must have been around the turn of the century, a cold and unfriendly city to an Irishman with no money to his name.

I wondered what else he’d had to do to survive. I remember stories of how he washed glasses and swept bar floors before working his way up to barman and finally owner, saving all his money until he could buy his first establishment. Perhaps, the business world had not changed that much. We had electric cars and smartphones, but there were still people trying to rob us, take our money and run.

I had to find a way of stopping Daniel or protecting myself.

The idea of going to prison was preposterous. This was business, Ladden Ltd. did what every other big company and organization did. We had a firm of accountants who made sure the numbers added up the way they should, and we had received clean audits every year. This involved some clever accounting, sometimes, sure, but it was common practice around the world. Moving money to offshore accounts, spreading it out, writing it off as certain expenses was par for the course. There had been a few payments, off the books, in my personal account but I had taken care of them, moving the money around to ensure it could not be traced.

I had no idea why they were coming after us as aggressively as they were.

I had a feeling Brock knew something though.

As soon as I was able to talk to my father again, I asked him who he had played golf with the day he was on the course with the chairman.

“What?” My father looked at me like he didn’t know what I was talking about.

“I’m assuming you were four on the course?” I said.

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