Page 22 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“He asked for the ports and called it peace.”

“And you said?”

“I complimented his cardiologist.”

Lev drives a block in silence. “So… War, then. Eventually.”

“Eventually. He won’t move while the succession looks settled. He’ll probe.” I watch the city slide past. “Drive to the office. I want the Meridian Atlantic files on my desk tonight.”

Because the second matter of the day is worse than the first, and the second matter is my son.

It’s taken Zurich’s forensic man nine days to unwind what the woman with the folio pointed at in twenty minutes, and tonight the picture completes itself on my desk while the building empties below me.

Meridian Atlantic Services.

A subsidiary with a letterhead and no employees, invoicing our own logistics arm for consulting no one performed, and being paid, always on time. It sums that then walked offshore through two more shells and came home as dividends into an account in my son’s name.

Embezzlement, I assumed. Vanity money, the boy skimming his inheritance out of impatience. Squalid, familiar, survivable.

It isn’t embezzlement. The embezzlement is the wrapping paper.

The pattern is in the freight records, laid beside the invoices. For three years, containers moving on our cleanest routes, our bonded carriers, our above-reproach customs lanes, have carried consignments our own manifests describe in the vaguest permissible language. Machine parts. Textiles. Consolidated freight.

Each vague consignment correlates with a payment into Meridian Atlantic within the week. The payments originate, after the shells are unwound, from accounts Zurich’s man has flagged with a single handwritten word.

Sokolov.

Someone routed Alexei Sokolov’s product through my clean lines. The one thing that makes our company look legitimate. And my son signed the paperwork.

Carrier authorizations, vague manifests, whatever slid across his desk, because every signature kept the dividends flowing into the account that paid for the apartment, the tailor, the model’s earrings, the champagne fountain.

Alexei sat across from me this afternoon offering to buy my ports with my own money, and he’s been renting them for three years at a price my son set.

The question is what Klaus knew. Is he a traitor or a fool?

Did he know whose freight rode our lanes? Did he take the money with open eyes, and sell his father’s house to his father’s enemy for an allowance? Or did he enjoy what kept him rich without knowing and never once wondered why a consulting firm with no consultants paid him so damn well?

A traitor I could deal with. There are procedures for traitors, old ones. A fool is worse. It means the rot was stupidity. There’s no fixing stupid.

I don’t know which verdict I’m praying for.

The security console on my desk chirps. Badge activity, after-hours protocol, my own rule. I glance at it expecting a cleaner.

RIDER, D. Archive room, sublevel two. Just after midnight.

She’s in the paper crypts, alone. A very dedicated EA. It’s a pity my son couldn’t muster one-tenth of the same devotion toward the empire that carries his name.

I take the elevator down.

Sublevel two smells of paper and cold concrete. The archive room runs long and narrow under fluorescent tubes, steel shelving to the ceiling, and I find her mid-aisle, shoes off, standing on a rolling step stool, wrestling a banker’s box off a high shelf with a laptop balanced on the shelf edge and a pen in her teeth. She hasn’t heard the door.

“Miss Rider.”

She startles, box tipping. I cross and catch it one-handed and set it on the cart, and now we’re standing close in a narrow aisle at midnight. She takes the pen out of her mouth, and the air scorches.

I remember what it felt like to be in that mouth, and now, I’m jealous of the pen.

“You scared the hell out of me.” Her whisper is furious. “Why are you lurking in my archive?”