Page 130 of The Session

“Her? She’s a lot more involved in this than you realize. Tru has her angle. She’d like to see herself in Max’s place. Trust me—I’ve known her since she was a baby. She resents the fact that Max gets most of the credit for her father’s work.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Mark asked.

“Not everyone wants the same thing. Some of us just want something to be done. Sometimes we’re happy to do it through other people,” Marnie replied.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s not important right now. We need to move, but we don’t want to rush into a trap.”

“What can I do?”

“Keep playing along. Max wants you to impress everyone at the CEO event. You need to show that you can sell. We need to get you an official position inside Summit to strengthen your position. To do that, we have to make the case that you’re not just Max’s bastard. That will take executive committee sign-off,” she explained.

“Who are they?”

“Sort of a check and balance on Max. Basically, the people who have invested in Summit Strategies. Aside from Max, Arnold, and Nathan, there are four other people on the committee: Calder Voss, Tommy Park, Jonathan Kincaid, and Safid Al-Rashid.”

“Are they trustworthy?” Mark asked.

“Maybe Kincaid. The others are fair game. Nathan is probably already working with one or more of them.”

“To use the leak to harm Max?”

“To make him look like a liability, at the very least. Then Morris can use that as a wedge,” Marnie said.

“What if we took his little play and turned it inside out?” Mark suggested.

“What do you mean?”

“Morris broke into the Vault and made it look like somebody else stole the files. That way, when the files leaked, the blame wouldn’t fall on him,” Mark recapped.

“Right,” Marnie affirmed.

“Can Morris get to Blaise Cutler right now?”

“Probably not. That part of the organization is directly under Max, and he’s been pretty protective of it.”

“Right now, we don’t want Nathan to know we’re onto him. He doesn’t know what we know—not for sure. He also doesn’t know what Blaise knows,” Mark added.

“The boy is a bit of an idiot,” Marnie said.

“True, which we can use to our advantage. Is there somebody you trust to feed Morris a warning? I mean, not something that looks like a warning, but somebody who can pass information to him,” Mark suggested.

“One or two. Maybe Michael Henley. He doesn’t work directly for us, but we use him a lot,” she said.

“What if somebody tells Henley that Blaise is insisting Morris was behind breaking into the Vault to steal the files—but we tell Morris we don’t believe it for a minute. We know Blaise is lying and saying anything he can to cover his tracks.” He thought for a moment. “We could even say that Blaise claimed he saw Morris’s laptop or heard him talking about the break-in—something to make Morris think twice,” Mark proposed.

“I’m not sure insiders would believe that. Morris didn’t need the files. He already had that information,” Marnie countered.

“That’s why I think it would work. It’ll make Morris look bad either way. And if he’s going to go into the executive committee to try to win people over, being accused of the leak wouldn’t be the best way to do it,” Mark argued.

“That could work,” Marnie replied. “You’ve been studying.”

“It’s pattern inversion from The Reality Equation. Invert, rotate—use their energy against them.”

“Sometimes I forget,” Marnie said, smiling. “Occasionally there’s a gold nugget in all that bullshit.”

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