Chapter 13
The instant Geri’d stepped off the elevator, before she’d even reached the boardroom, the taste of copper on the air turned her stomach.
The body was gone, at least. The blood? Not so much. It had congealed on the table and Eric’s chair, as well as Art and Quinn’s chairs. It had stained the wall and the carpet, leaving rust-colored smears here and near-black, coagulated pools there. The dark red splatters on the wall and ceiling remained exactly as they’d been yesterday.
It took work, but Geri managed to avoid throwing up. If anything, the macabre reminder of Eric’s murder drove her on; she was going to find a way out of this, and that started with assessing the landscape. Now was the perfect time, too, since Rich hadn’t come into the room yet. Neither had Quinn; Geri didn’t know what that was about, but she grabbed the opportunity while she had it.
Ostensibly trying to enjoy the view, she strolled up to one of the windows overlooking the western part of the island. The east ended abruptly just beyond the hotel, with sheer cliffs dropping about a hundred feet straight down. Not an ideal escape route for someone who didn’t know how to rappel and didn’t have a boat waiting for her.
Just north of the building, at the edge of what she could see from this particular window, was the airstrip, which seemed to run right along the water’s edge. She couldn’t see any aircraft or hangars, but maybe she’d have to sneak a look from another angle across the boardroom.
The western side of the island was more expansive than the east. Pale beaches ringed the coast right up to a dense tree line. The topography wasn’t steep or treacherous—some rolling hills, including a couple of higher ones in the middle of the island. The biggest issue was the thick jungle.
The island was long and narrow, with the northern and southern coasts fully visible while the westernmost end was somewhere beyond the horizon. Good. Even if the island was only twenty or thirty miles long, that meant there was enough distance that she could probably get away from the hotel’s signal jammers.
The beach would be easier to traverse, but wildly exposed. The jungle would provide cover, but there was no telling from here if it was passable on foot. And she still didn’t know if the venomous snakes existed, or if they were just a deterrent. Either way, the possibility of a snakebite sounded far less dangerous than staying here and waiting to join Eric.
Through the jungle, then, assuming the undergrowth was passable. If it slowed her down too much, she’d have to move on the beach, ideally close to the tree line for some cover. As far away from the building as she could get, she’d try her signal booster again and hope to connect with someone somewhere who could—
The boardroom door opened, and she whipped around.
Rich walked in with Quinn at his heels. Quinn’s eyes were downcast and he looked chastised; Geri wondered what had gone on between them before they’d come in here. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been good.
Rich still had his gameshow host persona in place, and he gestured at the bloody table. “If everyone could have a seat, please. We can get started.”
Everyone exchanged nauseated glances, and then obediently took their seats. Art and Quinn regarded their chairs uneasily before gingerly sitting down.
Rich took his place at the head or the table, though he remained standing. “Before we begin, some of you have approached me and insisted you’re here by mistake.” His gaze landed pointedly on Quinn, then Kit, then Kyle, before he swept it around the table at everyone. “Particularly those of you who’ve inherited your fortunes.”
Geri met Quinn’s eyes across the table. Then he dropped his gaze. Shit. What had Rich said to him before the meeting?
Their host began to pace, one hand behind his back and the other stroking his chin thoughtfully. “Many years ago, I went to school with a boy who was an heir to his family’s fortune. The company that had made his parents rich manufactured a variety of wood-burning stove. Simple enough, right?” He halted and faced the group again. “The problem was that this particular stove was banned by the EPA in the early 1980s. Apparently it leeched toxic gases into homes, and it was also a serious source of environmental pollution.”
Geri exchanged puzzled glances with Dan Woolman beside her.
“Not a problem for this boy’s father, though,” Rich said with a sardonic smile. “Because while his product couldn’t be used or sold in the United States, it was quite popular in other countries. Particularly in developing countries that didn’t have stringent environmental or health regulations.”
He rested his hands on the edge of the table and looked at each competitor in turn. “Forty years after his product was banned in the United States, his company is worth over one hundred million. The founder’s net worth, thanks to a number of investments fueled by that wealth, is north of two billion.” He narrowed his eyes. “The cost to the people who consumed his product? Difficult to estimate, but countries in which his stoves are popular have noticeably higher rates of—and fatalities from—several types of lung disease and neurological disorders. The environmental impact?” Rich waved a hand. “Impossible to say for sure, since his was hardly the only company to take advantage of the more relaxed regulations in those places.” He paused. “What we do know is that countries that have since banned his product have significantly lower levels of carbon dioxide and methane, particularly in rural and residential areas.”
Geri swallowed. Somewhere in her mind, her father’s voice, bellowed, “The damn EPA is costing us a fortune! Why the hell does it matter? Our equipment isn’t even used in the United States!”
She suppressed a shudder. At the time, it had made sense to her. After the horror show she’d been subjected to all night last night… Christ.
Rich wasn’t done yet, either. “My classmate chose not to get involved with his father’s company.” He quirked his lips and shrugged. “He always preferred the life of the leisure class—enjoying all the things the world has to offer the multimillionaire. Now, my classmate never worked a day in his life for his father’s company, but that company subsidized his existence as a decadent parasite. He traveled all over the world, tasted the finer things in life, and had a collection of Swiss timepieces worth as much as his yacht. And every penny of that”—he thumped his knuckle on the table—“came from the wallets of people simply trying to heat their homes, unaware that the cost of that heat was their health. Their children’s health.”
Everyone at the table shifted and squirmed, the creaking chairs giving away their otherwise subtle movements. Geri suddenly thought of her sister, whose only ambitions were to be beautiful, rich, and doted on by a rich husband. She had no interest in working on anything but her tan, and she made no apologies for that.
Is Annette on Rich’s radar?
Unaware of Geri’s heart thumping with renewed fear, Rich said, “My classmate never sold a single stove. He never installed a single one into a single home. But he lived a life of wealth and privilege built by those stoves.” He narrowed his eyes. “He didn’t actively participate in poisoning people or land, but he turned a blind eye to it and accepted the wealth that came from it. Was he innocent?” Rich shook his head. “Absolutely not.”
“Then why isn’t he here?” Alan demanded. “Are you just going to torture us because you have an ax to grind with—”
“My classmate is no longer anyone’s concern,” Rich said coolly. “The only question now is whether his heirs will grow up to be parasites like him, or if their humanity will shine through. If they’ll use that ill-gotten wealth to better the world, or if they’ll live in his blissful, spoiled ignorance funded by blood money.” He shrugged so flippantly, it made Geri’s neck prickle. “Nothing to be done there except wait and see.”
“Holy fuck,” Dan said in a harsh whisper. “You’re a serial killer .”
“Technically.” Rich shrugged again. Then he grinned. “I do appreciate the segue into the game’s next challenge, though.”
Oh, that didn’t sound good…
“Now that you all understand what this competition is about,” Rich said, “we’re going to get into the less friendly challenges.”
Geri gulped. Less friendly? Than one where the loser died a slow, agonizing death all over the boardroom floor?
“We like to call this”—Rich clicked the remote, and as he spoke, the words appeared in red on the big screen—“the Body Count Challenge.”
Everyone at the table exchanged puzzled and terrified glances.
“The young people these days are obsessed with the body counts of potential partners,” Rich said. On the screen, a video on the screen flashed through clips of twenty- and thirty-something men and women asking, “What’s your body count?” “What’s your body count?” “What’s your body count?”
Rich paused the video. “Of course, most people lie about it. Some people don’t want to be seen as being too promiscuous. Others want to sound more experienced than they are.” He chuckled in that way people did when they expected everyone in the room to do the same.
Uneasy laughter went around the table.
“To be blunt, I couldn’t give less of a fuck who any of you people have had sex with,” Rich declared. “Unless of course they were underage or otherwise didn’t give consent, in which case—well, karma has a way of catching up with people.”
He scanned the group, possibly searching for uneasy tells.
No one seemed to register on his radar. If they did, he didn’t let on.
“The body count I’m concerned with,” he said after a moment, “is the literal one.” He clicked the remote.
As soon as the image appeared, everyone in the room balked, turning away as they gasped or cursed.
It was a person of indeterminate age or gender in a hospital bed, with tubes and wires sticking out from every imaginable direction. Bags of fluid hung above them, and monitors earnestly recorded vitals that were, even to Geri’s untrained eye, weak. Bandages and tape covered huge areas of skin. What little skin was visible was almost as pale as the bedsheets.
Rich gestured at the image. “Can any of you guess why this poor individual is in this ICU?”
One by one, contestants shook their heads. Geri could hazard a few guesses—an accident? A serious illness?—but she was terrified to speak up.
“Mr. Keller.” Rich looked right at Art and pointed at the screen. “Is it possible this person overdosed on a medication? Or perhaps was unable to acquire the medication he needed because it was too expensive?”
Art gulped. “It… I… I suppose, yes?”
“Mmhmm.” Rich’s eyes flicked to Kit. “Ms. Mason. Is there a chance this could be pesticide exposure? Perhaps chemical burns? Cancer?”
Kit lost some color. “M-maybe?”
“Maybe indeed. Or…” Rich stroked his chin as if giving it some serious thought. He shifted his gaze to Dan Woolman. “A worker in a mine who’s inhaled too many particles of coal.” He looked at Geri. “A civilian wounded in a drone strike.” He moved on to Lynette. “Any of the above, thanks to political lobbying to prevent costly but effective regulations that would prevent such tragedies.”
Geri’s heart thundered in her chest. A chair squeaked as someone else fidgeted. She thought she heard someone whisper a prayer. Under any other circumstances, she’d have rolled her eyes at Rich’s self-righteous preaching. Today, she could still taste Eric Valentine’s blood with every breath, and she was too scared to be annoyed.
And admittedly, she saw his points. All of them.
“I’m not going to tell you what happened to this person,” Rich said. “Only that he died at the age of forty-five, leaving behind a wife and three kids who will never be able to pay for the multimillion dollar bill from his hospital stay.”
“Let us pay for it,” Charlie blurted out. “Any one of us can. Easily.”
“You can, yes.” Rich glared at him. “It’s pocket change for a man worth what you are. And yet, how many of you have ever eagerly volunteered to cover such a bill when your neck wasn’t on the line?”
No one responded. What could they say?
Geri pressed back in her chair, a mix of fear and shame knotting beneath her ribs.
“At any time,” Rich gritted out, “ any one of you could have spent a few hours—hell, twenty minutes—scrolling a site like GoFundMe. You could have changed the lives of thousands of people with a few clicks.” He paused, scanning the contestants. “I’ll tell you what—if you can prove that you’ve done exactly that, you can leave.” He gestured at the door. “I’ll have a plane ready on the airstrip to take you off the island and back to your home. All you have to do is show me proof that you’ve fulfilled more than five GoFundMes.” He raised his chin. “Any takers?”
“You won’t—” Paul hesitated, then with a mix of both timidity and defiance, he croaked, “You won’t just let us leave. Not after we watched you murder someone.”
“On the contrary.” Rich offered a frosty grin. “I’m just that confident that not one among you can claim this particular ticket off the island.” He looked from one person to the next again. “Or am I wrong?”
No one spoke up.
Rich gave a caustic laugh. “That’s what I thought. Now. For this challenge, I once again need a number from each of you. This time…” He grinned again. “I want your body count.”
The players exchanged puzzled glances before turning to him again.
Rich said, “Every one of you built your fortune on the backs of thousands if not millions of people. Every one of your bank balances is written in blood. The very least you could do is be aware of how many people contributed to that blood.” He paused. “And I would suggest you be honest in your assessments, because whoever’s guess is the farthest from reality, well.” He gestured at the vacant, bloody chair between Art and Quinn. “I don’t think I need to spell out what happens.”
The panic in the room was quiet but palpable, as if Geri could physically feel every person’s pulse skyrocketing as adrenaline shot through them.
“How can we even know what our…” Dan made a horrified face. “What our body count is?”
Rich looked him right in the eyes. “How can you continue to rake in money while turning a blind eye to how many lives are lost as a result?”
Dan blanched and gulped.
“By the time we’re finished here,” Rich growled, “you’ll all have a much better idea of the impact your companies—or your parents’ companies—have on the rest of the world.” Before anyone could protest, he gestured at Art. “Mr. Keller. Why don’t you go first?”
Art gaped. “I… Me?”
“Yes. You.”
The pharmaceutical tycoon’s eyes lost focus. The whole room was silent as he seemed to consider his answer. After several painful minutes had gone by, he offered up his guess, which was in the low five figures.
“I wanted the total body count,” Rich said coldly. “Not annual.”
Art stared at him, jaw slack. “That’s—my company is not murdering people. Are you insane?”
Rich shrugged. “Overdoses alone account for a few thousand per year, and—”
“My company is not responsible for people using our products incorrectly,” Art snapped.
Rich narrowed his eyes. “You are when you lobby against programs to prevent opioid addiction in between sending your representatives to doctors’ offices to push your products.”
Art paled.
“Similarly,” Rich said, “you are responsible when you buy the silence of families whose loved ones died as a result of reactions and interactions, and you keep that data quiet so it won’t damage sales.” He clicked the remote. “All told, Mr. Keller, you’ve undersold your company’s body count by forty-six percent.”
“What? How do we even know these numbers are accurate?” Art demanded. “Where are your sources? Prove it! I demand proof! ”
Rich shrugged. He went to a keyboard beside the large screen and tapped a few keys. When he was finished, dozens of PDFs were listed. He selected one at random and showed the results of an investigation into deaths as a result of being unable to afford medications.
Art scoffed. “Their insurance companies are the ones who deny them! Not us!”
Rich narrowed his eyes. “Are their insurance companies the ones who decide a particular chemo drug is twenty thousand dollars per pill?”
Art’s mouth opened and closed like a fish’s.
“Do insurance companies decide that emergency inhalers and epinephrin should be astronomically expensive?”
Art shifted in his chair. Then he looked around, and his spine straightened. “Why aren’t there any insurance executives here, though? Because we all know they stand in the way of more healthcare than—”
“Oh, I promise you,” Rich said evenly, “we haven’t forgotten about them. But today, the one in the hot seat is you.” He gestured at the screen again. “And your company—your greed —is the reason people die for want of medications to treat cancer, asthma, diabetes, anaphylaxis. The list goes on.” He leaned a hand on the table and glared harder at Art. “Your company manufactures a drug that treats liver cancer in children , and it costs patients over one million dollars per year. You can’t blame insurers for that, you absolute human piece of shit.”
Art stared at him, eyes huge and skin blanched.
“And let’s not also forget the mountains of pharmaceuticals that were not approved by the FDA, but your company continues to produce and sell.” Rich narrowed his eyes. “Would you like to tell the class”—he gestured at everyone else—“why you would continue to produce something you can’t sell?”
Art swallowed hard. “They’re… They’re sold in places with—”
“Speak up!” Rich barked.
Art jumped, then spoke a little louder. “They’re sold in places without as many regulations as the United States.”
“They are. And there are reams of data”—Rich flicked through several PDFs on the screen—“about people suffering and dying from your drugs for all the reasons the FDA refused to approve them. I have the proof of all that and more.” Rich pointed at the screen. “Your company is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, and I will happily walk everyone in this room through every single document detailing how and why that blood is on your hands. Would you like me to continue?”
Mute, Art shook his head.
“That’s what I thought. Moving on.”
Quinn’s family had made a fortune in real estate. Geri hadn’t thought there would be many deaths associated with that, but clearly she was wrong. Fortunately for Quinn, he hadn’t made that assumption; he’d guessed around a thousand, and Rich’s statistics said a little over twelve hundred. Most of those had been construction deaths over the years, but also suicides of underpaid employees as well as poverty, a lack of healthcare, and even a murder-suicide.
“Your father made sure one of his employees was screwed out of a workers’ comp claim,” Rich explained. “The employee was too disabled to work, and too poor to survive while he went through the system to get approved for disability. When he realized he couldn’t dig himself out of that hole, he shot his wife and kids, then himself.”
The story made Geri ill. From the shaking hand Quinn put over his mouth as his face turned green, he was long past that point.
The only relief, she suspected, was that he’d guessed close enough to remain ahead of Art and out of danger of elimination.
Charlie and Elena Simmons acquired their fortune came from the same place, so Rich had them both input their guesses before he revealed the real number. They both grossly underestimated their body count, with Charlie guessing substantially closer than his ex-wife. Elena had apparently been unaware that Charlie’s high tech empire included supply chains that went back to lithium and other rare earth mines, sweatshops, and child slave labor, all of which had resulted in deaths. They had both at least been aware that a few of the company’s stateside employees had been forced to work until they collapsed from dehydration or heat exhaustion, and several had died. A shameful number of employees been fired for missing too much work, resulting in them losing access to their health insurance, and they’d died of the cancer or other serious illness that had been the cause of their absences.
When employee suicides were addressed, Charlie barked, “I can’t be held responsible for workers who have problems outside of work!”
In response, Rich had calmly shown everyone in the room scans of suicide notes from those employees, each of which pointed to their job as destroying health, relationships, and sanity.
“Any questions?” Rich asked.
Both Charlie and Elena shook their heads.
“Elena,” Rich said, “you’re currently in last place. Would you like to use your elimination pass?”
Elena chewed her lip so hard it nearly bled. “Do I have to make the choice now?”
“No. You can wait.”
“I’ll wait.” She wrung her hands in her lap. “There’s… There’s still people left to go.”
Next was Geri. After watching everyone before her underestimate, she tried to strategize in the opposite direction. Adding up the numbers she was familiar with regarding drone strikes, ordnance deployments, and overall casualties in various conflicts over the years, and taking into consideration that Cole Industries wasn’t the only game in town, she guessed around a hundred thousand.
“I’ll give you credit,” Rich said flatly, “You at least acknowledge the destruction your company creates. But you’ve still come up short.”
Her blood turned cold. “How… How short?”
Like he had for Art, Rich pulled up a folder of PDFs, and Geri’s heart sank deeper with each statistic he dropped.
Failures of armor and weapon systems due to design decisions made to keep costs down. Depleted uranium exposure. Extreme poverty due to destroyed infrastructure. Contaminated water and food supplies. Civilian encounters with unexploded ordnance.
And she wasn’t exempt from supply line casualties either. Mining. Processing of raw materials. Horrific working conditions in countries where Cole Industries sought cheap labor.
She’d always known the company manufactured equipment to kill enemies and keep allies alive, and that collateral damage was part of that. But all that death carried more weight now than she’d ever imagined. As if each person’s blood was on her hands. Now that blood and her ignorance about just how much destruction she’d caused might be her own literal death.
Her heart was in the pit of her churning stomach. She was in position to be eliminated, and there were only a few people left. Her neck prickled as if she could feel Death’s breath right on her sweat-dampened skin.
She caught Quinn’s eye across the table. He was clearly relieved to be off the chopping block, but there was concern in his expression. She wondered if he could see how terrified she was.
By the time Rich had made it all the way around the table and reached the final contestant, Geri was still in last place. The despair kicked in hard—there was no way she, head of a defense contractor and weapons manufacturer, would win over a political lobbyist. No way.
She closed her eyes and covered her face. She had never shaken this badly before. Not when she’d been on a boat during a hurricane. Not when she’d been given the news that her father’s longtime illness had taken a sharp downward turn. The icy terror was cemented to her bones by inevitability—she was going to die. Here and now. In this room. There was no way around it.
Sure enough, Lynette’s guess was in the low thousands, and Geri’s heart sank even deeper. Lynette had probably overshot the real number, which meant Geri was fucked.
“My, my, Ms. Baldwin,” Rich said mildly. “You’re quite the saint compared to your fellow competitors.”
Lynette smiled with relief, but then the smile dropped. She squirmed in her chair.
Geri glanced between her and Rich. Did Lynette know something? Or was she just getting as paranoid as they all were because Rich might have some horrific card up his sleeve?
“By sheer numbers,” Rich said, “Geri Cole would be eliminated here and now.”
Geri swallowed, still terrified but possibly seeing a glimmer of hope.
“This game isn’t about the sheer numbers, though,” Rich went on. “It’s about how honest and aware you all are about those numbers. And Ms. Baldwin…” Rich tsked and shook his head. “It seems you might be the most oblivious of all.”
All the air rushed out of Geri’s lungs at the same moment Lynette sucked in a startled breath.
“What?” Lynette put a hand to her chest. “What do you mean? I don’t poison or murder people! My guess was much higher than it should’ve been!”
“Au contraire, my dear.” Rich shook his head again. “Your inheritance alone was built in blood.”
She scoffed. “That all came before me! I’m not responsible for it!”
“No, and we’re not counting it here. But what you’ve chosen to do with your gilded life— that is on you. And for reasons you can take up with the deity of your choosing, you chose to lobby for multiple companies who wanted fewer regulations and more freedom to get rich.”
“I’m just a liaison!” she insisted, shifting in her chair as she became more agitated. “All I do is—”
“All you do is grease the palms of people in power,” Rich growled. “At the behest of companies including Ms. Cole’s, Mr. Woolman’s, and Mr. Keller’s.” He inclined his head. “And you don’t believe some of the blood on their hands is also on yours?”
Lynette argued fiercely, gesturing at some of the other competitors as if trying to implicate them, but Geri couldn’t make out the words over the blood pounding in her ears. She was guiltily relieved that she wouldn’t be the one losing this challenge after all, but someone else was going to die in her place. And that someone else, it turned out, had been hired by Cole Industries to lobby on their behalf.
She was beginning to think Rich’s lethal punishments wouldn’t do nearly as much damage to her as her conscience being ripped apart.
Rich leaned down and reached under the table. When he rose, everyone stilled.
He had a pistol in his hand, along with a magazine. He opened his other hand and let a few bullets scatter on the glass tabletop, their rattling and rolling making Geri’s teeth try to chatter.
As everyone watched in petrified silence, Rich began to thumb rounds into the magazine. “One of your crown jewels, Ms. Baldwin, is successfully bribing lawmakers to—if you’ll pardon the pun—shoot down several gun control measures.” He snapped the magazine into the pistol and racked the slide. “Tell me, Ms. Baldwin.” He clicked off the safety and looked right at her. “Are you proud of your work?”
Lynette stared at him and the gun.
“It’s a simple question.” He tilted his head. “Are you proud that you’ve been knowingly making your country less safe?” He tapped the muzzle of the gun against the table, the rhythmic clink of metal on glass menacing and unnerving. “Or do you have some capacity to feel shame?”
“I…” Lynette’s eyes flicked toward the gun, and she pressed her lips together. Finally, she met his gaze again with a mix of fear and defiance. “I work to keep people and companies free instead of—”
Rich shot her.
The blast sent everyone at the table scurrying backward, some toppling chairs as they went.
Lynette slumped over the edge of the table, hands on her midsection, still alive and in agony as blood ran between her fingers. She didn’t make a sound, though.
Except… no.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t making any sounds—it was that Geri couldn’t hear anything. Her ears were stuffed with cotton, and only a high-pitched ringing made it through.
Lynette crumpled to the side, then onto the floor, both her and her chair sprawling. Kit and Charlie were closest to her, and they stared in slack-jawed horror as she writhed and bled on the carpet at their feet.
Her screams made it through the cotton in Geri’s ears, and as some of that cotton cleared away, the agonizing sounds made her stomach turn.
At the head of the table, Rich huffed in annoyance and gestured at Tyson. “Shut her up.”
Tyson nodded sharply.
Geri didn’t feel guilty about her relief this time; they were going to put the poor woman out of her misery.
That was what she thought they were going to do, anyway.
Tyson pulled a rag out of his pocket and jammed it into Lynette’s mouth. Indeed, he shut the woman up, reducing her cries to muffled moans that sounded a lot like they had while Geri’s ears had still been offline. In that moment, she was glad her hearing hadn’t fully recovered yet.
Rich kept talking, but Geri didn’t understand a word he said. She needed to know because this game was quite literally life or death, but all she could hear were the steadily fading sounds of life coming from Lynette.
At some point, the poor woman fell silent. Kit and Charlie still glanced at her now and then, while Rich kept talking, their faces turning greener each time, but she didn’t make another sound. Unconscious, probably. Dead, hopefully.
That could’ve been me.
That almost was me.
I lived… and she died. Horribly.
Geri rubbed her temples and tried not to throw up. She didn’t know how to feel any of this. The guilt. The shameful relief. The fear that she wouldn’t be able to dodge the bullet—the literal or metaphorical one—next time.
“Well done, competitors.” Rich produced another one of those unsettling grins. “This completes the Body Count challenge. Now, if you would all return to your rooms, change into some casual clothing, and meet back in the lobby in one hour.”
Geri swallowed bile.
Oh fuck. What fresh hell is this?
“And what if we don’t come down?” Charlie Simmons demanded. “You’re going to kill us anyway, so why should we—”
“Mr. Simmons.” Rich gestured at Lynette. “Rest assured that there are far worse ways to die than this. And don’t think for a second that I’m above using those methods on someone who pisses me off.” He pointed at the door. “Lobby. One hour.”
Charlie’s teeth snapped shut.
And he followed everyone else out of the boardroom.