16. Caleph
16
CALEPH
S he’s hiding something from me. That’s the one thing I know for sure, beyond all doubt. I’m on my phone to Seven before I can take a breath, asking him to dig deeper. I can gloss over the basics with her until he comes back to me and gives me the information I need before deep diving into the serious stuff.
When I go back to the lounge room where I left her, she’s standing with her arms folded across her chest, looking out one of the windows at the sea. There’s something small and frail and sad about the way she stands clutching her arms tensely, her nails pushing into her skin.
“Where were we?” I ask her, as I walk into the room in quick strides.
“You were just about to tell me how you came into so much money.”
She whirls around, her blazing eyes full of hatred as she looks at me. I’ve touched on a very crucial nerve, something that’s made her super angry, and now she is back in business mode. She’s going in for the kill. Nothing else will erase whatever pain she’s going through, so she’s going to make being here worth her while.
I understand that anything I tell her could potentially be used against me, especially if she’s been sent to spy on me, so I pick and choose my words very, very carefully before I start.
“I came into some money when I turned eighteen,” I start. “Not much, but enough.”
I watch as her delicate hand moves gracefully across the page, taking notes.
“I had an idea that I wanted to bring to life.”
She fixes me with a scathing look; I’m being vague again and she’s tiring of me talking in tongues. I have to give her something.
“I set up a munitions factory.”
I watch her lips part in shock but continue.
“At first, we sold to smaller countries; it’s a profitable market and I reinvested all the profit into a bigger, better plant. The second factory gave me better turnover, and it also caught the attention of bigger fish. Eight years after the first factory, I was supplying some of the greatest world powers with their arms. All legitimate,” I add.
“That’s not what the FBI and Interpol claims,” she points out. I guess that’s her question. She does have a process.
“That’s because they don’t know what I know.”
“Which is?”
“All in good time,” I tell her, and she huffs in irritation at my reluctance to answer the question.
“So, all this,” she waves her hand around the boat, “all this comes from arms trading?”
“For the most part. I’ve got interests in real estate, precious metals, logistics, and I’ve dabbled in some art.”
“Precious metals; does that mean mines, or end product?”
I blink. I don’t see why that’s important, but I don’t lie. There’s no way anyone can know where that mine is. No way.
“Mining,” I tell her, but she just starts scrawling without giving me a reaction.
“What about family?”
“What about them?”
She waves her pen around animatedly as she talks.
“Who are they, what do they do, can we get an interview?”
“My personal life is out of bounds,” I tell her.
This has only made her more curious and more determined, but she just purses her lips and moves on. I know she’s going to circle back around to this topic eventually.
“Some would say your rise to fame and fortune has been meteoric. What would you say is the single most important thing that contributed to your growth?”
“Focus. Singular focus. I had an idea. I planned. And I saw it through. I didn’t let anything stand in my way.”
“And what of the rumors that you have ties to the mafia?”
“If you look up the definition of rumor, you’ll see I fit very nicely into that mold. Someone invented a story about me; someone else found it intriguing enough to spread it around.”
“So, you deny any involvement with organized crime of any kind?”
“Unconditionally.”
She sets aside her resources and folds her hands over her knees casually. I take this to mean her next question is off the record, for our ears only.
“You’re a very private person. No one has ever gotten close enough to even say hello or get a picture of you. Why have you now agreed to sit down for this, your first every interview, with me?”
“To show the world that I’m not the monster they should be afraid of.”
* * *
Seven calls me two hours later. He doesn’t know the details of what’s happened between Ariadne and me, but the first thing he does is apologize and tell me he should have gone digging further. He’s one of the smartest men I know, and he would’ve put it together in his head that this was crucial information that he shouldn’t have missed.
He goes on to explain what he’s learned; he gives me the facts as they are and waits for me to give him any further instructions. My mind is racing at a thousand miles an hour as I consider what he’s told me.
“Dr Rand Holloway works out of Mercy General. They were together two years, and by all accounts, he was Miss Moore’s first serious boyfriend. On the night in question, she was at the hospital to see her boyfriend and she found him in a compromising position with one of the nurses. There doesn’t appear to be a nurse at Mercy he hasn’t been through, all while he was in a relationship with Miss Moore.
She moved out of their apartment and into a shared apartment two suburbs over to avoid seeing him. She’s a struggling journalist; her rent alone is beyond her means. She doesn’t have many friends, although she is close to Nina Tyler and Michael Archer, whose house she was leaving when you picked her up. That timeline coincides directly with Miss Moore’s ex becoming engaged to a woman that’s not a nurse and has no ties with Mercy General.”
I set my phone down and wonder at the timing of everything that’s happened. It’s unbelievable to me that we have a brief chance encounter before fate steps in and throws us together again for another chance encounter. It’s unfathomable to me, because I’d never been to Mercy General before. And I’d been delayed multiple times before I got there. The fact that I happened to be walking in as she was walking out is too much to comprehend. And I still don’t believe in coincidences. I analyze the facts as presented. Could it just simply be a case of right place, wrong time?