Chapter 25
The Wrath of Cora
Having a high-quality game is not enough. Even I know there have been plenty of instances of good games tanking and taking their studios down with them. I can’t name any off-hand but I’m sure Rob could, same as any of our hard-core gamers.
On my way back to Anders’s office, I pass Ginny’s empty desk. But there’s no help there as she’s on leave. I know next to nothing about marketing a game but my intuition is telling me something is amiss.
Back in Anders’s office, I sit at his desk, tapping my fingers.
The situation is dire. As soon as the investors find out about this, they’re going to be clamouring to get their money out.
Once it gets around the workforce, it will trigger a mass flight.
Anyone of any talent will be out of the door so fast, the ground will scorch in their wake.
No advertising, no money, and soon no staff.
Total collapse. And if Cerium goes down, I go with it.
I pull up Scarlett’s calendar. She’s out of the office, but she should be back in half an hour. I send a message for her to see me ‘AS SOON AS POSSIBLE’ and try to concentrate on something else until she arrives.
For about the first time in my working life, I’m pleased to see Scarlett’s glossy head appear around the door. She does not look pleased.
“You summoned me.” There’s an undertone of recalcitrance that’s impossible to miss.
“Come in, please. Shut the door.”
Her eyebrow quirks, but she does as I ask.
“Piotr told me this morning that there are no advertising or promotion slots available in the two weeks leading up to our launch.”
“Ah.” Obviously, no surprise to Scarlett.
“You knew?”
“One of the biggest pro-Cerium influencers was asking when we were going to announce the launch date. He told me his slots were full. I took that to Piotr. Honestly, I was surprised he didn’t know already.”
I tap my fingers on the desk some more. I don’t trust her. But I don’t have a choice. “How good is your relationship with our promotion partners? Is there one you’re closer to than the others? Someone who might tell us who bought the slots? Like the one who reached out to you.”
Scarlett’s designer-clad shoulders lift and fall. “I suppose I could try. I’m not sure how it will help. We still won’t have anything.”
“Just do it,” I instruct her, and she leaves.
I collapse back into the chair. Dealing with truculent staff has never been top of my wish list, and I’ve had both Piotr and Scarlett this morning. I close my eyes and wonder what I’m going to tell Anders tonight.
Our calls have been short, to the point of brusque.
His father has been getting better physically and is out of bed, but his mind is still confused.
He’s still violent, but now he’s also mobile.
And it’s not just the difficulty of dealing with him, it’s the emotional toll of watching someone you love and respect behave so badly.
The last time I saw Anders, his eyes were sunken, rimmed with purple, and the worry lines looked carved into his forehead.
I dread giving him this news on top of everything else.
Half an hour later, my phone pings with a message from Scarlett. A single word: Wobbegong.
Something prickles. There are just too many coincidences. Once is Wobbegong pre-empting our launch. Fair enough, that’s a coincidence. Twice is the Wobbegong CEO in a nearby coffee shop, in an area of London far from his offices, far from banks and lawyers and other likely excuses.
And now I learn Wobbegong pre-empted our marketing. That’s number three. It’s too much to ignore. It can’t be chance. We’re being targeted.
I think back to the convention when we first saw the Wobbegong release date and Scarlett said, ‘But how could they have known? Only a handful of us know.’
And that is the point. Only a handful knew. But Wobbegong knew because someone told them. We’ve got a mole.
The question is: Who?
I tap my fingers some more. Would they? Would they be brazen enough? If they think we don’t suspect, and with Anders gone, they might believe they’ve got away with it. But surely Wobbegong would have paid. Still, it’s worth a check. We only need the traitor to slip up once.
I stand up, smooth the wrinkles out of my skirt, and prepare to go to war. Time to discover who sold us out.
I find my foot soldier at her desk. “Chloe,” I say quietly, “I need a favour.”
There’s nothing more I can do until Chloe gets back to me.
I should concentrate on work, as there’s enough of it.
But my mind won’t stop picking at the problem because Chloe’s task is a longshot.
It’s more likely she’ll find nothing than something.
Except when I do try other things, my brain keeps skedaddling back to this.
Who can I trust? I count them off. Nur and Chloe, definitely. None of the rest of the management team. In the light of the loss of influencer slots, the poaching of our original launch date can no longer be regarded as accidental. All the management team knew the date. It could be any one of them.
Ginny? It pains me to put her in the suspects basket, but Piotr could have told her the date we’d fixed on before he dumped her.
And revenge against him could be a motive.
She’s off this week, supposedly sunning herself in some exotic location, but she hasn’t posted any pictures on social media and that’s odd.
And she definitely seemed shifty when Anders asked her where she was going.
What if she is here, meeting with Wobbegong Interactive and not on a beach in the sun?
Who else? There’s Rob. He didn’t know the launch date and has already shown himself to be loyal.
Not a whisper about an affair between me and Anders has reached my ears and I’ve been keeping them pricked.
And Rob’s not unique. I would bet most of our rank and file are extraordinarily loyal; look how hard they’re working to bring The Obsidian Sigil in on time.
Just look at Steve, uprooting their life and moving halfway around the globe for Cerium.
My normal time for departure comes but I've already called Effie's daycare and Dana to tell them I will be late, not something I take lightly. Time ticks on. I wait.
Then my phone rings. At last, Chloe.
“Cora!” she says and I can tell straightaway it’s good news. Her excitement is there in her voice. “I have a name.”
“Let me guess,” I say. “Scarlett?”
Then she tells me. I blink.
I suck in my breath, feeling a headache crawling over my skull. This is a nightmare. I kick my head back and think.
“Cora? Are you okay?”
I'd forgotten Chloe was still on the line.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I reassure her. I’m not. I’m really not. I’m shocked and angry, and terrified. Because this is no longer the fear of an unspecified baddie. This is scarily real. I thank Chloe and disconnect.
This is way beyond my pay grade. I don't want to drop another problem on Anders but maybe it's necessary. I pick up my phone and hit dial.
And get voicemail. I leave a message. Call me.
What now?
Mentally, I run through my options. Sit here, fingers crossed it doesn't get worse? Or act. I suck in a breath. Anders left me in charge; it's his problem if he doesn't like what I'm about to do.
I call Athertons, our lawyers, and ask for Harriet Petrie, one of their employment lawyers.
I'm going to need legal top cover for this. I let out my breath when they put me through. There was a chance she had already left for the weekend. I get straight to the point. Lawyers charge by the minute. I’m not wasting time chatting about her weekend plans.
“I need to sack someone high up,” I tell Harriet.
“Are you sure?” she says. “I always counsel clients to pay them off. Usually much cheaper in the long run. I can send you over an airtight compromise agreement. Of course, they’ll have to get it reviewed by their own lawyer before they sign or it won’t hold up in court.”
“We’re not giving the scumbag a penny.”
“I see,” she says, her voice even and non-judgmental.
“You realise your employee can, and probably will, take you to a tribunal?”
“Let them try.”
Like every lawyer who's ever existed, Harriet wastes no time in spelling out the consequences of precipitous action. And they're dire.
“What evidence do you have against your employee?” she asks.
I list the issues. The revised launch date. The pre-booked influencers. An expense claim for the same coffee shop at the same time as I saw the CEO of Wobbegong.
She dismisses them all. “Circumstantial at best. To hold up in court, you’ll need hard evidence.”
“We’ll get more.” I’m by no means sure of this, but being stupid enough to put in an expenses claim for a meeting with a competitor implies a lack of paranoid prudence. It suggests we’ll find further errors lurking if we go looking. Before, we didn’t know we needed to look. We do now.
But finally, I get her agreement to sit in on any meeting. She will only intervene if I do or say something wildly problematic.
After she ends the call, I sit for a moment, petrified. Harriet was clear about the risk to the company from acting precipitously. If I sink Cerium, Anders’s beloved baby, he will never speak to me again. But every moment the traitor stays in post gives another opportunity for harm.
I close my eyes, seeking the strength to make the call. Cool, calm Cora says listen to Harriet. Wild child Cora says kick their arse.
I make my choice.
I need to act. And I need to do it quickly. Harriet won’t wait around forever, and I want our mole gone now. We don't have formal security as such. We're too small. But someone is getting fired today and I have a feeling they’ll think it more than easy to get away with threatening me.
I tap the desk as I consider the issues. First, I call Scarlett. It's probably the most painful thing I'll have to do today, and that's saying something. It takes all of my self-control to swallow my pride and say, “I need your help.”
Then I track down Rob, who’s hiding in one of the low-stimulus rooms. He’s proven he can be discreet, so I explain what I need and what is going down. I’m grateful when he says, “You can count on me.”
Everything is ready. It's the last Friday of the month and the only staff left are the diehards. When there's a knock on the door, I'm behind Anders’s desk; Rob is sitting to one side.
“Come in,” I call. And he walks in.
“Piotr,” I say. “You know Rob. And also here, in this meeting, is Harriet Petrie from Athertons, who is on speaker.”
The lawyer says, “Good afternoon.”
“What's this about?” Piotr glances at his Patek Philippe watch very deliberately. “I’ve got plans.”
Clasping my hands together, I say, “For some time, we've harboured a suspicion that someone from the management team has been passing information to Wobbegong Interactive. It's recently come to our attention that person is you.”
“What the fuck?” Piotr’s head jerks back with the force of his denial. “That's bullshit.”
“Not bullshit. We have a witness to your meeting with the Wobbegong CEO.” It’s a fudge, but it sounds far more concrete than we have your expense claim.
“I talk to lots of people,” he scoffs. “That’s how I stay abreast of the market.” Then a gleam appears in his eyes. “Does Anders know about this?”
No. No, he doesn’t. But I’m not going to let this transparent attempt to undermine me distract me from my purpose. “We are prepared to go to court over this.” I let the pronoun do a lot of talking. “You need to understand that. You are fired for gross misconduct, effective immediately.”
Piotr looks shocked. But what did he think would happen? He must have an exit plan.
His machismo surfaces quickly. “You’ll regret this,” he sneers. “You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.” He takes a step forward as he says it, and Rob leaps to his feet. He’s a big guy. It’s mostly flab, but he looks imposing. Piotr halts.
I take Rob’s intervention as time to wrap this up.
“Rob will escort you to your desk. Your laptop and work phone will remain here, as will all digital media, documents, and any company assets. Please provide Rob with a list of your passcodes. You may only remove your personal effects. Your pay, pension and holiday entitlement cease immediately with no notice period. Pay and benefits accrued to date will be paid as normal at the end of the month.”
“If you think I’m going to give you anything, you can go fuck yourselves!”
Not unexpected. But Rob has IT removing Piotr’s access to our systems as we speak. They don’t need his passcodes to get into his equipment, but it would probably be faster if they had them.
Rob moves to the door and opens it. He gestures to the corridor.
“Fuck you!” Piotr spins on his heel and stalks out, Rob scurrying behind him.
“Well, that went rather well.” Harriet’s crisp upper-crust accent resounds in the sudden silence. “You know where I am if you need me.” The call drops.
“Did it?” I’m alone, slumped in the chair, whispering my words to the emptiness.
I unclasp my hands. They’re shaking. It’s one thing to anticipate his aggression, another thing entirely to experience it. I lean back and take stock.
All that remains is to find actual hard evidence of Piotr’s misconduct, bed in Scarlett as our new head of publishing, and by some miracle, market The Obsidian Sigil.
And after that, I just have to tell Anders his marketing plan is scuppered, and I’ve fired his top dog without conclusive proof.