See No Evil Trilogy, page 29
East sat forward with his laptop. “Okay, we’ve got Taron Davies, Malcolm Witsel, and Jace McClaren.
Jace McClaren was an actor in the 70s and 80s. A-list, older now, but still influential in Hollywood. He was one of the early Brits to make a name for himself back then across the pond. Studios still had him on speed dial.
I studied the list. None of them seemed likely options for the Five. “Are these the best candidates we’ve got?”
East nodded. “Yeah, they’re on the original list, so we need to try to talk to them.”
Bridge sat forward. “I’ll take Witsel. He seems to loathe my father, so at least we’ll have something in common.”
“Fine.” I said. “I’ll take Davies. I don’t really know him well, other than he used to play rugby, right?”
East nodded. “Yeah, now he’s a team owner. Youngest on record. Became an owner at just thirty-five.”
I rolled my eyes. “How many thirty-five-year-old team owners do you know? Teams are expensive endeavors.”
East laughed. “He’s fifty now. But he’s brought that league from some minor players to the majors. If anyone’s Five, I bet it’s him.”
Alyssa, my assistant, knocked on the door and pushed it open. “I’m sorry, Mr. Covington, I apologize for interrupting.”
Her gaze skittered when she reached Bridge. Her eyes went wide, and a flush crept up her neck.
What the hell was that about?
“Yes, Alyssa, what’s wrong?”
“Well, um, there’s somebody here to see you.”
“Yeah, that’s Drew Wilcox. What’s the problem? I told you to expect him.”
“No, sir, it’s not him. It’s a Miss Emma Varma.”
My brows lifted. “Emma? Emma’s here?” Shit.
Emma, apparently having grown tired of waiting for Alyssa to announce her, just marched up and scooted by her. “Oh good, all three of you are in one place. That will make this easier.”
Alyssa’s gaze skittered over to Emma as if assessing if she could physically block her way, but I put up my hand. “It’s okay, we’ll see her. She’s a friend.”
Alyssa still pursed her lips, but when her gaze rolled over to Bridge again, her features softened. Oh, Christ. Had Bridge dipped his quill in company ink? Not that I was particularly fond of Mina, but it didn’t seem like him at all.
When Alyssa left, I turned to Emma with a smile. “Well, if you had called and said you wanted to meet, we would have taken you to lunch or something.”
She glowered at the three of us. “Just so we’re clear, I don’t appreciate you lot stopping me at the initiation.”
East gave her a warm smile and attempted to give her a hug, but she turned a scowl on him, and with a grumble, he sat down. “I was just trying to say hello before we get down to business.”
Because it was East, she softened. “Sorry, love, I’m not really here for a social visit. But it is always good to see you.”
That seemed to assuage East’s bruised ego. The brunt of her ire was directed at Bridge. “If you ever put your hands on me again, I swear to God, I’ll cut them off.”
Bridge stiffened, and then he planted his hands on my desk as he returned her glowering disdain. “You’re welcome to try. But you’re not going to get very far.”
“Test me and see.”
What the hell is going on with Bridge and Emma? Yeah, of course, she was probably pissed off that we’d bundled her off like a recalcitrant teenager. But something was up with them. Their level of hatred was too strong.
“If you want, Emma, I can carry you out of here the same way. Right over my shoulder, ass on display for everyone to see.”
Her upper lip curled. “You can try. But this time, I’m ready for you. You put your bloody hands on me, and I will sever you from those balls you love so much.”
Even my balls shriveled up thinking about just what Emma would do. I figured I should probably end their verbal sparring match, but it was akin to watching a train wreck. “Ems, it’s always a delight. Why don’t you have a seat? You and Bridge can fight another time.”
She sighed when her gaze shifted to me. “Sorry. I don’t like being man-handled.”
Bridge tried to perk up. “Man-handled? I barely—”
I put up my hand and sent him a shut-the-fuck-up look.
“I’m sorry that Bridge man-handled you. We did it for your own safety, but it must have been uncomfortable.”
From one of my leather chairs, East beamed at me. “Look at you, being diplomatic. Maybe Livy is rubbing off on you, after all.”
I shrugged. “Hardly. But what’s up, Emma? What can we do for you? Or are you just here to read us the riot act?”
She reached in her back pocket and pulled out a flash drive. “You need to see this.”
I frowned. “What’s on it?”
“The truth. I don’t know. Someone left it for me under the handle of my car.”
East lost some of his good nature then. “What do you mean under the handle of your car?”
“I mean, when I put my fingers there to open my car door, that was taped to the handle.”
Bridge exploded on her. “And instead of calling the police, you took it and brought it here? God, how stupid are you? For all you knew, moving it could have set off a car bomb or something.”
“Oh, my God, there he is, the persistent, consummate arsehole.”
“Well, maybe if you didn’t act like an idiot teenager, I wouldn’t have to be an arsehole to keep you safe.”
“News flash, dummy, I never asked you to keep me safe.”
“Well, you can’t seem to do it well enough on your own.”
I put my hands up. “That is enough, both of you. Emma, Bridge has a point. Maybe you should call the police.”
“Yeah, sure. Fine. But first, watch what’s on it.”
East held out his hand. “Give that to me. This laptop is secure, and I'm not going to connect this to the network, so anything malicious on it won't infiltrate our system.
She gave it to him, and he stuck it in. When I strolled over there and looked over his shoulder, I saw something that I saw every night when I closed my eyes. The night of our initiation. The night Toby had died.
My gaze pinned her. “Where did this come from?”
“Look, I already told you. Somebody taped it to my car. I brought it straight here. Someone did this for Toby. I know you’ll do the right thing for him, but I don’t want to be in this anymore. It’s up to you three to fix what you broke.” Then she stormed out and slammed the door behind her.
East hit a few keys, and then the video projected onto the big screen. It was then that Drew chose to walk in. “Hey, was that Emma?”
Bridge urged him to be quiet. “Yeah, she brought something to us. It looks like someone is passing her information.”
Drew crossed his arms and leaned back against my bookshelf. “Yeah, but who? And what’s their agenda? I say we don’t watch it.”
East rolled his eyes. “The hell we’re not going to watch it. We need to know what they know. Information is key. No sticking our heads in the sand.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I agree with East. This is going to hurt, but if it has some useful information, we need to see it.”
Drew eased himself into the seat opposite East. “What the hell is going on?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, mate, but I guess we’re all about to find out.”
When East hit play again, my stomach clenched. In one of the frames was a room I recognized. After all, we’d all been reborn in that room.
All except one.
I checked the timestamp. Other frames showed other rooms in the Van Linsted estate from different vantage points. The rebirth room was where we all were.
After Toby’s death, we learned that there were safeguards in place to protect us, to keep us all safe. Not that any of them had worked. There were some who were meant to be watching the recruits inside their coffins.
There was someone meant to be listening, in case anyone said anything or made any confessions in there. And then, there were medical staff on hand. That much we knew. We’d seen them working to revive Toby, but it hadn’t worked.
As I paced, we saw the events of the night unfold. East focused on one screen. The coffins were being placed in the room of rebirth.
Drew, myself, East, Bridge, Toby, and then the others were placed around a circle. Drew had woken first, then me, East, and Bridge. We saw Toby not waking and then me trying to haul Toby out of his coffin, trying to get him to wake up.
A sheen of sweat popped all over my skin as I remembered crying over my friend’s body, trying to perform CPR but being shoved away, trying to fight anyone pulling me off him. Drew and Bridge pulled me back as East also ran forward to check on him. I remembered all of it as if it was yesterday. It was the stuff of my nightmares. The weight I carried like an albatross.
Wordlessly, East pulled up the other screens. They were timestamped thirty minutes earlier. We saw Toby in his coffin, struggling to breathe, pulling at his tie, and he was banging on the coffin. “I need out. Let me out.”
Bloody hell.
We’d all been shown the safety latch on the inside of the coffin, the one that would let us out no matter what. The problem with being let out was you couldn’t go back in. If you unlatched before your rebirth, that was it. You were out of the Elite and had to face the consequences. Toby had reached for his latch, pulled it, but it hadn’t worked.
I gasped. “Was the bloody latch broken?”
Bridge stalked over for a closer look. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
East slowed down the frame and then peered closer. “Yeah, it’s not opening. Fuck.”
“He was trying to get out,” I breathed, my voice merely an echo of its usual strength.
“Who was on watch that night?” Drew asked.
East shifted to another video. Everyone was getting their assignments. Bram Van Linsted was on the screen. He was on overwatch. Meant to be monitoring the videos.
“I’m going to fucking kill him.” The rage that sat on simmer most of the time when I thought about him turned to full boil.
East nodded his chin at the screen. “You’ll have to kill Garreth Jameson too. He was supposed to be listening in. All the coffins were mic’ed.”
“Why didn’t they do something? He was calling out. He was trying to get out.”
Bridge ran his hands through his hair. “Fuck. I knew it. I knew something was fucking wrong with this.”
I stared at him. “How the fuck could you know? None of us knew a thing.”
There was a final video. East scrolled down and clicked it. Francis Middleton. He was the oldest son of Jake Middleton. Father and son had the biggest crisis management firm in the country. It was the video of the members discussing how they’d spin it. Lord Middleton was giving everyone their marching orders. “It’s a great tragedy, but we can’t let this tarnish the name of the Elite. So we will run our standard spin campaign. A great tragedy, an accident. Marcus, you keep the rest of the recruits under control. Not a word about this incident leaks.”
I was going to be sick. Bile burned the back of my throat and I dragged in long deep breaths.
“They did this to Toby. Van Linsted, Jameson, Middleton. They did this to him.”
Bridge shouted, “Fuck! They killed our friend. They murdered him. And we let them get away with it.”
For the first time since I’d known him, Bridge was well and truly shattered. I was well and truly shattered. But he wasn’t wrong. Emma hadn’t been wrong either. We hadn’t looked very hard into this. That made us complicit too.
My voice shook as I struggled against my churning gut.
“We didn’t question their story. We didn’t question what we were told. They told us Toby had suffered a heart attack of an unknown origin. We didn’t know he’d tried to get out. They didn’t tell us that. They didn’t tell us that his coffin was locked. They didn’t tell us he died afraid, that they could have stopped this. So at the very least, they are culpable. They let our friend die, and we didn’t ask enough questions. He loved us the most, and we didn’t take care of him.”
Bridge leaned against the wall and slid down until his arse met wood. “He was just like me, unwanted. And I turned my back on him.”
“We have to make this right.” I wasn’t going to just accept this.
Bridge lifted his head. “What the fuck are we going to do?”
I met his gaze. “We’re going to strip them of the one thing they think they have. Power. All of them. They’re going to pay, starting with fucking Van Linsted. The one thing he wants most is to become Director Prime, and we already have a plan to rob him of that. When we’re done, he’s going to want to trade places with Toby. And when we’ve taken care of him, we’ll take care of the others too.”
I stared at the television screen. I hadn’t known it until that moment, but I’d been waiting for this day for over ten years.
My so-called brothers had killed Toby.
Ben
I was too keyed up after our meeting to work.
Between Livy and that bomb Emma dropped on us, no way I was getting any work done. So I asked Alyssa to move the rest of my meetings, and I headed out to Surrey to find a needle in a rugby haystack.
No point in sticking around if I couldn’t focus. Focus? More like you kept thinking you saw her around every corner.
Fair point. So better I was doing something constructive than willing her to show up in my office telling me what a pain in the arse I was.
The hour-long drive hadn’t done much to cool me down. I’d replayed every damn conversation I’d ever had with any member of the Elite. I wondered how many of them were power-hungry arseholes. I wondered who had known, what they’d known, and who was complicit in Toby’s death.
But the truth was, we were all complicit.
I parked in the visitor lot then headed first to the pitch. I walked out onto the grass, and the injection of adrenaline in my blood made a smile tug at my lips. One of the few fond memories I had from my childhood was my parents taking me to my first game. I must have been five, maybe six.
But now, as I marched through the front doors, my soul was far heavier.
The receptionist took my name when I checked in, and to my surprise Taron Davies agreed to see me right away. I’d expected him to posture and make me wait, but then he probably knew why I was there. We were already behind the curve compared to Van Linsted. Bram had probably already beat us to him.
I was led through the expansive main lobby. Up above, there was a balcony where I could see members of the office staff milling about, off to meetings, doing whatever it was that they did to manage sports teams. I was led to the back to an elevator that I took up three floors and then down the hall to the left. There were photos of famous rugby players from Australia, New Zealand, and England covering the walls in sports action shots.
There were also various images of his team, together with Davies, looking young and happy.
And all it had taken to attain that happiness was a little nudge from the Elite. There really was nowhere that they couldn’t touch.
I knocked on the door of his suite, and a receptionist opened it for me with a smile. “Hello, Mr. Covington. Mr. Davies will see you now. Would you like some coffee? Tea? Biscuits?”
“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
“Fair enough, come with me.”
Her hair was pinned back in a tidy bun that reminded me of the one that Livy wore often in the office. It was the kind of bun that made me want to grab into her hair, loosen the pins, and let her curls bounce free.
The woman in front of me had no curls. Get your head in the game, stop thinking about Livy.
When she reached Davies’ office, she knocked brusquely and then opened it. “Mr. Davies, Mr. Covington is here.”
She stepped aside to let me pass and then closed the door behind me.
Taron Davies.
I knew only a little about him from Elite meetings. He looked good for fifty. That sort of movie star fifty that included expensive creams and the occasional touch up at the plastic surgeon. Nothing quite so extensive that he would be unrecognizable but just small little changes along the way. His skin was tanned, and his hair was still blacker than pitch. Clearly, he dyed it, but it moved easily, and his face still moved, so I didn’t think Botox was his thing.
“Thank you for seeing me.”
He stood, marched around his desk, and gave me a good hearty handshake. The kind that was supposed to convey reassurance and trust. I trusted nothing.
“Covington. I don’t think we’ve had much of an opportunity to speak. Come in. Come in. Have a seat.”
He was dressed casually, trousers, long-sleeved button-down, but no tie. The sort of thing an owner would wear to appear not to be stuffy, but still having to wear the suit because of reporters and meetings.
“Thank you for making the time to see me.”
“Well, of course. I mean your father and I go way back.”
I ground my teeth. “Well, come on, don’t hold him against me.”
Davies flashed a grin. “Yeah, he’s a right pain in the ass but good at the core. I remember you when you joined. You were watchful. Quiet. You and your mates, you’ve done a remarkable job while taking as minimal help as possible.”
I shrugged. “Well, in my experience, everyone needs help sometimes. But the key is not to keep reaching your hand out to take it.”
The smile was more genuine now. It reached his eyes as he gave a low chuckle. “And that’s how you have stayed so independent. That’s how I’ve stayed independent too. I don’t go back to the till asking for more slippery slope.”
We understood each other. “I agree.”
He sat back and crossed his arms over his abdomen which, considering his age, was still flat. He was still clearly fit. “What can I do for you?”
I glanced around at the trophies in the glass cases and the medals on the wall. Photos with celebrities and beautiful woman. And then I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “Let’s cut the shit. You know why I’m here. I assume Bram’s already beat me to it, but let me make my pitch, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
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