Finally, in one of the spreadsheet files, she noticed the tabs at the bottom of the file and realized how they were reporting income and…expenses.
The thumb drive Reyes gave her contained a wealth of information, and now that she understood how it was laid out, she returned to the first file and started over.
As it stood, the cartel was worth over $100 million US dollars, and that was with their production and distribution reduced due to Manuel’s “absence” and his “missing” men. It looked like that, over the past several years, they were averaging $500 million or more in business per year.
The distribution network stretched all throughout Mexico, down into South America, and even through parts of the continental United States.
She tsked. Manuel wasn’t even inventive enough to make inroads into Canada.
It wasn’t that she cared about the cartel. Running such an operation at full scale was a risky endeavor in many ways, and that wasn’t a risk she wanted to shoulder long term.
What she wanted was the full picture, so she could begin shopping it around to offload it.
Preferably a group from overseas, perhaps Russians, or maybe even the North Koreans. Their government was always in search of covert ways to fill their coffers, and she knew someone who might have an inroad with government officials in those embassies.
After spending several minutes searching social media and professional networking websites, she contacted the obvious person to help her and set up an appointment for them to visit her at work. That way, it would look less suspicious if her father was prying and people were reporting back to him at the company. She could explain it as research into competition.
If she saw him outside of work and her father had people watching her, it would be difficult to explain away the subterfuge.
In reality, she hoped to develop direct contacts who could put her closer to people who could help her with her other… pursuit.
Mainly running down all leads relating to Manuel’s supposedly impossible scenario.
If she could be the one to locate and control access to some other intelligent species?
Yes, that was something she could also market to the highest bidder and set herself up for life, well away from her father’s crushing thumb.
She was under no illusions that he wouldn’t fully relinquish control of his companies to her unless he was dead, and even then, it wouldn’t shock her if he’d set up some man to still be over her after his death.
He’d made his fortune fucking people over, and she knew she wasn’t immune to that fate. The whole family line was full of cut-throat bastards, and she wasn’t sure if her mother’s death had really been a tragic but natural one, or if she’d had a little assistance leaving this mortal coil.
As a child, she’d loved her father, grew up thinking the world revolved around him. To the best of her knowledge he never dated, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have whores on the side she never knew about.
Considering his DNA, she’d be shocked if he didn’t.
One thing she couldn’t forgive was how he didn’t demand that Manuel rein in his brother sooner. She wasn’t a particularly sentimental woman, but some lines should not be crossed, and looking the other way during the rapes and murders of girls was one of them.
If, on the remotest of chances, Manuel was still alive, she’d gladly murder him herself just for that.
Loyalty springing from the water of the womb was definitely not all it was cracked up to be, and Miranda knew her family had shed too much needless blood throughout the years for her to consider maintaining a blind loyalty to it.
She spent less than thirty minutes studying the sheets before shutting down her computer and sitting back to rub her eyes. It was too much to try to decipher right now, and she would need to decipher it before presenting it to someone else.
Not to mention, she wanted to sanitize the data to prevent any potential buyers from figuring things out and moving in without paying for the privilege of doing so.
She suspected that if her father caught wind of her efforts that he might think she wanted to move in and run the cartel, when that was the farthest thing from her mind. She only wanted to keep it running so she could offload it.
What, was her father going to complain to her about it?
He wouldn’t when she made sure the arrangement included making it look like a takeover without exposing her role. She’d have to kill Reyes, and possibly another couple of men, but that could also easily be explained by the ever-present violence inherent in the business model.
She poured herself a bourbon on the rocks and then settled on her sofa, staring out the sliding glass doors of her living room. She had a beautiful view from this vantage point, but she knew it’d be even nicer from the penthouse.
That would be one of her first purchases—acquiring this building and kicking out the residents up there. They were annoying French ex-pats, something to do with a software company, and she hated everything about them, from their snobbish ways to their three obnoxiously loud children, who made utilizing the pool in peace nearly impossible.
Maybe I’ll require taking them out as part of the deal of selling the cartel, she mused, smiling to herself. Not get her hands dirty and prevent any kind of messy legal battle to evict them. Just swoop in and take it over with the rest of the building.
Oh, not killing them. At least not harming their three brats. But money greased palms quite easily in this country, and it would take nothing to create a scandal out of nothing and make their choice to leave this country the no-brainer, if they wanted to spare their children—and themselves—the shame of a protracted criminal prosecution for tax fraud or financial corruption or some other easily concocted charge.
