Ciara
I’m heading back from Miami… been stalking other cafes for YOU, remember?”
It’s a DIGITAL assignment. You can call Miss Stone on the flight back…
“Harrison?” Aaron rushed to my desk. “We have a problem.”
“Just one?”
“I’m not kidding.” His terse tone caught me off guard. “We’re in deep shit.”
“Have a seat.”
“I can’t.” He shook his head. “Ciara and I have consistently run the numbers with every member of the accounting team, and unless we’re all dumb, this company is missing a boatload of money.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred million.”
I blinked, waiting for him to correct ‘million’ with ‘thousand,’ but he didn’t.
“Million, Harrison.” He read my mind. “Five hundred million.”
“How is that even possible?” I asked. “That’s more than half of what I paid for this place.”
“I can have an independent auditing team here in an hour, but…”
“But what?”
“It’ll invite suspicion and conversation,” he said. “And I’m sure you don’t want this anywhere near the media.”
Right… I stood up from my chair and looked out the window.
I didn’t need to utter a word about my hate-tolerate relationship with journalists.
From here, I could see the sleek silver skyscraper that housed The Times. It was one block away from the red brick tower where freelance journalists huddled and shared stories about shady businessmen on Wall Street.
Sighing, I remembered that I had an upcoming stretch of interviews with them in three weeks, and I didn’t want to have to answer a single question about myself—let alone the state of this company’s finances.
“What’s the alternative?” I looked over my shoulder at Aaron. “Better yet, is there one?”
“We take a page from your book and make every executive stay until the numbers line up or the money appears,” he said. “We also question everyone who ever had access to it, and threaten them with legal action and….”
“And what?”
“You have to extend your takeover timing,” he said. “By another three months—at least.”
“Let’s go ahead and make it six,” I said. “Tell Human Resources to update all the contracts, and send out a note that the six a.m. start time is now permanent.”
“Will do.”
“Now, for this ‘find the missing money’ operation,” he said, “are we going slumber-party aggressive or all-nighter aggressive?”
“Both.” I returned to my desk. “I’ll tell Miss Stone to handle the setup before her other tasks.”
FIFTEEN
ANDREA
