"The ghost returns," Juno murmured, his eyes tracking my movement. He slid a mug across the counter toward me. "Black. Like your soul."
"My soul is currently under audit," I noted, taking the coffee. I didn't sip it. I carried it to the table and set it down next to Stephen.
"Stephen, can you move please?” I asked, trying to tower over him, though even at my full height I probably wasn’t very impressive.
He blinked, looking up over the rim of his silver glasses. "Excuse me?"
"You're in my seat. That puts the monitor at a bad angle for the glare."
A corner of Stephen's mouth twitched. He picked up his laptop and moved one seat to the left without a word. His monitor now had some glare from the window on it and I could tell that he was thinking of a way to fix that already.
I sat down. I opened my laptop.
The spreadsheet was still there, exactly where I’d left it before Mateo carried me out of the mini-office I’d set up last night. The numbers, the shell companies, the labyrinth of Vance’s empire. Before, it had looked like a wall. Now, it looked like a diagram.
"We’ve been looking at the money," I said, my fingers hovering over the keys. "We tracked the flow from the compliance fines toAegis Collective Solutions. We proved he’s stealing from his clients."
"It's a solid fraud case," Stephen agreed, leaning back. "But fraud takes five years to litigate. By the time we get a discovery order, Vance will have liquidated the assets and moved to a non-extradition country."
"Exactly," I said. "Fraud is a white-collar crime. It’s polite. We need something visceral."
I minimized the spreadsheet and opened a new tab. I started pulling up media kits.
"Vance is a producer," I said, typing furiously. "He doesn't have power; he has leverage. He holds the keys to the venues, the distribution deals, the playlists. But leverage requires legitimacy."
I pulled up a graph I’d built in my head while staring at the ceiling of the hotel room three days ago.
"Who gives him the legitimacy?" I asked the room.
"The board," Mateo grunted from the shadows.
"The board cares about dividends," I countered. "They don't care about the optics unless the stock drops."
I pulled up a photo. It wasn't a banker. It wasn't a lawyer.
It was a man with a silver fox aesthetic, a jaw like a ship’s prow, and a smile that looked like it cost ten thousand pounds.
Hendrick Warson.
"Warson," Juno said, his tone darkening. "He owns theWarson Global Media. And almost every lifestyle magazine in the UK."
"He owns the narrative," I corrected.
I started drawing lines on the screen, connecting entities.
"Look at the timeline. Every time Vance introduces a more restrictive rider, like the cycle-tracking clause last year, what happens in the press two weeks prior?"
I pulled up a series of news articles, each in their own tab, to make my point. All I really needed was the headlines though.
THE UNSTABLE OMEGA: Why Biology Needs Management.
ARTISTS IN CRISIS: The Dangers of Unchecked Heats.
SAFETY FIRST: Why Productions Are Choosing Compliance.
"Warson runs the fear campaign," I said. "He primes the public to believe that Omegas are ticking time bombs and that managers who enforce these draconian rules are heroes protecting the tour."
I looked up at them.
