Page 3 of Soul of Discretion

The tone for the meeting was set.

****

Two hours later, Simon sat at his desk going over his notes from his meeting. The sense of achievement at reaming out the two senior (now ex) executives of his Canadian company was tainted with the secure knowledge that Jack Teeman, the president, was someone Simon himself had appointed four years ago.

The financial officer, Roger Parkin, had admitted he’d expressed concern to Jack about the loss of revenue, but had decided to listen to Jack’s excuses rather than call Simon to query what he should be doing.

The Toronto operation was a small company in the large scheme of Simon’s corporate responsibilities, with around one hundred employees, specializing in building prosthetics and artificial intelligence systems. It should have been making a lot of money with all the government and private contracts they had.

Reading between the lines, Simon believed the accounting firm had no doubt been cooking the books for Jack, or were clueless idiots easily bamboozled, and his senior management team had made a fool of Simon by hiding things. Of course, he wanted to kick serious ass.

The thing that hurt him most was his misplaced trust in his best friend Jack. They’d been good together back in the day when they’d been young men starting out in the world of high tech business, and now it looked like Jack was intent on only feathering his own nest.

Simon reflected grimly that simply wasn’t going to happen. He picked up the air ticket Collette had placed on his desk, together with a typewritten itinerary, contact numbers for all the people he’d be expected to see over in Toronto, and a folder containing the latest audited (and potentially falsified) accounts of the Canadian operation.

Stuffing them into his briefcase, he stood up, winced as he rolled his shoulder—sitting at a desk always made him seize up, due to an old shoulder injury from playing rugby—and picked up his cup of coffee, smiling slightly as he dunked a biscuit in.

Collette knocked on his door and he motioned her in.

“Sorry the flight is so early tomorrow morning, but there weren’t many planes available.” She waved her notepad at him. “At least it will give you a few hours after work to pack and get some sleep. I’m sure Peter will have a suitcase packed for you already.”

He nodded. “Yeah. If I want to surprise Jack before he does a runner or has time to make up another excuse for the company’s poor performance, I need to get to him as soon as possible. Those bastards I fired this morning will no doubt be cursing me and singing their woes in his ear as we speak.”

Collette’s lips pursed in concern. “I see your shoulder is playing up again. Sit down and I’ll try to ease it for you.”

As well as being the greatest secretary in the world, Collette was also a qualified physiotherapist. Simon often wondered why she’d chosen the corporate life over her medical career. He’d asked her one day and she’d laughed. “I got tired of having old men face down and giving me the old ‘do you do happy endings’ smirk. Then I met Peter and the only man I wanted to give a happy ending to was him.” Her eyes had glinted wickedly. Simon had tried not to think of the image of her and Peter doing the dirty.

Simon sat down and sighed in bliss as his secretary’s nimble fingers massaged the troubled spot.

“You do know this is above and beyond the call of duty, don’t you?” he murmured, closing his eyes, trying not to make pained noises and wriggle around as her practiced fingers kneaded his flesh. “Peter may accuse me of exploiting you and your oh-so-many talents.”

“Pah,” she retorted as she found a particularly painful spot and Simon’s fingers clenched the arm of his chair. “He is not the boss of me. No man is. And you are in pain, and I know how to relieve it, and that is all that matters.”

After a few minutes of her ministrations, Simon felt sleepy. His muscles relaxed, his head drooped forward and sound around him grew faint.

As long as those magic fingers keep doing what they’re doing, I don’t want to think about anything else….

He was startled back to wakefulness by the rude and insistent clamour of the old-fashioned ring tone on his cell phone. He’d made it simple and sounding like a proper phone because he couldn’t bear today’s new-fangled ditties of popular music excerpts and clucking chickens.

Collette stopped massaging his neck muscles as Simon’s body protested the sudden lack of care being given.

He picked up his phone and growled an impatient “Yes?” into it as Collette sidled out of the room with an apologetic shrug.

The line was filled with static and it was hard to make anything out.

“Simon, it’s me.” The line crackled, and the voice faded but Simon was sure it had been Jack’s voice.

“Jack, is that you? The line is bad. Best to call me back.” Simon didn’t really want to speak to him yet; he’d prefer to do his ass-kicking face-to-face.

“I’m in trouble, mate.” It was Jack, Simon was sure of it. He recognised the Irish brogue. “Wanted to say sorry—” Crackle, crackle. “Be careful—”

The line went dead. Simon glared at his phone and then redialled the number. It went straight to voicemail.

“Huh,” he muttered thoughtfully as he laid his phone down on his desk. “If that was an apology for fucking up my company, it was sincerely lacking. Wait until I get hold of you, mate.” He scowled menacingly. “There won’t be enough places in the world for you to hide.”

He battened down his misgivings about the strange phone call, though the words “I’m in trouble” played through his brain like the plucking of harp strings.

Jack Teeman was canny, streetwise, and tough, and for him to say those words, something had to seriously be out of kilter.