Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 182

Chp 182: The Man At The Door.

Nineteen hours in a grey room, and Dawson hadn’t given them one thing.

“Let’s go back to 2013.”

“Let’s not.”

“The Fairhaven transfer.” The investigator slid the page across for the ninth time. “Six properties. One signature.”

“That’s a corporate filing, prepared by a corporate department, on the eighteenth floor of a building I visit twice a month.” Dawson hadn’t touched the page once in nineteen hours. “I have four thousand employees. I don’t personally inspect their handwriting.”

“Your initials are in the margin.”

“My initials are on eleven thousand documents. That’s what initials are for.”

“Mr. Valerius…”

“Do you know what I did in 2013?” He leaned back. “I closed the harbour bid. I was in three countries that quarter. If somebody in legal was signing dead men’s names on the eighteenth floor, then somebody in legal has some explaining to do and I look forward to hearing it.”

Just then the door opened.

Okoye came in with a paper cup of tea and didn’t offer him one.

“He’s been like this since midnight,” the investigator said.

“He will be like this until Thursday.” She sat down across from Dawson and looked at him the way a woman looks at a stain she has seen before. “You are very good, Mr. Valerius. I want you to know that I noticed.”

“Thank you.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.” She wrapped both hands around her cup. “Twenty-nine years I have done this Do you know what every single one of you says in this room? Not the same lie. The same shape of lie. It was the department. It was the process. It was a system so large that no one man could possibly be responsible for it.”

“That happens to be true.”

“It’s the most useful sentence ever written, and I have heard it from every man who ever thought the law was something that happened to other people.” She sipped. “You built a system so that when it finally came apart there would be nobody standing in the middle of it. Very clever. But you made one mistake.”

“Enlighten me.”

“You forgot that somebody has to be first.” She set the cup down. “Somebody has to be first. And every road in this file runs back to one man, and he is sitting in front of me in a very expensive shirt, on nineteen hours with no sleep, still telling me about the eighteenth floor.”

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Bille Betrayal a contracted revenge

Dawson said nothing.

emand hearing is Friday.” Okoye said, getting up. “Federal. I would use the time to find yourself a very serous lawyer, and I don’t mean the two who have already stopped answering your calls.”

Forty minutes later the door opened again.

“Counsel for Mr. Valerius.”

The man who came in was maybe sixty, small, neat, in a suit that had cost more than the room. Silver hair. Half-moon glasses. A briefcase he set down with a click.

Dawson had never seen him before in his life.

“Who are…”

“Don’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not one word.” The man didn’t even look up. He opened the case, took out a single folder, and laid it flat. “You have spoken enough for one week, Mr. Valerius. From this moment until I tell you otherwise, your mouth stays shut. Nod if that is agreeable.”

Dawson, who had never taken an instruction from anyone in his adult life, found himself nodding.

Okoye came back in with two of her people, and Dawson saw something he genuinely enjoyed for the first time in nine days.

“Director.” The little man smiled. “My client has been in this room for nineteen hours. He was detained for questioning, which isn’t arrest. Under what section, exactly, are you holding him?”

“He is cooperating voluntarily.”

“He is voluntarily sitting in a locked room with no counsel present for nineteen hours.” He turned a page. “You have also seized eleven accounts on an emergency order signed at six in the morning by a duty officer, and, forgive me, the order names the corporate entity. Not the individual. I have read it twice hoping I was wrong.”

Okoye’s face didn’t move. But she didn’t answer immediately, and Dawson, who read men and women for a living, saw exactly what that pause cost her.

“The evidence stands,” she said.

“I have no doubt it does, and I imagine Friday will be very interesting.” He closed the folder and clicked the case shut. “But you are not holding him through it on this paper. Release him now and file properly, or release him at four o’clock this afternoon when the judge tells you to and I attach that to everything I write for the next two years.”

The room was quiet.

“Get his things,” Okoye said.

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Billionaires Betrayal a contracted revenge

“Thank you, Director.”

Don’t be pleased with yourself.” She looked at Dawson as she said it. “You have bought him eleven days That’s all this is.”

The car was black and unmarked and the little man got in beside him and said nothing until they had cleared three streets.

“That,” Dawson said, “was worth whatever you charge.”

“It was.”

“I’m not ungrateful. Tell me your firm and I will have the retainer moved this afternoon.”

“There is no retainer.”

“There is always a retainer.”

“Not this time.” The man took off his glasses and cleaned them with a small cloth. “I’m not the person you should be thanking, Mr. Valerius. I was hired at eleven o’clock last night by somebody else, and paid in full before I got on the plane.”

Dawson went cold.

“By whom?”

The car slowed. They had turned into a service road behind a hotel, and there was another car parked there, and a very large man leaning against it with one arm still bound in white.

“You’ve got to be joking,” Dawson said.

“Good morning,” Kaelen called through the window. “You look terrible.”

They stood in the concrete quiet of that service road and neither man offered a hand.

“Why?” Dawson said.

“Because you were about to be remanded on Friday, and a man in federal custody is no use to me at all.”

“That’s at least honest.”

“I’m always honest. It’s my worst quality. Kaelen shifted his bad shoulder. “You said no to me in a hole in the ground. I have decided not to take it personally, because you were having a difficult week and because I’m a generous man.”

“You bought me a lawyer.”

“I bought us both time.” All the humour went out of his face at once. “Listen to me now, because I’m only saying this once. Somebody put your name in front of that Bureau. Somebody has been reading files out of three vaults. Six of my men are dead on a ridge and neither of us has a single idea who fired those shots

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