Seducing My Billionaire Enemy

Chapter 1 The lobby of Cross Meridian had a smell akin to money that no one had ever had to worry about, it was clean and slightly citrusy and was pumped through the vents so that people wouldn't have to catch the scent of anyone else. I was standing at the security desk with a visitor badge which read NORA BEL, missing the final letter, and I decided not to point it out. I had taken three weeks to make sure that nothing about me would cause anyone to take a second look, and it seemed almost like a blessing to have a missing letter. The guard said, "Thirty-first floor, Conference room Halsey. They'll give you a permanent badge by Friday," and slid the lanyard across the marble. I thanked him and went towards the elevators, keeping my laptop bag pressed against my ribs as if it were a shield. Behind me, stretching as far as the height of a church, the Chicago River remained gray and indifferent. My father would have disliked the building the moment he saw it and would have had some comment about the carpet. Walter Bell had operated Bell Precision from a cinderblock plant on Route 6 in Joliet for twenty-six years, dealing mainly in machined parts, such as valve bodies and couplings, the dull metal that holds other things together. When he got home he always smelled of cutting oil, and for years after his death I would detect that odour in hardware stores and have to stand still until it disappeared. Three years ago Cross Meridian had first purchased his largest customer, then his largest supplier, and then, during one winter, acquired him as well. The sign remained on the premises, and nobody had taken the trouble to remove it, which in my view was worse than if they had. No, I hadn't anticipated coming to like it here. When the elevator door opened it revealed grey carpet and a state of quiet. Halsey turned out to be a room without any windows, having a table designed for twenty and a team of four. A woman with a mass of braids and a travel mug as big as a thermos looked up from her laptop and indicated me. You are the one who has been transferred from Hale and Pryor's forensic team. "Nora." This is Dana Anderson, I look after the revenue side, which involves a lot of sighing. She pushed the chair out with her foot and said, "Sit down. The room they've given us is the worst in the building, so we'll be neighbours. Do you drink coffee? You seem to be the type who drinks coffee." "I do now." "Good answer." Ben and the quiet man named Wen both nodded without lifting their heads. I knew exactly what kind of room this was, and for the first time that morning my shoulders relaxed. Marcus Hale agreed to my request within a minute. I kept thinking about that. Although I had typed the email twice, ready to argue, he had replied before I had finished my second coffee: "Fine. Be careful." He didn't say "fine". He kept asking questions until you wanted to throw your chair. I had told myself that he was finally placing trust in me. This is the situation," Dana said, and she put a drive into my hand. "The company has been suffering losses which no one can account for. It's not a large amount, nor happening all at once, just a leak, not a flood. The board have paid us and they would like to be informed that it's merely a rounding error. It won't turn out to be a rounding error. Here is the vendor master list. There are four thousand one hundred and twelve vendors. Enjoy it." "Anything I should know?" The CFO is charming, the CEO is terrifying and the coffee in the hallway is a lie, the good coffee is on forty. I laughed since this was what was expected and then inserted the drive. There is a reason for this approach and it's not exciting. You don't begin by looking at the suspicious cases. It's easy to come up with an explanation for suspicious things and people generally have already done so. Instead, you start with the dull cases. You look for things that are too neat, too regular, or too quiet. Honest vendors are messy: their addresses appear in three different formats, their invoices jump around, and there are typos here and there. Unhonest vendors, on the other hand, are neat because someone has invented the information and had no reason to be careless. I had sorted all the items according to payment variance by ten-fifteen, and by eleven I was no longer hearing any sound in the room. "Dana." "Mm." "Calloway Freight Partners." She looked over. "I've never heard of it. Why?" There's no street address, just a postal box in Wilmington, Delaware. I scrolled through them. The invoices go back fourteen months and are all paid within two days, which is almost nobody's case. The total amounts to two point three million and every invoice amount ends in forty. Not the cents, but the dollars, forty each time. Ben then raised his head and said, "It might be a flat service contract." Flat contracts aren't capable of scaling with increased volume, these ones are. The figure rises as the shipments rise and still ends in forty. It could be nothing at all. When you put it that way, it's never just a nothing at all. Dana pushed her chair back, holding her mug, and I got the feeling that I was being taken seriously by someone I had known for ninety minutes. Having friends in a job such as this is a disadvantage because they always ask you how you are and then go on to ask you why. The approval record indicated a single approval, that being one of the procurement managers who had left the company eight months earlier, after that the vendor made the payment to itself automatically. This wasn't Bell Precision, not by any stretch of the imagination. My father's downfall was contained in a different decade of the files, and I hadn't come to this place in order to hunt down a freight company that had only a P.O. box. Yet there is a sort of sensation when you pull on one thread and the entire sleeve shifts, that sensation has nothing to do with your original intention. "Flag it?" Dana asked. Not still. I would like to check elsewhere where it appears. Intelligent one, don't stick your finger into it until you know what's beneath it. Here you are in the worst room of the building. I carried on working right through lunch. When it was 1:52 I looked at the Calloway payment history for the third time and saw a small gray line in the audit log which I had not previously examined. The line showed who had accessed the file and at what time. My entry was the last one: N. Bel, 11:03 a.m., nine minutes. There was a second name listed above it, with a timestamp eleven seconds after I had first opened the file. At 11:03 a.m. Cross is currently viewing it. My screen flashed and a calendar invitation moved into the corner of my inbox, dispatched from an assistant's account on behalf of a person who had apparently decided to watch me working. Mr. Cross would like to see the person who opened the Calloway file at 4.00 p.m. today. Dana looked over my shoulder at it and didn't say a word this time.