LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

David called on Friday morning with the voice of a man who had not slept.

Aisha was already at her desk — it was six forty-five, the office empty and quiet in the particular way it was before the day filled it with noise and requirement — and she answered on the first ring with the alertness of someone who had also not slept especially well.

"NDG Consulting Solutions is a shell," David said, without greeting. "Registered in Douala fourteen months ago, single director, minimal public footprint. But the holding structure behind it traces back through two intermediary companies to a parent entity registered in Mauritius." A pause. "That parent entity has a joint venture agreement with EkoCorp dated sixteen months ago."

Aisha was very still. "Sixteen months ago."

"Two months before Diane Ngo left TechNova."

She set down her pen. Outside, the city was just beginning its morning conversation with itself — the first taxis, the early vendors, the particular energy of Yaoundé deciding to be awake. She had always loved this hour. The city before it became what the day required of it.

"She didn't leave because of the falling out over equity," Aisha said. It was not a question.

"The falling out may have been engineered," David said carefully. "To create a clean exit with a sympathetic narrative. A co-founder who left over a principled disagreement reads very differently from one who was positioning herself to work against the company."

Aisha thought about those last months with Diane. The arguments that had escalated faster than arguments usually did. The positions that had been more entrenched than the underlying disagreements seemed to warrant. The departure that had been, in retrospect, too clean. Too resolved. Too final.

She had grieved that friendship for a long time. Had blamed herself, partially, for not finding a way to keep it.

"She manufactured it," she said quietly. "The whole falling out. She needed a reason to leave that would hold up."

"That's my read." David's voice was careful but certain. "I'm sorry, Aisha."

She absorbed that for a moment. Then she set it aside the way she set things aside when there was work to do — not suppressing it, just scheduling it. There would be time for the full weight of it later. Right now there was a case to build.

"How close are we?" she said.

"Close. The financial trail between NDG and EkoCorp is documentable. The payments to Raymond Mbah are documentable. What I need now is a direct communication — an email, a message, anything that explicitly connects Diane Ngo to the instruction to leak TechNova's financials to Fotso Advisory." A pause. "That's the piece that makes this criminal rather than merely civil."

"How do we get it?"

"Carefully." He paused again, longer this time. "There is one option. It's not without risk."

"Tell me."

"Raymond Mbah doesn't know we know. Which means he's still active. Still presumably in communication with whoever is directing him." David's voice was measured, deliberate. "If we approach him correctly — with enough of what we have to make him understand that his position is untenable, but not so much that he feels cornered — he might cooperate. Turn witness. Give us the direct communication we need in exchange for consideration in whatever legal action follows."

Aisha thought about Raymond sitting across the conference table yesterday, his retention analysis open in front of him, his smile entirely ordinary. "You want to flip him."

"I want to give him the opportunity to make a better choice than the one he's currently committed to." A beat. "It's his only real exit. When this breaks — and it will break — he wants to be on the right side of it."

She was quiet for a moment. "When?"

"Monday. Give me the weekend to prepare the approach properly."

"Do it." She paused. "David. When we move, we move completely. I don't want anything left unresolved. Every thread, every connection, every person who had a hand in this."

"Understood." A brief pause. "And Aisha — when this is over, you should take some time. You've been carrying a significant amount."

"When it's over," she said. Which was what she had been saying to everyone and which was beginning to accumulate its own kind of weight.

She thanked him and hung up.

Then she sat alone in the quiet office for a moment, in the early morning light, and allowed herself to feel the full shape of what she now knew.

Diane Ngo had sat across from her in a studio apartment seven years ago and said this is going to change things. She had meant it as a promise. She had spent the years since converting it into something else entirely — a blueprint for destruction built from the inside of the very thing they had created together.

The grief of it was real and it was going to take time and she was not going to pretend otherwise to herself, even if she would continue to perform composure for everyone else.

But underneath the grief was something harder and more durable.

Anger. The clean, purposeful kind. The kind that did not cloud judgment but sharpened it.

She picked up her phone.

Kael arrived at her office at eight.

She had not asked him to come. She had sent a message saying David called, significant developments, update when you're free, and he had replied I'm coming in and she had not told him not to, which was its own kind of answer.

He knocked once and she told him to come in and he closed the door behind him and sat across from her desk with the focused attention of someone who understood that the conversation they were about to have required his full presence.

She told him everything. All of it, in sequence, with the precision she brought to every important communication — the shell company, the Mauritius connection, the joint venture with EkoCorp, the manufactured falling out, David's plan for Raymond.

He listened without interrupting, which she had noticed he always did when it mattered. Did not reach for his phone, did not ask clarifying questions until she was finished, did not perform concern. Just listened with the full weight of his attention.

When she finished he was quiet for a moment.

"She built this over years," he said. "Before she even left."

"Yes."

"While you were still working together. While you still trusted her completely." He said it not to wound but to understand the full shape of it.

"Yes." Aisha looked at her desk. "I keep going back to the early days. Trying to identify the moment. When she decided. Whether there was a version of her that genuinely believed in what we were building, or whether it was always —" She stopped.

"It doesn't matter," Kael said quietly. "What she intended at the beginning doesn't change what she chose to do. And it doesn't change what you built. TechNova exists because of your vision and your work. She contributed to the foundation and then tried to demolish the house. The house is still standing."

Aisha looked at him across the desk.

"You're very good at saying the right thing," she said.

"I've had three years to think about what I should have said and didn't." The honesty of it was simple and direct. "I'm making use of the practice."

She held his gaze for a moment. Then, because she was tired and it was early and the performance of composure was considerably more effortful than it usually was, she said the thing she had been carrying since David's call.

"I'm angry," she said. "Not just at Diane. At myself, for not seeing it. For trusting so completely that I built blind spots into the foundation of my own company."

"You trusted a friend," Kael said. "That's not a blind spot. That's being human."

"I can't afford to be that human. Not at this level."

"Yes you can." His voice was firm but not unkind. "The alternative is building something that works but costs you the ability to trust anyone, and that is a much higher price than what you're paying now." He leaned forward slightly. "You have Sule. You have Bih. You have David. You have a team that stayed when staying was hard. Your instincts about people are good, Aisha. One person exploited them. That's her failure, not yours."

She was quiet for a long moment.

Outside the office, she could hear the building coming alive around them — voices in the corridor, the sound of the coffee machine, Bih's heels on the tiled floor approaching and then passing.

"Monday," she said finally. "David approaches Raymond on Monday."

"I'll have my legal team standing by." He held her gaze. "We're close."

"I know." She straightened slightly, the familiar gathering of herself that preceded whatever the day required. "Thank you for coming."

"You didn't tell me not to."

"I noticed that too."

The almost-smile. Then the full one, brief and warm, and she felt something shift in her chest the way it had been shifting by degrees for weeks now — quietly, without announcement, in the direction of something she was almost ready to name.

Almost.

"Go run your company," he said, standing. "I'll see you on the other side of Monday."

She nodded. He left.

She looked at the closed door for a moment. Then she opened her laptop, pulled up the day's agenda, and went to work.

The house was still standing.

She intended to keep it that way.

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