“You lied to me,” she said, confronting Kyle.
“Did you really expect me to lose one of my top people?” he shot back.
“Well, you’re losing one now.”
And she quit. Before the day was out, she was working for Lisa Carver, the CEO of Arrival, but not before one final warning for Brandon Kyle.
“If you want to sue me, to stop me from going to work for Lisa, be my guest. I’ll be in touch with CNN and the Times and anyone else I can think of to tell them you secretly kept a sexual predator on the payroll. Just try me.”
The catastrophic Gandalf crash that took the lives of that director and his girlfriend came three months later. Kyle could think of no one more qualified to infect one of his vehicles with a virus than a former employee who’d been in charge of protecting them from such incursions.
Kyle learned that, after the accident, Rhonda took time off from work. She began to drink heavily, started seeing a therapist. From what Kyle could gather, she’d had every intention of fucking up one of his cars, but never meant for anyone to get killed. Screw up the door locks, keep the navigation system from working, have the heat come on when you dialed in the A/C. Let Gandalf get a reputation for unreliability.
But kill two innocent people? She hadn’t signed on for that.
Arrival had exploited Rhonda, using everything she knew about Gandalf’s operating system, and then expanding on that knowledge. Rhonda had left one company for its failure to deal with a sexual predator and now worked for one that had used her expertise to, in effect, commit murder.
One day, Kyle got a call from a number that he could not identify.
“I want to talk,” Rhonda said. “Tomorrow.”
She was ready, she said, to blow the whistle on Arrival.
They could not be seen together. She’d rent a room at the Hilton, have a key card left for him at the desk. Kyle went to the hotel at the appointed time, but there was no key for him. No Rhonda Templeton had checked in. So Kyle waited in the lobby for two hours until he received a call from the office asking if he’d heard the news.
Rhonda was dead.
Hell of a thing. That morning, the superintendent of her condo broke into her unit when water started flowing out from under the door. Found her naked body in the bathroom. Looked like she’d gotten into the tub while the water was still running, slipped, and hit her head on the edge. A fatal blow. What were the odds?
What were the odds, indeed.
Kyle knew how he must have sounded in the interviews he gave after that. Arrival had not only used one of his own employees to sabotage him, but murdered her when her conscience got the better of her. Gandalf’s reputation already in tatters, now Kyle personally was seen to be in a delusional free fall. Gandalf stock plummeted. The company went bankrupt, the factory mothballed. All but a handful of employees remained, most devoted to winding down operations. Even Emeril got the boot.
Kyle lost his Cape Hatteras seaside mansion, the Soho condo in New York. His stable of rare sports cars, including his 1961 Jaguar E-Type, a 1964 Aston Martin DB5, and his most treasured find, a 1983 DeLorean, the vehicle from those Back to the Future movies, was auctioned off.
And worst of all, he lost Beverly.
Five years. Good times. But Beverly wasn’t interested in sticking around for the bad. “I can’t take it,” she’d finally told him. “This obsession, this drive to get even, it’s consumed you. Every minute of every day, it’s Lisa this, Lisa that. You’ve got a choice to make. You can either move past what’s happened, let me help you move forward, or you let this anger and revenge completely eat you up, and do it alone.”
Kyle made his choice.
Thank God there was a prenup. Managed to send her packing with a cool million. Chump change compared to what she might have gotten without one. So there was still money left to do what he had to do.
To get even.
Arrival and its CEO, Lisa Carver, had humiliated him.
Destroyed all that he had worked so long to build. His life’s dream.
Kyle had become a joke on late-night talk shows. What was it one of the hosts quipped? “I was going to buy a Gandalf, but decided not to take the plunge.”
There had to be payback. You couldn’t crush a man’s soul and expect to get away with it. The way Brandon Kyle saw it, there was nothing left to lose, only one way to settle the score.
“Excuse me?”
Kyle, still leaning up against the railing, turned. A slight, balding man in his thirties was standing three feet away, leaning in curiously, peering at Kyle through a pair of black-framed glasses.
“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “Clyde Travers, Consumer Safety magazine.”
“Hey,” Kyle said.
Travers was extending a hand, so Kyle, with some reluctance, took it. “Nice to meet you. Ben Stapleton, Wheel Base Trends.”
“Kind of lonely back here,” Travers said, chuckling nervously. “Everyone else is up front. I guess people like to see where they are going instead of where they’ve been.”
Kyle feigned a friendly smile but said nothing. But Clyde was correct. This end of the ferry, on this lower deck, was an out-of-the way spot. Kyle had chosen it because he wanted to be alone with his thoughts, and now this guy had come along.
Travers was looking intently at Kyle, as if trying to place him. “Have we met before?”
“I don’t think so,” Brandon Kyle said, because no one, before today, had ever met Ben Stapleton. But Kyle did believe he recognized Travers. The man had interviewed him at some point.
“Are you sure?” Travers persisted. “Because you look familiar.”
Kyle shrugged. “Maybe at some other event.”
Travers wouldn’t stop staring. “You know who you look like?”
Kyle had that feeling you get when you think you’ve lost your wallet. “Who?” he asked, slowly.
“That Gandalf guy. Brandon Kyle.”
Kyle laughed nervously. “I wish. I’d love a full head of hair and a six-pack.” He patted the stuffing strapped to his waist. “But like I said, I’m Ben Stapleton, Wheel Base.”
Travers was looking him right in the eye. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve interviewed you three times over the years. In 2018, when the first Gandalfs were coming off the line.” He smiled wryly as he looked Kyle up and down. “What’s with the disguise? That is, unless you’ve really been getting into the Krispy Kremes in a big way the last few months.”
Kyle wasn’t ready to concede defeat. “Honestly, I’m not who you think I am.”
Travers took out his phone. “So, if I look up Ben Stapleton and Wheel Base Trends, I’m gonna see your picture and byline, am I?”
Kyle reached out a cautioning hand. “Okay, fine, put your phone away.”
Travers grinned with satisfaction. “So what gives?”
Kyle sighed and looked back out to sea, elbows on the railing. “It’s a long story.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got time.” He shook his head, disbelieving. “So, like, Lisa Carver, the Arrival PR people, they’ve got no idea you’re on the ferry, that you’re headed for their presser? Am I right? I mean, I can’t imagine you were on the guest list.”
Kyle nodded slowly. “That’s correct.”
“So you’re sneaking in. You want to see for yourself what they’re up to.” Travers’s head bobbed up and down sympathetically. “Look, I get it. I’m one of the people who’s believed you from the beginning. I think they fucked with your software, and I think they killed that woman who used to work with you. Staged that bathroom accident.”