Kerry grimaced. “Oh lord. That honestly won’t work.”
“Then go with him and figure out how to make it work.” Bridges told her. “You’ve got a shitload of your father in you. Go prove it.” He nudged her with his elbow. “G’wan.”
Dar leaned past her. “You keep insulting Kerry and I’m going to tell you to fuck off too.”
“No, it’s okay.” Kerry was surprised to find that it actually was. “He meant it in a good way.” She stood up and patted Dar’s back, then circled the table and pointed at Steve. “C’mon.”
“Let’s clear the room.” Bridges said. “Except you, and you and me.” He pointed at Jacques and Dar. “John, keep that bozo entertained.” He indicated Higgs. “Move, people.”
Five minutes later they were alone in the room.
“So.” Bridges said. “Explain to me why you turned into such an idiot?” He asked Jacques.
Jacques merely shook his head. “There becomes a point.” He said, after a pause. “When all the bad decisions make of so much weight, you cannot push them off.”
“You could have.” Dar disagreed. “I told you what you needed to do.”
“You did.” He said. “But I am only one man, and there were so many on the board who refused to go along with that, because it meant to the world a total failure.”
“And this is?” Bridges brows hiked.
“Now? It is in fact a total failure.” Jacques said. “We will all be cast out.”
“You should be.” Dar said. “You butchered that company.”
“Dar.”
“Jacques, that’s why they pay you the big bucks.” Dar said. “The buck stops with you. Just like, when I was there, the buck stopped with Alistair.”
“We were very sure we knew what to do.” Jacques said. “We were absolutely sure we had picked well to replace you.”
Dar regarded him. “You are a moron.” She said. “That guy could no more replace me than I could flap my arms and fly to Mars.”
‘Yes, well Dar, that is the problem isn’t it? You made yourself un-replaceable.” Jacques said. “I think you knew that. You arranged things so that anyone who followed you would be lost.”
Dar regarded him thoughtfully. “I did.” She agreed, surprising everyone. “Not on purpose.” She added. “It’s just who I am. I’m a leader. An Alpha if you want.” She exhaled, and nodded. “I did things my way. But you all knew that, and you let me. If that wasn’t what you wanted, then you should have stopped me a long time ago.”
Bridges nodded in turn.
“So yes, I knew I was impossible to replace. I just wasn’t going to sacrifice my life because of that. I was hoping you’d find someone who would study what I did, and then make a plan to make it their own. Not do something as mind bendingly stupid as make some random change then make it impossible to recover from it.”
“So now you will wreck us.” Jacques said.
“Yes. I can’t let you wreck both the company’s reputation and mine.” Dar said. “So I will take you down, and force a replacement of the board, and if the company’s very lucky Alastair will agree to take over again until things can be made right.”
“They will not stand still for that.” Jacques shook his head.
“They won’t have a choice. “ Bridges spoke up. “Considering how much of the operations of the government you goat heads are disrupting I could have all of you held as suspected terrorists. You do realize that, right?”
Jacques look at him in startlement.
“You do realize where you are, right?” He pointed at the desk. “You do realize the guy who walked in here a while back in the chinos and button down was George Bush, right? Leader of the free world and all that crap?”
Dar sighed.
“She gets it.” Bridges pointed at Dar. “If I were you, I’d start catching up before the best thing that will happen to you and all your Wall Street buddies is they’ll end up in Guantanamo.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “And I don’t even need a warrant. Your families will never see you again. You’ll never get a lawyer. You get me?”
Jacques was silent for a moment. “Yes.” He said then. “I understand you.”
“Good.” Bridges looked satisfied. “Today might end up all right after all.” He leaned back and twiddled his thumbs, humming softly under his breath.
Dar waited a moment to see if anything else was going to happen, then she pulled out her Handspring and started to type.
Part 16
Kerry found herself in a rectangular office, with desks against the walls and old fashioned drapes over the windows above them. There were two men behind one of the desks with big ledgers open in front of them, and her new friend Steve on the phone next to her.
“We can’t.” She answered Steve’s question. “We don’t have anything close to the space, people, systems, all that, to be able to actually manage the contracts.”
“But Ms. Roberts said…”
“Yes, I know what Dar said.” Kerry sighed. “I’m totally with her on getting that board out of there and getting people into position not to mess everything up again but there is just no way for us to take over the service like that.” She snapped her fingers.
“So what do we do?”
Well, that was a good question. Kerry leaned against the desk behind her. “’What are the … wait, why am I asking you that? I wrote the damn contract.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “It’s a three year, and it was renewed about eighteen months ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“Got a penalty clause.” One of the accountants said.
“Yes, it would. But it also has SLA’s in it. Can you pull them?” Kerry said. “And the monitors that prove they were broken?”
Steve scratched his head. “Do we do that?”
“You should.”
“I think they depended on ILS to tell us.” He responded with a grimace. “But really all that doesn’t matter. Bridges said to just make it happen so that’s what we need to do, you know?”
“I know but it’s not that easy. The stuff that’s running your stuff is on pieces of gear that other people’s stuff is running on.”
“That’s not right.” Steve said. “You can’t mix top secret stuff like that.”
“I can if the other stuff is just as top secret.” Kerry said. “There’s an awful lot of government stuff on the ..” She paused and pondered the options. “Okay wait. The government nodes in the area are segregated… “
“We should take over everything. It wasn’t right to have some company doing it.” Steve said. “I told everyone that.”
“That’s it.” Kerry straightened up . “We can’t do it because we don’t have the people.”
“Well, we sure don’t have the people. That’s why we hired ILS.” The accountant said, in a practical tone.
“But you could.” Kerry said. “You could put your own people into all the places where the connections are, and you monitor them.”
Steve’s eyes literally lit up. “Yeah!”
“We don’t have those people.” The accountant repeated. “Where do we get them?”
“You hire the people that are already there.” Kerry’s pale green eyes twinkled, just a little. “The ones that work for ILS. That would be out of a job if you took away the contracts.”
“Ahhhh.” The accountant smiled, thinly. “I see.”
“That way they’re not cutting the contracts to another company you’re in sourcing.” Kerry said. “You just terminate the contracts for non performance and conscript the equipment due to national security reasons.”
“You bet..” He paused. “Can we do that?”