Who: Lucas Graves & Marco Valentino What: You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Where: Office When: Monday afternoon. Warnings: N/A
His request was simple. He had the equivalent of about two million dollars in a handful of different currencies, and he needed the cash to turn into numbers showing up in one of his two dozen offshore accounts. He usually raked in a couple of hundred grand here and there, and that was manageable enough with his own resources. A little bit bigger than that, and he'd have to make a few phone calls. Two million dollars was not a big sum - considerable, for a man in Marco's league, but he had enough two millions at his fingertips that it wouldn't mean the end of the world if it really disappeared - but to move two million dollars around and perform magic tricks with it required someone who, in the eyes of the public, would see two million as inconsequential small change.
He left the briefcases at the usual drop point. The more you could trust someone, regardless of who they were and what they stood for, the less complicated things had to be. Besides, they were all just a little too old and a little too weary to be playing games with each other. Or at least, didn't they all like to think so?
It was one of the more uncommon occasions where the secretary made him stay around and do some actual work at one of his offices. He had an appointment in a few minutes but apparently the backlog of paperwork was becoming 'insurmountable' and her head was 'going to explode into tiny bitty pieces' if he didn't sign off those papers. The trouble with running small companies was that there was not enough room to have too many people in middle management, and most of the time you had to do everything yourself.
A machine, regardless of how well it was constructed, how perfectly the gears aligned and how smoothly everything ran, still had to have someone push the on/off button and supervise its operation.
"Louise, do you want a promotion? Then you can sign these off yourself and leave me alone."