Page 49 of Ruthless Prince
A sweaty old man with a beer gut bumped into me, almost spilling his drink on my shoes, but I stepped to the side just in time and slid into the booth Teddy had claimed for us. “Here,” I said, pushing one of the glasses across thetable.
“Thanks,” he mumbled, barely glancingup.
“I had them bring it down from upstairs,” I said, swirling my glass in one hand. “It’s a fifty-year-old single malt. Over thirty grand a bottle. Won’t get anything better anywhereelse.”
Teddy simply grunted atthat.
I let out a low sigh. “We can go if youwant.”
His eyes snapped up to meet mine. “No. We only just gothere.”
I raised a brow. “You sure you wanna hang out?” I asked. This club used to be Teddy’s favorite place, which was why I’d brought him here in an effort to cheer him up, but judging by his morose expression and total disinterest in the girls, it seemed like the last place he wanted to be right now. “I’ve got work tomorrow, so it’s fine if you wannaleave.”
“No. I want to stay.” He glanced at the girl dancing next to us. She’d righted herself on the pole and was doing a series of spins to the beat. “Besides, it’s not like you really have to work,” he added with a snort ofamusement.
I didn’t appreciate his snide tone, but it was the first time I’d seen any sign of amusement from him in weeks, so I let it go. I knew he didn’t mean to be an asshole. He was justhurting.
“I have some shit to discuss with my supervisor, so I actually do have to go in tomorrow morning,” I said. “Otherwise we could pull an all-nighter.”
Teddy let out a derisive chuckle. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant your family owns half the fucking country, so you don’t need to workanywhere.”
“I like myjob.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“I honestly can’t figure out why you work there. With your connections, you could make five times more somewhereelse, and you wouldn’t have to answer to anysupervisors.”
“The guys I work with are cool, and the pay isn’tbad.”
“But it’s not seven figures, isit?”
I shrugged. “I don’t care. I like Caldwell. Simple asthat.”
Caldwell was a private intelligence agency devoted to the analysis and exploitation of intelligence taken from open sources and government-run agencies like the NSA. I’d worked there since I graduated from college two yearsago.
The main difference between private and government intelligence agencies was that private ones often obtained information through shady or deceptive means. This allowed the government to buy and access intelligence from them without implicating themselves in the process. Basically, all they had to say was ‘oops, we didn’t know’ if they were ever caught, and then they were off the hook, even though everyone knew or suspected thetruth.
Almost a hundred billion dollars was poured into the private sector each year, courtesy of our wonderful government, so business was booming on our end. In fact, many functions previously performed by government agencies like the NSA and CIA were now outsourced to agencies likeCaldwell.
The section I worked for concentrated on media manipulation campaigns and the distribution of strategic disinformation, otherwise known as fake news and information warfare. I’d discovered a while ago that I had a real knack for predictive modeling, and that came in handy in this line of work. I could spotlight issues before anyone else even knew they were issues, and Caldwell could then use their brand of information management to make the problem go away before it went viral, as things tended to do these days. Conversely, if there was something that the government or other high-paying clientswantedto go viral, we could make that happentoo.
“Well, I guess you don’t actually need a high salary. Or a salary at all,” Teddy said tonelessly. He tipped his glass back and downed his scotch in one gulp. “Not when your inheritance is worth more than the GDP of several smallcountries.”
I snorted. “Noshit.”
His upper lip curled as he finished swallowing his mouthful. Then he sniffed and shook his head. “I still don’t get how you ended up workingthere. You were so obsessed with all that political shit back in the day.Remember?”
“Yeah.”
He rolled his eyes. “You used to go on and on about how you’d be the first person on either side of your family to be involved with that whole circus out in the open. Maybe even become the president when you were fifty. Now you’re basically a fuckingspook.”
“I’m not a spook. That’s theCIA.”
“Whatever. You know what Imean.”
I smiled faintly. “Things change. Interests change. Like I said, I like my job, and for now, it’s what I want todo.”
