Page 57 of The Inheritance
“Trying to contain an outbreak of chlamydia in koalas.”
Elias paused midway into the lift and looked at Leo.
“Apparently koalas are highly susceptible to chlamydia,” Leo said. “The latest strain is threatening to make them extinct in New South Wales.”
Elias shook his head and resumed the dips.
“Interesting fact,” Leo continued. “Dr. Peter Nevin can apparently be in two places at once. Here he is speaking at the National Koala Conference in Port Macquarie in New South Wales.”
He flicked the tablet and a picture of Peter Nevin at the podium slid onto the screen.
“And here he is in Vegas after losing three hundred thousand dollars at the poker table on the same day.” Leo swiped across the tablet, presenting a picture of Malcolm exiting a casino, his face flat.
Elias ran out of dips, jumped to the floor, and began to unchain the weights. “Malcolm gambled under his brother’s name.”
“Oh, he didn’t just gamble. When someone like Malcolm lands in Vegas, a siren goes off and they roll out the red carpet from the plane all the way to the strip.”
“How deep is the hole?”
“Twenty-three million.”
Elias took special care to slide the weight plate back onto the rack. Breaking community equipment would not be good. Except that whatever pressure he’d managed to vent now doubled.
Twenty-three million. Over three times Malcolm’s annual pay with bonuses.
Malcolm was a gambler. Everything suddenly made sense. If the motherlode of gold wasn’t an exaggeration, Malcolm could’ve walked away with a bonus of several hundred thousand.
The casinos had to know who they were dealing with. Nobody would allow a koala scientist to carry that kind of debt, but a star assault team leader from a large guild was a different story. If they had any decency, they would’ve cut Malcolm off, but then they weren’t in the decency business.
“He is on a payment plan,” Leo said.
“Of course he is.”
And they would let him dig that hole deeper and deeper. Why not? He’d become a passive income golden goose. And all of this should have been caught during his audits. Those payments had to have come from somewhere, and Malcolm would’ve been at it for years. Any bookkeeper worth their salt would’ve noticed a large amount of money going out.
“The auditor…”
“Already got her, sir.”
Her? Malcolm’s auditor was a man… and he had retired two years ago. The Guild must’ve assigned him to someone else. “Is it Susan Calloway?”
“It is.”
“Are they having an affair?”
Leo blinked. “They are! How…”
“Three years ago at the Establishment Party. He got two drinks, one for his wife and one for Susan, and when he handed the champagne to her, her face lit up. Then her husband returned to the table, and she stopped smiling.”
He had reminded Malcolm and Susan separately after that party that rules applied to them. The guild had a code of conduct, and every prospective guild member signed a document stating they read it and agreed to abide by it during the contract stage. Cold Chaos didn’t tolerate affairs. If both parties were single, relationships between guild members were fine, but cheating on your spouse, in or outside of the guild, would result in severe sanctions.
Adultery undermined trust, destroyed morale, and eroded the chain of command. That was the official position of the US Army, and during his tenure as an officer, he had seen that directive ignored time and time again. From the senior NCOs who made bets on who would be the first to get into a freshly-minted attractive lieutenant’s pants to officers who led double lives every time they went on a prolonged deployment. It never ended well.
He wanted none of that in the guild. If you didn’t have the discipline or moral resilience to remain faithful to the one person who should’ve mattered most in your life, how could anyone rely on you in the breach, where lives were on the line?
He’d made his position quite clear. Both Malcolm and Susan swore nothing was going on, and Elias hadn’t seen any signs of trouble since. Meanwhile Susan quietly became Malcolm’s auditor and chose to ignore his gambling.
Elias hid a sigh. Some days he was just done.
