Page 1 of Mile High With the Bikers
1
RORY
“Would you like a drink, sir?”I gesture at the fancy brass bar cart I’m pushing around the conference table. A brief hit of turbulence makes the glass bottles on it rattle, but then the private jet settles. I straighten my flight attendant’s uniform and repaint my sweet smile on my face. Never let it be said that I don’t know how to play my part, even if inside I want to scream.
Stewart Walls looks up from the tablet in his hand and grins. It’s an ugly thing. “Whiskey, neat.”
“Macallan or Karuizawa?”
“What’s the year on the Karuizawa?”
I glance at the bottle. “Sixty-four.”
“Nearly as old as me,” he says with a wink. “Aged to perfection, don’t you think?”
I giggle politely as I pour, imagining the reaction if I dumped my bucket of fancy glacier ice over his head. My father would kill me, but it might almost be worth it. The jerk rewards me with a wandering hand that slides over my butt and down my thigh.
“And yet you still refuse to grow up, Stewie,” Mary Haney grumbles under her breath. She glances at me and we share a moment of feminine understanding before her gaze flicks away.
When Dad was putting together the list of special guests for this trip, he had me investigate everyone he decided was worth an invite. Four are tech CEOs, the kind that’s famous for whatever innovation that earned them their first billion, and then sank that money into just about everything they could get their fingers into. You only see it if you dig deep enough, but these people are connected.
These two in particular ran a start-up together just out of college before he went into payment systems and she focused on surveillance technology. But it’s the other three invites that really make me nervous. I’m pretty sure they have their fingers in a lot of things as well, but where the tech CEOs use loopholes to skirt the edge of the law, these guys are so far beyond you can’t even see them from the edge. My searches mostly ended in a lot of suspicious dead ends or leads into corners of the dark web that I really don’t want to get too familiar with.
“And for you, Mr. Whittaker?” The last passenger I need to serve before I can escape is the worst. My father.
“Water, plenty of ice,” he orders without even looking up.
His choice gets a few raised eyebrows from the others, but it’s what I expected. He’ll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on stocking a bar to impress the right people, but would never put that poison in his own body. I use silver tongs to drop perfect squares of crystal clear ice into his glass and fill it with Norwegian water. Sourced directly, of course.
“Will that be everything?”
“Yes. Leave us.” He raises a hand and flicks his fingers dismissively.
I nod. “Sir.”
Mason and Tim, Dad’s two bodyguards, watch over everything from the back of the room. Along with them stand a half dozen other stone-faced men, doing the same for their own employers. Mason rolls his eyes subtly as I push the cart their way. I raise my shoulder in a tiny shrug, like “That guy, right? What can you do?”
And it’s true. I knew exactly how this was going to go when Dad informed me I was coming with him. It’s not like I want to sit here and listen to them drone on and on about the Hermes project anyway. Not after what happened after the first demonstration. Not once I realized the impact was going to be so much worse than I imagined.
Sometimes I wonder what my mother would think if she saw how my life was going. Would she feel guilty for essentially selling me off in exchange for a chateau in Austria?
Until I was thirteen, I had a fairly normal life, if you count going to a private international boarding school as normal. It didn’t bother me that Mom was single, but she worked a lot. Dad was completely absent except for his monthly payments, but I knew he was some kind of big shot. My mistake was to think that if I just studied really hard and did well enough in school, at least one of them would have to notice.
It worked, but not exactly how I hoped. One of my teachers contacted Dad, not realizing he wasn’t really part of my life, gushing about my grades and explaining how she thought I would blossom with more advanced tutoring. Knowing him asI do now, I’m almost surprised he even noticed her email, but once in a while something catches his attention, and on that day it was me. The slip-up he’d never met that was costing him an arm and a leg in child support was suddenly very interesting.
And now, almost ten years later, I slip past his bodyguards and retreat through the door into the back of the plane.
One of the privacy rooms, there for passengers to make phone calls or work privately, opens and a man in a gray suit comes out, almost bumping into me. He’s in his thirties with light brown eyes and attractive enough, but he’s traveling with one of the guests that scares me, Silas McGrath. A man whose business must be very lucrative for him to be here, and yet surprisingly hard to pin down. I smile and stand to the side to let him pass.
He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a wallet. “Great timing, let me get a look at what you’ve got.”
“Oh! There’s no charge, sir.”
He flips open his wallet and counts out five hundred dollar bills, folding them up and slipping them into the tiny handkerchief pocket of my uniform. “Thirty minutes of your time.”
“What?”
“In the room. With me.”
