Page 47 of The Money Man
“Or maybe it’s just not in character foryou,” he muttered.
“How was your meeting with Ted?”
He gave her a narrow-eyed look but let it go. “Strange. He seemed interested in my proposal at the beginning but by the time you returned he was throwing up obstacles in every direction. The terms he offered were downright insulting to my intelligence and he appeared to be quite pleased with that. If I had really wanted to partner with BalanceTrakR, I would have been seriously angry.”
“Well, you did a great job of looking ticked off when Myron and I got back. I guess your drama major pays off in situations like that.”
He huffed out a laugh. “I never thought of it that way.”
“Really? You don’t call on your acting chops when dealing with difficult clients?” She couldn’t believe that.
“Not consciously. You know the acting career was more my father’s idea than mine.”
“Yeah, I still can’t believe he told you that starting your own firm was too risky when he should have been cheering you on.”
He hesitated for a moment before shaking his head. “Maybe I ought to thank him. The prospect of hearing him say ‘I told you so’ made me doubly desperate to succeed.”
Alice nodded. She still needed to prove to her mother that she wasn’t a failure in life.
“But that’s the past,” Derek said, closing the subject. “Let’s deal with our current problem.”
She ventured to mention her crazy idea about BalanceTrakR. “This is going to sound strange but I felt like BalanceTrakR’s headquarters were sort of a stage set.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The room for the coders was so clichéd. It had a Ping-Pong table and action figures on the cubicles. I mean, do software companies still have Ping-Pong tables for their developers? It almost seemed like a throwback to something that someone had seen in a movie.”
Derek frowned. “What else?”
“The security staff! You know those hacker movies where the guy wears a black hoodie and sits hunched over his laptop in a dark room, searching for a back door into the CIA’s supersecret system or a city’s traffic-light control center? That’s exactly what it looked like. The only person who looked real was the head guy, and he was genuinely terrifying.” She felt the frisson of fear all over again as she remembered his blank eyes.
“Did you talk to him?”
“Just hello-how-are-you kind of stuff.”
He said something under his breath that she couldn’t quite make out. “No casual questions asked?”
“Not a one. I wasn’t going to mess with him.”
“I’m glad you have some sense of self-preservation.”
She swiveled on the seat to look straight into his eyes. “Do you really think Myron Barsky is a threat?” He’d seemed more awkward than anything else.
“Maybe not Myron, but it sounds like you met someone who could be.” The angles of his face were taut with disquiet. “I felt something was off with Ted Murval. You felt something was not right with the facility. That worries me.”
“Well, since they’re doing something illegal, it would make sense that they wanted to throw us off the scent, right?” She settled back against the seat. “And now they believe they have, so there’s no reason to be concerned.”
“If it was all a setup, they went to a lot of trouble and expense to trick us. That means the stakes are high.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “But that’s for Leland and Tully to worry about now. You’re off the case.”
Regret curled through her. “I guess my clients won’t get their money back for BalanceTrakR. I feel badly about that.”
“You can’t blame yourself for dishonest behavior.”
“It’s funny but the worst I thought of Myron at his original presentation was that he promised a lot and I wasn’t sure the software could deliver it all. It never occurred to me that he wouldstealfrom his users.” She grimaced. “I guess I’m naive.”
“You have faith in people doing the right thing. I hope you never lose that because it’s a rare trait ... except in this situation.” He wrapped his hand around hers. “You need to understand that those who steal are often willing to do worse to protect themselves.”
“You keep saying that, but I can’t picture Myron even punching anyone in the nose. Although John Peters ...” She shivered a bit at the memory of his implacable face.
