Wrong Woman

Chapter 1 - Discretion Assured

The meeting had been scheduled for ninety minutes, and at the hour mark Rupert Giraldi was fairly sure he knew who in the room had already decided to vote against him.

It wasn’t Neville Ashcombe, though Neville was doing most of the talking. Neville talked the way some men drove, steadily and in the middle of the lane, signaling everything well in advance. He had been the senior independent director of Giraldi Infrastructure plc for six years, and in all that time he had never once surprised anybody. He was worried about the Dutch. He was worried about the government. He wanted both worries in the minutes.

“I’m not saying we walk away,” Neville said. “I’m saying we should be honest with ourselves about what we’re walking into.”

“We’re walking into a contract we spent two years winning,” Rupert said.

“A contract whose terms have changed.”

“The terms haven’t changed. The paperwork has.”

That got a laugh from the far end of the table, from Ines Corbett, who ran the ports division and had driven up from Southampton at six that morning and plainly wanted her lunch. Neville didn’t laugh. Rupert hadn’t expected him to.

The boardroom was on the fourth floor of what had been, in the 1880s, a tea warehouse on the south bank of the Thames. Rupert had bought the building fourteen years ago, when it was full of pigeons and a theater company that couldn’t pay its rent, and he’d kept the iron columns and the long windows and very little else. From his chair he could see the river running out toward the sea, brown and quick, and a police launch working its way upstream against it. He liked this room because it was difficult to be pompous in it. The ceilings dropped low between the beams, and tall men ducked without noticing they were doing it.