For advance chapters /patreon.com/HandsomeDuckGod
Once, Ethan would certainly have risen to a remark like that, or at the very least felt a flush of irritation. But after everything he had been through, he was no longer the high schooler he'd been. A few barbed words were not worth his anger.
"I never did ask," Brandt continued, prickly as a hedgehog. "What does President Mercer want with a fortune teller? Is New Future not running so smoothly after all?"
Ethan smiled faintly.
"It's not about the company. It's personal. I don't know why, but I seem to have a particular affinity with people named Brandt. There was one back in high school. And now there's you."
Watching Ethan sigh to himself over it, Brandt was thoroughly lost. He knew nothing of the unpleasant chapters of Ethan's high school years.
"Let's get back to it, Manager Brandt. I came today for the truth."
Brandt laughed out loud.
"President Mercer, surely a man as bright as you hasn't swallowed those people's conspiracy theories. The truth is that your Hidden Dragon program threatened too many interests, mine among them. And it so happened that Sterling had a metallurgical partnership that required my sign-off. After that, you know the rest."
"I've heard all of that." Ethan's fingers tapped a slow rhythm on the table. "I came here because I want to hear the parts I haven't."
Brandt chuckled.
"President Mercer, this is the truth. If it doesn't satisfy you, there's nothing I can do about that."
As Ethan watched him hold the line, the interrogator's voice came through his earpiece.
"Mr. Mercer, it's no use. Rouse has him locked down with the rewards he's promised. He won't hear anything right now."
Ethan gave no reaction and went on.
"When I came in, the people from the Bureau told me you have a sick child. Won't you give him some thought?"
The instant the word child landed, Brandt's lip curled in contempt.
"That little burden? If it weren't for that kid dragging me down, who knows how much easier my life would have been. Just as well. Now that I'm caught, let him fend for himself."
It had to be said, Brandt's performance was superb. Even Ethan caught nothing off about it. Anyone who didn't know better might genuinely have taken the man for a cold-blooded creature with no feeling for his own blood.
But a person was still a person. However iron one's composure, there was always some tremor when the thing they truly cared about came up. And in front of J.A.R.V.I.S., the strongest artificial intelligence on the planet, even the smallest tremor was caught.
"Sir. When you mentioned the child just now, his blink rate shifted, briefly, for a single instant. I would advise you to keep pressing along the line of the child."
The tip in his ear settled Ethan completely. When he looked at Brandt again, his confidence had hardened into certainty.
"Manager Brandt. Why do you think people go on living?"
"It's because they have things they're attached to in this world. Family. Love. Loyalty. There's always some tie a person can't cut, something that keeps them from choosing death lightly."
Brandt felt the young man's whole bearing shift, as though his most carefully buried secret were already sitting in the other man's palm.
"What exactly are you trying to say? I genuinely don't follow. Has the prosecutor's office run out of people? Why send a green kid like you to question me?"
Hearing the new hurry in Brandt's voice, Ethan didn't mind it.
"Why send me? Good question. The answer is simple. Because I have capabilities those prosecutors don't."
That gave Brandt a small pause.
"Manager Brandt. The only reason you're keeping your mouth shut is that Rouse can give you what you want. But what if Rouse were no longer President Rouse? Are you certain you'd still get what he promised you?"
Hearing it delivered without a trace of emotion, the first real flicker of panic entered Brandt's chest.
"Impossible. I don't know why you keep bringing Rouse into this, but in the Republic, you cannot arrest a man at random without evidence."
"Ha." Ethan laughed, twice. Then his face changed, and he fixed Brandt with a flat, expressionless stare.
"Of course we can't simply arrest him. President Rouse is a law-abiding citizen. But what if it were my own private action? You know what kind of momentum New Future has across the Republic right now. If I don't get the answer I want today, then for the foreseeable future, New Future abandons every other project and pours everything into besieging Sterling Energy until Liam Rouse is bankrupt."
He let Brandt absorb that, then continued.
"Or there's another route. You've heard of J.A.R.V.I.S. Having him into Rouse's accounts, all of them, without leaving a trace, is also an option. And then there are my Transformers. Perhaps President Rouse could be made to have a quiet accident."
As Ethan went on listing, evenly, one method after another for dealing with Rouse, the project manager who had weathered every kind of high-stakes scene came completely apart.
If something happened to Rouse, what became of his son? Given the kind of man Rouse was, if he were bankrupted, would he keep paying to care for a stranger's child?
The answer was obvious.
And at last Brandt understood why the prosecutors had sent Ethan to question him. Because the man across the table had both the means and the ability to tear his arrangement with Rouse to pieces, all while staying inside the limits of the law.
Bang.
Brandt shot to his feet, hard enough to knock his chair over backward. He didn't care. He jabbed a finger across the table at Ethan and shouted toward the camera mounted in the corner of the room.
"I'm reporting him! Did everyone hear that? This man is planning to use illegal methods of commercial competition to bring down Sterling Energy! And artificial intelligence breaking into bank accounts, that's illegal! Arrest him! Arrest him now!"
In the monitoring room outside, watching Brandt come unglued on the screen, the prosecutors tacitly agreed to see nothing at all.
Arrest Ethan Mercer?
What kind of joke was that? Even setting aside whether the man had broken any law, and even supposing he had, the system made provision for sentence reductions through meritorious service. With a mind like Ethan's, he would likely be released the moment after they locked the door.
"Why aren't you moving? Why aren't you arresting him?"
Brandt's near-frantic voice rang through the interrogation room, and no one outside it lifted a finger.