I think he senses that something’s wrong, but I don’t volunteer my thoughts and he doesn’t have much time to question me. He has to get to work himself and he has to be there by nine. I don’t have to be at Jessica’s until ten.

He agrees to leave me in the penthouse by myself.

Actually, it’s not like he agrees to it exactly; he just does it. He seems to trust me.

Yesterday that trust was justified. Reciprocated. But now?

Sitting alone in his office, my hands pressed flat against the smooth surface of his mahogany desk, I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and try to organize my thoughts.

“What do I do?” I whisper aloud.

And then as the obvious answer comes to me I open my eyes and walk over to Lander’s file cabinet and start looking through his papers, trying to find something incriminating.

Because the obvious answer is simply this: stick to the plan.

I should be relieved. Everything is exactly as I originally thought it was. Travis is a criminal, Lander is a profit-hungry enabler—who cares less about innocents being hurt than about the status of his corporation—and their father is the asshole who unleashed them on the world.

It shouldn’t surprise me that Lander wants to use his girlfriend to help his brother and HGVB get away with breaking the law. Sure, he’s trying to stop them, but there’s no justice in his plan, and they’ll keep all their profits from Travis’s dirty acts. Just last night Lander told me he was a bad person. He said he was worse than me, and God knows that’s saying something.

So everything that’s happening . . . it’s good. Lander has literally spelled out what I need to be looking for. I just need to make it look like Jessica knows all about the espionage and that she’s threatening to go public, and I’d better do it quickly because that woman could accidentally overdose at any time. Despite harboring some pity, I have absolutely no love for Jessica. And if she does commit suicide or overdose, I won’t hesitate to find a way to make it look like a murder and pin it on Travis. But if she lives, that works for me too.

Travis is the kind of guy who would put a hit out on his wife if he thought she was going to betray him. Jessica knows that; after all, she was party to what happened to Nick Foley. So it shouldn’t be too hard to convince her that she’s going to be the next to go. I have to tell her that if she doesn’t stage her own death she will actually die.