The Blackguard, Chapter 1
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Chapter One
In the Beginning
They stood when I came into their boardroom, like I was a judge or dignitary and not a junior project manager who’d only been with the company three months. I looked out over the people running General Buildable and smiled at their banality. Some flaccid with age, some puckered with their carefully manicured bitterness, some staring out from conspicuously empty eyes. I sat down among them with a feeling something approaching righteous indignation.
“We have a good plan,” John Baker said. “Carl Garrison from NDOT will show up in Enclave and offer the town’s leading citizens $1,500,000 to let us construct a bridge. Then we’ll send you in with another $600,000 to actually build the thing.”
I nodded and rotated my glass of ice water on the marble conference table. I oozed confidence and couldn’t have contrasted more with the nervous gaggle of corporate limp dicks asking me show some courage in their stead.
“Make it look local and primitive and like something they’d do themselves,” Anfernee Boldin said. “It’ll be easier on everybody if the world thinks Enclave wanted out of its box.”
I said I understood and then, with all the delicacy of an Ebola virus, continued.
“It’d be a shame to endanger your gilded parachutes.”
Bake r pretended to miss my contempt.
“That’s all you have to do,” he said. “A year or so after you finish the bridge and go home NDOT will complete their road to Enclave and pretend to be astonished when they find a happy local population, a nice causeway right into town and billions of gallons of fresh water in the aquifer. General Buildable will dig the wells and construct the pipes and buy up the water rights. We will kick back 20% of the profits to Garrison and give you half million dollars for your trouble.”
I scratched the short hairs on my chin and thought about the meaning of $500,000. A small yacht, a nice house, or two brand new Ferraris. I smiled at the Armani-clad cowards before me, looked briefly at my feet and agreed to their terms.