Page 27 of The Session

Fiasco

Tru Feingold sat in a cubicle tucked into the rear corner of an unused floor in Summit’s Biscayne Bay building. When she worked out of this office, she preferred to be as far away from the rest of the organization as possible, because she needed to focus on planning the dozens of events Summit Strategies put on around the world every year—a daunting task, even with multiple teams to help. When it came to creative thinking, she found most of the teams’ suggestions robotic and repetitive. The problem was that many of Summit’s staff were legacy; they were the children of people who had come on board decades earlier. While this meant they treated the company like an extended family—much as Tru did, having grown up in it as a product of the elite schools, summer camps, and training programs that Summit ran through its various subsidiaries—they tended to share the same ideas and see the world the same way. So when it was time to think about themes for banquets or new ways to describe course offerings, the underlings usually looked inward instead of outward. Tru’s solution was to go to the Barnes & Noble bookstore and grab as many magazines as she could off the shelf, ranging from interior design to whatever callouts caught her attention, to help her avoid monotonous repetition.

“So this is where you sneak off to read girlie magazines?” Blaise Cutler drawled.

Tru looked up to see Blaise leaning over the top of the cubicle in front of her.

“Do you practice looking like a gargoyle, or does it just come naturally to you?” she shot back.

“I’m a natural work of art,” Blaise replied. “And speaking of pieces of work, what do you think of your golden boy’s little fuckup?”

“What?” Tru asked.

“Don’t you get Wi-Fi down here?”

Tru pointed to her phone sitting on the corner of the desk. “I turn it off to keep out distractions, but apparently they still find me. What the hell are you talking about?”

“I asked Media Watch to keep an eye out on your new pet. And man, I wasn’t disappointed. It seems the handsome but rather dim-witted jock decided to drive an ambulance, while off duty, into the middle of an active police operation and fucked everything up—one officer got shot and a bystander was wounded. The police department is furious and threatening to press charges,” he told her.

“Something happened to Mark?” Tru asked, reaching for her phone.

“He’s fine, but he’s in a mountain of crap right now. Thank God we didn’t try to bring him on board when you suggested it. Otherwise, we’d be dealing with the fallout from this.”

Tru read through the article Blaise had linked to. It was a local news report with unattributed quotes from inside the police department. There was an active investigation, with few details beyond the fact that Mark had been involved and fingers were pointing at him as having exacerbated the police’s efforts to contain the situation.

“This doesn’t read right,” Tru muttered.

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Blaise said. “And you of all people should know: It’s not about the facts, it’s the perception. And right now, ‘Captain Johnny Be Too Good to Be True’ doesn’t look so good.”

“Could you do me a favor and go fuck off while I look into this?”

The mock smile on Blaise’s face flickered for a moment before he regained his composure. As much as he tried to play it cool, he’d never gotten over the crush he’d had on Tru since he first laid eyes on her at twelve years old.

Tru grabbed her phone and hurried toward the stairwell, running down two flights to the floor where the Integrity and Security team was located. The entire level was lit like a command center, with darkened rooms illuminated by the glow of cubicle lights and computer screens. Inside was the security group that handled domestic operations for Summit Strategies. At the far end, a wall was filled with a large LED screen displaying security reports and camera feeds from around the world.

Tru thought it more theatrical than practical, but it certainly made an impression on anyone who saw it. The design was straight out of a Hollywood movie, largely because Max Lightman had hired a Hollywood set designer to build it. Tru wandered through the labyrinth until she found Bob Nichols standing behind a security officer as she scrolled through a spreadsheet.

Tru was never comfortable around Nichols. Prior to working at Summit Strategies, he’d had a background in the intelligence community, with stints at the NSA and CIA. Although extremely well qualified, his presence here likely meant he’d fucked up and become unemployable elsewhere. The reasons ranged from forgivable offenses that simply didn’t fit a modern workplace to things that were a bit too sinister for Tru to stomach.

Bob Nichols was one of the people who had everybody else’s secrets. Although he didn’t have the same authority as the Vault archivist or the head of strategic security—located in the Bahamas for jurisdictional reasons—he had nearly unlimited power within the organization.

“Ms. Feingold, how may I assist you?” He lowered his reading glasses so they hung around his neck and greeted her with a congenial smile. While Nichols was friendly and professional, he also had the kind of steely demeanor that Tru associated with men who were comfortable pulling the trigger or pressing the button on a kill switch.

Summit Strategies ran a training school in Arizona where they taught drone pilots how to fly and engage in combat from ten thousand miles away. She thought Nichols would fit right in with the instructors there. While certain branches of the US military were effective at training people who were both compassionate and lethal, other branches found themselves needing to outsource the lethal part of training.

“Mark Greenley,” Tru said.

“You got my profile and research on him, right?”

“Yes, thank you for that,” Tru replied. “He was just involved in an incident, and I was hoping you might be able to find out more.”

“Really?” Nichols pulled the security researcher’s chair away from the desk. “Excuse me.”

He scrolled through screens, then typed on the keyboard.

On-screen, AI-generated summaries of the news reports appeared, along with a list of all the public records available.

“It seems like he’s in a bit of trouble,” Nichols observed.