Page 8 of The Session

“I know, I know. I just hope you don’t think I’m crazy.”

“Not at all,” Tru assured her.

“You’re the only one I trust, and there are some things that just don’t make sense. I kind of want some peace of mind, and I think you should know.”

“I completely understand,” Tru said. “Let’s start at the beginning. I wasn’t quite sure from your text messages what to make of things, but some of it checks out with things I’ve observed.”

Tru Feingold never had a close relationship with Susan Philips, but she had always found Susan consistent and honest in their dealings. She was a quiet woman who worked in finance for Summit Strategies and did some of the planning for budget forecasts, over which they had frequently interacted.

The one change Tru observed was that Susan’s hair was a bit more unkempt than usual, and it looked like she had done her makeup at the last minute. There were also bags under her eyes. Susan normally was much more put-together.

Susan asked, “How much do you know about Future Strategies?”

“I hear the name a lot, but I feel like I know less and less about them,” Tru admitted. “They’re supposed to be an internal strategy planning group, but they keep popping up everywhere. I’ve met some of the people on the team, but they’re rather evasive, which is odd, given, well, who I am. But I know that some of our divisions can be a bit more secretive than our standard for secrecy.”

“The same for me,” Susan said. “I noticed entire meetings had been canceled or moved around. At first I didn’t think much of it, but then I found out that Future Strategies was basically doing the rescheduling on their own and deciding who was going to be on the list and who wasn’t.”

“I’ve seen the same. What kind of meetings did you notice this with?” Tru asked.

“Mostly global affairs, and some things related to budget planning and accounting oversight,” Susan explained. “I asked my supervisor Donald Hamlin about it, and he told me he was instructed that it wasn’t any of our concern. Now I don’t know who told him that, but that’s as far as I could take it through the chain of command.”

“Hamlin’s more of a soldier than a thinker. That doesn’t surprise me,” Tru said.

“But how come you don’t know anything about it? Your father is the cofounder of Summit,” Susan asked.

“Well, he’s semiretired, for one, and two, there are a lot of parts to the company. You know, a lot of the divisions are completely stand-alone entities that we just share a space and some resources with.”

Tru knew that wasn’t accurate. Summit Strategies had a number of subsidiaries and offshore holding companies that created very tight ownership of the other firms but were intertangled in such a way it would take an IRS agent years to figure it all out. And any who could were usually offered jobs working for one of Summit’s tax-consulting groups.

When her friends—the few she had outside the company—asked her about Summit, Tru usually described it as either a consulting firm or a management group. Both were essentially true, but the spread and reach of the company often surprised even her. What had started as her father and Max Lightman doing coaching seminars for executives and training salespeople had grown into something much bigger and more complicated.

Even though most people didn’t know exactly what Summit Strategies was, at some point during the day, a phone representative or salesperson they interacted with had probably gone through a Summit Strategies seminar or worked for a company Summit had a stake in. Such was the organization’s reach.

“I’ve asked and haven’t gotten a specific answer,” Tru said. “I’ve even brought it up to Morris, who is supposed to know about all the different moving parts, and he just said that they’re focusing on forward projections. I will say that sometimes we have groups that legally have to keep certain things to themselves.”

“Well, I tried to just stay out of it, but one of the things I have to do is file for tax relief in all the different countries that we have operations in,” Susan explained. “And that means I have access to our credit cards. I noticed we had a number of charges going through in places where we never spent before.”

“Like where?” Tru asked.

Susan looked around the café again, then lowered her voice. “I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say.”

“It’s okay,” Tru assured her.

“Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan—places that I only hear about in the news.”

“We’ve got a lot of operations in different places, but none there. What were the expenses for?” Tru asked.

“Well, that’s where it got really weird. A lot of them were for hotel charges, but I looked up the hotels and they didn’t exist. Some of them might be car services, and I couldn’t find any records for that. Then there were other expenses that looked normal but were extremely costly—like freight rental and other expenditures—and only a few of them ended up being real companies.”

“Interesting,” Tru said.

“And I know that we have subsidiaries like Andromeda and Constellation that do research in places like that, but their accounting is completely different. I would never see those credit card bills. They’re basically like a private CIA, as far as I understand.”

Tru knew a lot more about the operations of Andromeda and Constellation, and Susan’s description wasn’t far off. Some of Summit Strategies’ clients came to them for intelligence about companies in other countries, not all of them friendly to the United States. The polite term was “research.” The impolite one was “industrial espionage.” All of it was perfectly legal under US law—less so in other countries.

“Did you report this to Donald?” Tru asked.

“First I had to double-check things and look up the authorization code. I couldn’t find it connected to any division. But then I went through an older database backup, and it belonged to Future Strategies.”