Abby takes the laptop back.
“Would you like to hear more of the story?” Rosie asks.
“Sure,” says Max. “Maybe Blake Scott has two dogs?”
“I’ll note that down,” says Rosie.
“Only the influencers—the ones smuggling all the money—start getting shot,” says Steve. “One by one.”
“This actually happened to a friend of mine,” says Max.
“Yes?” says Rosie.
“Yeah, Jeff Nolan. Good guy.”
“This exact story?” Rosie asks. If Max is involved in all this, he is covering it very well.
“Same thing,” says Max. “Influencers getting shot. I don’t think they were money-smugglers, though. That’s a nice twist.”
“You like the idea?” Rosie asks.
“Sure,” says Max. “Where would we film?”
“We’d start in South Carolina,” says Steve. “Then St. Lucia, then Ireland.”
“And we’d finish the whole thing in Dubai,” says Rosie.
“Sounds nice,” says Max, expertly looping his bow tie. Again, no sign that any of this is ringing alarm bells for him.
Max slips into a pair of dress shoes. “Send it to my agent. Tell him I said yes. But I need my character to be a good guy. Make someone else the baddie, and I kill him.”
“There’s another character who would be perfect as the bad guy,” says Rosie.
“Great,” says Max, heading toward the stage.
“François Loubet?”
Max thinks. “I’ve heard that name before. French?”
“One supposes so,” says Rosie.
“Great,” says Max. “I’ll ask Timothée Chalamet. He’s a mate. I come first in the billing, though.”
Max disappears onto the stage and they hear applause. Abby follows to the side of the stage with her laptop.
“You’re good,” says Rosie to Abby. “I’ll tell Henk.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” says Abby, and is gone. They hear Max start his speech.
“Now what’s beautiful, ultra-hard, and incredibly expensive? No, not me. Diamonds. The last time I was around this many carats, I was in Sainsbury’s.”
Rosie turns to Steve.
“Not a flicker,” says Rosie. “The whole way through the pitch.”
“Because Sainsbury’s is an English supermarket, you see, and they sell carrots.”
“But if Max isn’t Joe Blow,” says Steve, “who is? Because either he’s not involved at all, or he’s a very good actor.”
Rosie looks at Steve. “And I think we both know the answer to that.”
89
Dawn rises in the City of London. On the eightieth floor of a building that nobody can mention for reasons of security, Amy, Jeff Nolan, and Susan Knox, Jeff’s head of HR, sit at a boardroom table, files of paper spread out between them. The first rays of sun pick up dust in the air.
“Every single one of them,” says Amy.
“Thirty-five clients,” confirms Susan Knox. “All of whom have worked for Vivid Viral, and all of whom were introduced to Maximum Impact by Max Highfield. There are payments of ten grand directly into his account for each of them.”
Amy leafs through the new file. “This goes back just over two years. Name after name, introduced by Highfield, including Courtney Lewis, where the whole plan began to unravel.”
“Are there details of any of the jobs they did?” Jeff asks. “Where they might have traveled and when?”
“Low-value clients,” says Susan. “No one in this file could have afforded to have us accompany them on a trip. That’s why they were chosen.”
“Not a single clue?” Amy asks.
“The file is just names, numbers, and addresses,” says Susan. “Everything else must have gone through Vivid Viral, I suppose.”
