CHAPTER EIGHT
Consultant of the Year
Isaac was jolted out of his reverie by a snide comment from Persephone.
“Actually Isaac, I have something for you to do that is far more interesting than your amateur snuff movies.”
That last comment was a bit below the belt. Over the past ten years or so, as well as his work for the Frimann family business, Isaac had built up a decent sized niche web publishing business producing and hosting extreme sports videos. His clientele were the sports enthusiasts with a desire to see their exploits professionally edited then publically displayed and were prepared to pay for the privilege. To supplement this income stream, he had a number of side deals with the sporting bodies for these sports (rock climbing, parachuting, white water kayaking etc.) and some very nice royalty deals with the specialist camera manufacturers for the kit that these lunatics stuck on their heads and other parts of their bodies when jumping off cliffs and buildings or literally traversing lions’ dens and the like.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of these sports, some of the participants didn’t always make it to the finish line, so the editing required for the funeral service needed special care and attention to ensure that the grieving relatives could celebrate the full life lived by the recently departed without having to confront the grim manner of their demise. This business provided a legitimate front for Isaac’s far more lucrative and clandestine activities of illegal and untraceable hacking for the Frimann family; a select few local private investigators; and the odd international intelligence agency seeking deniability.
Together, these businesses provided a lifestyle that allowed him to live in a penthouse apartment in the middle of the city with harbour views and to own the three floors below him. He leased these premises at extortionate rents to corporates for temporary executive accommodation and one floor contained a high-end brothel run, of course, by one of the Frimann brothers.
It was the less legitimate end of Isaac’s business expertise that Persephone was hoping to use to help her with her money tracing and (hopefully) laundering issue, as the tax office appeared to be taking absolutely no notice of Isaac’s lifestyle compared to his income from web publishing. She outlined the situation to Isaac, letting him know that this was a sensitive matter that he was not to share with anyone, and asked for his help. Isaac could not believe his luck. He was happy to find and move money for Persephone and also was looking forward to spending the hours and hours it would take him to teach her how to become a successful and clandestine hacker. He was imagining days and nights with his body pressed up against Persephone’s working together on hot keyboards with nobody to interrupt them, with Persephone showing her undying gratitude by finally agreeing to sleep with him when he was jolted out of his reverie by a loud shout,
“Wake up dickhead. I’m happy to pay you for this, but not in the way you are thinking. Get your hands out of your pockets, you perv.” Persephone was laughing so hard tears were running down her face.
Isaac was offended and embarrassed at being caught out.
“I don’t need your money. Luckily for you I’m not all that busy at the moment, otherwise I wouldn’t help you, you bitch.” He muttered, not at all convincingly. He was working up to a bit of a dummy spit, when he stopped.
“Which insurance company are you talking about?”
“Élan International”
“I’m in.” was the immediate firm statement from Isaac. “It’s not just because it’s French, although that certainly helps, but those lazy arseholes have had a fair slice of my money for three years while the share price has tanked, the dividends have dried up and the Board and CEO have all voted themselves multi-million dollar bonuses every year. I was actually thinking about taking some sort of action against them anyway, but got a bit distracted with another quick job last week moving some money for the soon to be ex-wife of a triad boss to her account in the Caymans, so I temporarily forgot. Your timing is perfect.”
Persephone was taken aback. Clearly shareholder activism wasn’t completely dead.
Persephone and Isaac put their heads together and came up with a plan for how to track down the perpetrator, find and move the money and show her how to do this for herself so that she was a bit more self-sufficient in the future. First things first, Persephone had to secure the job with the HR Manager Sophia Prentice.
Matt Aitkenhead had set up the meeting with the Élan CEO for the next day, so Persephone made sure she had an early night drinking only one glass of chardonnay with dinner. Dressed in her silver Hugo Boss suit with killer Fendi heels and black lace stockings, Persephone was ready to tackle not CEO, who was reported to be a bit of a lady-killer, and also to try to establish some sort of rapport with Sophia. Early the following morning, she met up with Matt in the coffee shop in the foyer of the Élan building at Circular Quay. Matt was looking far more corporate than when she had last seen him and Persephone made sure that she was all business after her greeting kiss on the cheek. A double espresso and a banana muffin later, they both went up the express lift to the top floor and were greeted by a young woman with impossibly large breasts balanced on top of a tiny frame tottering on what can only be referred to as stilts.
“Hello, my name is Tiffany. I am the CEO’s personal assistant. M. Chiraq will be with you shortly; he is just on a TelePresence call to Paris. Please follow me to his office. Can I get you an espresso, herbal tea, sparkling spring water or anything else to drink?”
Persephone considered asking for First Flush Darjeeling tea with Black Locust Honey, but restrained herself. They followed the unsteady young PA into an office that could have doubled as a small ballroom, while Persephone positioned herself to catch Tiffany at any point should she topple off her shoes while traversing the highly polished marble floor. Once inside they crossed about thirty metres of carpet that appeared to give Tiffany far more trouble than the slippery-dip outside and made it to a couple of hot pink leather lounges that sat against a floor to ceiling glass wall with views across the harbour and out to the ocean. Neither Matt nor Persephone was unused to this scene, but both were a little envious that it wasn’t their daily office panorama.
After a short interval, a tall dark man crossed purposefully across the enormous office, holding his hand out to Persephone and smiling broadly. Persephone was taken aback as she had been expecting someone more noticeably horrible. She quickly got a grip on herself – of course he was personable and attractive – that’s how they get away with the crap that corporate executives inflict on the rest of the workers and the unsuspecting shareholders.
“Thierry Chiraq, and you must be the accomplished Persephone Stone.”
“Pleased to meet you Monsieur Chiraq.”
“Thierry, please, now how can I help?”
Persephone was used to this type of charm. They all knew that she was there to pitch for a job and this was just a polite start to the conversation. She opened with a summary of the position in which the company found itself; according to the briefing that Matt had already given her. She confirmed that this was indeed accurate, requesting that Thierry add any pertinent detail, then went into a brief description of the approach that she would take to such a situation, based on prior experience and her unique talents. Predictably the CEO had limited attention span for this type of information, especially when she started talking about sustainable downsizing and appropriate treatment of staff during the process and very quickly he suggested that he call in Sophia Prentice, his HR manager. He pulled out his phone and Sophia entered the room within seconds. This really was a boring dance, thought Persephone.
Sophia was an attractive and very smart woman in her forties by Persephone’s estimation. As previously described by Matt, she was dressed in an immaculate Versace suit with a silk shirt and pearls. Her heels matched Persephone’s for height and looked to be last seasons Louboutins – perfectly acceptable for work although the stockings were a bit plain. Her hair was blonde
and tied up in a severe French braid and her makeup was precise if a bit over-done. Her teeth when she smiled at everyone were the whitest of white, and her smile stopped just below her clearly botoxed cheekbones, framing eyes which were pale blue and ice cold. Sophia held out her hand and gave a firm handshake to Persephone, nodding at Matt,
“Hello again Matt, and good morning Thierry”
She looked enquiringly at Persephone. Thierry explained that he had just hired Persephone to help her out with the restructure. He told Sophia that as she had recently shown significant concern about lack of staff in her HR department, he didn’t want her to take on such a large and high profile activity while she had so many other critical and strategic things on her plate because she had complained that she was so under-resourced. He went on a bit about Persephone’s credentials and how he was confident that she would do a terrific job under Sophia’s direction. He added that he would be looking for frequent and regular updates from both of them. Having successfully undermined his HR manager and ensured that she understood that this was deliberate, he dismissed the women with a request to see an interim report in a week. Sophia, furious, gritted her teeth, smiled and gestured to Persephone to follow her. Persephone was simultaneously pleased to have landed the job and impressed that Thierry had sabotaged her so effectively all inside 2 minutes. She really had a job on her hands to get Sophia to cooperate enough so she could deliver something credible as well as being able to get on with the real reason she was there.
“Do you have the time for us to sit down and discuss this now?” Persephone enquired of Sophia. “I am keen to understand this from your perspective before I put a plan to you. Monsieur Chiraq really only gave me a brief overview and Matt isn’t on the inside.”
Sophia regarded Persephone with suspicion. She was very well aware that she had just been smacked by her boss and was trying to work out what was the relationship between this glamorous woman and Thierry. She would be sure to ask her husband that night if he knew anything about this. He was supposed to be a good mate of Matt’s, for goodness sake, why hadn’t he warned her before today? Like all successful corporate executives, Sophia was blessed with a healthy dose of paranoia, but given the world in which she lived and worked, that didn’t mean that she wasn’t being persecuted. She was well aware that she was not well liked and was not normally bothered by this, as the ‘cover’ she had from being the CFO’s wife generally kept most of her enemies at bay. The ones who had taken her on had discovered that she was a ruthless and implacable adversary, and unfortunately for them, the one with her hands on the staffing and remuneration budgets. The problem here was that the CEO had put this new consultant in the joint, so her normal tactics wouldn’t work. She determined to sit back and see what Persephone had to say. Who knows, she thought, perhaps I can make her my ally and use her to get rid of the people I have been trying to get out of the company for years.
Persephone was well aware of the situation that Sophia was facing and quickly worked out that she could play this to her advantage. Sophia needed to be reassured that Persephone was not going to make her look bad, not going to take her job, and most of all, that she was not going to report to the CEO behind her back. The one thing that Sophia was not worried about was that Persephone would do a better job than her, as they both knew that the job itself was not all that difficult. Despite the mountains of literature on how to do downsizing, the reality of the task was that it consisted of putting together a list of people that the managers wanted gone, balancing it with the financial impacts of redundancy payments and dressing it up so that it looked like the impact on the business was going to be negligible. Luckily there was so much time wasting and ineptitude buried in most corporates that you could take out half the workforce and not impact the performance, so this was going to be a doddle.
“Let’s go next door for a coffee,” suggested Sophia, “fewer people will hear us and this is a very sensitive assignment for us both. I have a great spot I go to for coffee that nobody else knows about.”
This was code for “I want to have this meeting out of the office while I work out if you are a threat or not and I want to impress you with my class and sophistication by not drinking the office coffee because I am really unsure about where I stand and I don’t want any of my staff to hear this before I have got my shit together.” Persephone smiled to herself. Sophia was not going to be a problem.
Sitting on a ridiculously uncomfortable stool sipping her double espresso and looking askance at Sophia’s skinny latte at the coffee shop curiously named The "C" Spot, Persephone started her ‘bonding’ session.
“So Sophia, how great is this café! You know, it’s really worth making the effort to find somewhere with such a great blend and such a gorgeous barista!”
Sophia, feeling flattered, was still keen to get to business, but was happy that Persephone was prepared to suck up to her a bit. Persephone kept up the sycophantic crap for a bit until she was about to throw up and then got into the job itself.
“Look, I realise we had a bit of an unfortunate start to this – I have got to say I was surprised when Monsieur Chiraq announced he had given me the gig, but I reckon we can make this a big success for you. These exercises are generally pretty poorly done because people are running around ‘engaging’ everyone in an attempt to avoid being universally hated. The truth is, I don’t care if I am loved, hated or treated with indifference. That’s the real benefit in having me here rather than you and your staff having to do this.”
Sophia nodded. She was getting it.
“The critical thing here is that I get totally unfettered access to your personnel records, salary and payroll information, employee contracts including current key performance indicators, organisation charts and any past or current disciplinary records.”
Sophia reckoned that this was pretty much perfect. She readily agreed and gave her PA a call to set things in motion.
“I’ve got our new consultant Poppy Stone with me and we’re having a cup of coffee round the corner. She will need an office with whiteboard, computer access, meeting table and a lock on the door.”
Persephone added, “I will also need an access key for all offices as I will certainly need to visit managers in other states. Do you have a really good administrative assistant that I can get to help me set up appointments, travel and the like? Other than that, I really won’t need much from you – we will just have to get together every week to get our report together for the CEO.”
Persephone was feeling smug and thought that this was the best opportunity to get the next sticky thing out of the way.
“Between you and me, we both know that this is a great opportunity for you to get rid of anyone you want out of Élan that you haven’t been able to eliminate to date. Why don’t you have a think about this, and let’s get together after work today once I have settled in. We can have a quick drink somewhere out of the city. Do you know The Gazebo Wine Garden at Potts Point?”
Sophia agreed and they both headed back to the office where her PA was waiting with office keys, computer logons and an office set up for Persephone. The previous occupant was just packing up his photos of his partner hugging their labradoodle, packs of musashi protein bars and a small statue of Kylie Minogue. He gave Persephone a look that should have had her bursting into flames on the spot. You’re going to have to stand in line sunshine, she thought – by the end of this job I might need a flak jacket when I go to work. She moved herself into the office that funnily enough didn’t boast quite the view of Thierry Chiraq’s palace, but she wasn’t there for the view anyway. She unpacked her briefcase, putting her laptop on the desk next to the Élan computer and logged onto the system. After having checked that it seemed to be working, she logged off and then tried to log on again, deliberately getting the password wrong three times. Sure enough, the system promptly logged her out and gave her the helpful message on the screen to call IT support. Okay, step one
underway.
Persephone called the number on the screen, navigated her way past the front line support and, dropping Thierry’s name liberally into the conversation, got onto the specialist team that provided PC support for the executive team. Sounding confused and panicky, she persuaded Mark the senior support tech to come up to the office and show her how to log on. Step one in intelligence gathering was to establish key relationships, and one of the critical early ones was with the IT support geeks. This was going to help Isaac get her inside the systems without leaving a trace.
Persephone had long ago learned this lesson well and it had stood her in great stead on her first job after leaving the military when she landed a job with a major defence contractor where she was given the role of support manager for the weapons systems in the submarines. Day one on the job and she was sent to the company headquarters to learn how to write software programs. She turned up to the course to be confronted by a room full of pasty looking blokes with beards wearing sneakers and large digital watches. After about an hour of listening to an equally unattractive instructor drone on about language constructs for real-time command and control systems, she ducked out for a coffee and vowed not to return. The way she looked at the situation was that she had no idea about submarine warfare and she was about to be responsible for delivering the systems that the Navy needed in order to fight the evil empire (this was still pretty much cold war days) and she had no intention of ever writing a line of software code. Luckily her sister had been dating a submariner for the past couple of years, so she called him up and explained her problem.
“No problems, old chap,” was John’s cheerful response, “my mate Brownie is running the latest Perisher course and I’m sure he will take you on and give you a few tips.”
Persephone was a bit baffled by this, but as the alternative was to go back to the smelly roomful of geeks, she was prepared to do anything. John called her back inside ten minutes and gave her instructions to go to Devonport Naval Base and ask to see Commander Ian Brown, who would sort her right out. Not bothering to say goodbye anyone at the training centre – Persephone had always believed in the approach that it is better to ask forgiveness than permission, she headed off to Plymouth on the next train. For the next month Persephone had the time of her life, whizzing around underwater with about 50 young men who were aiming to one day command a submarine (this course being the “Perisher” to which John had referred). During this time she not only learned about how submarines and their crew go about their business, but she also made a number of key contacts upon whom she would later rely once she returned to her real job.
Back at her desk, she discovered that the work that her company had been contracted to undertake bore little resemblance to what the people who were trying to use the systems actually needed or even wanted. She also found out that the process by which the works program was put together was flawed, with decisions being made by people who had neither skin in the game nor knowledge of the real priorities, or both. Having just come from a role where she was a serving officer in the military, she was determined that she would not allow men to go into combat with weapons systems that were less than the best she could provide. Trouble was, that in order to achieve this, Persephone was going to have to bypass the contracted ‘chain of command’ and get things done through other means. The only way she could hope to get away with this was by using her contacts from the Perisher course and rely on their gratitude that someone was at last giving them something they actually needed to help her when the shit inevitably hit the fan. As it luck would have it, the contract for the support services was up for renewal and one of the submariners from the course got promoted into a role where he was highly influential in the decision to renew or not.
Following the successful renewal of the contract for a further five years, Persephone was further convinced that the relationships she had forged, along with her natural tendency to ignore direct orders had been instrumental in her success. She learned the lesson well, and every time she started a new job, she made sure that she found the people who were going to make a difference to her success and built relationships early with them. Finding out what is going on when the people who already know are prepared to tell you is a lot more efficient. And when things get sticky, then having people who are prepared to put themselves out to help is critical, especially in large bureaucracies. Many of Persephone’s consultant friends and colleagues over the years never worked this out, and despite spending days and weeks analysing spreadsheets, reports and other documents, never seemed to get to the root of the matter anything like as quickly as she did. Mind you, given the model for consulting delivered by big firms, taking longer to do the job generally resulted in bigger fees, so nobody was too worried about trying to be more like Persephone.
So back at Élan, Persephone was keen to get to know someone who would help her navigate through all of their systems, saving her crucial hours finding out the extent of the fraud and who was behind it. As she was waiting for Mark the techo to arrive, Persephone took a USB stick out of her pocket and inserted it into the desktop computer. As instructed by Isaac the previous night, she opened the folder called Spector and click on the file called Install.exe. With the modifications that Isaac had made, this software bypassed all the controls that would normally stop this sort of software being installed, and Persephone now had a sophisticated keystroke logger on her desktop. Now every move that Mark made would be recorded, including his administrator login and passwords.
Just as she was putting the key back in her bag, there was a knock on the door, and a head topped with spiky black hair, a badly pockmarked face festooned with face metal and a grin a mile wide poked itself into the office.
“What’s happened to Crispin? Bloody hell, he’s even taken his Kylie statue! Hi I’m Mark from the executive support team. You must be Poppy Stone. What can I do for you Poppy?”
Mark bounced into the room. Persephone was pleased and gave him a wide grin. She knew how to deal with guys like Mark.
“Is this Crispin’s office? I don’t know anyone here yet – I only started today. What does Crispin do anyway? Do you reckon I’ve pissed him off?” Persephone simpered, as office gossip is often the best way to kick off this sort of discussion.
Luckily Mark was up for a bit of chat and proceeded to give Persephone a vicious character assassination. Apparently Crispin was the recruitment manager in the HR department and he was widely understood to be the person who ensured that the people hired were Crispin’s mates and not necessarily the person needed or even wanted by the hiring manager. He was also reputed to be getting backhanders from a couple of recruitment agencies. Every time anyone got close to exposing him, he would cry harassment and play the “you’re just persecuting me because I’m gay” card. Mark was just warming up at that point. Crispin’s personal life was also ripe for malicious disparagement. Not only was his partner reputed to be the pill dealer for the entire call centre, but the two of them apparently had an initiation ritual for the young men that they hired into it that consisted of taking them to one of the clubs on Oxford Street on their first Friday night and subjecting them to forced homosexual acts (and that even included the straight ones , although truth be told not too many straight men applied for call centre jobs). And finally, the look on the face of the labradoodle in the picture, according to Mark, was one of terror.
Mark finally stopped, realising that he might have crossed the line with this new chick, talking about buggery and bestiality on her first day, but Persephone was laughing uproariously.
“So anyway, how can I help?”
Persephone gestured to her computer in frustration. She explained that she had a new logon but after the first attempt when she reset the password, it no long worked. Mark immediately stepped over to the computer, logged on as an administrator and checked out that her account was indeed locked. He unlocked it, reset her password again and got her to log in. Once th
is was sorted, Persephone asked him to set her up with full access on the major underwriting, claims and customer systems. Mark gladly helped her and she kept up a steady stream of compliments as to how clever he was, how much better than the IT dudes at the last place she worked, and made sure that she got Mark’s personal mobile phone number so she could call him any time for help if she needed it.
Once Mark had finished and everything was working, Persephone thanked him profusely and locked the door behind him. She picked up her mobile phone.
“Isaac, it worked – just had the IT support tech in here and he used his admin logon. What do I do now?”
Isaac told her how to extract the information from the key logging application and she gave him the details of the supervisor login. Grateful that he didn’t have to spend hours breaking into these systems, Isaac started to trawl through the insurance databases that opened up to him, looking for information about Brad Jones and his policy and claim history. Within an hour, Isaac had discovered that there had been some changes to the contact details made by a person in the claims department and then shortly afterwards, and a couple of years before his ‘disappearance’, Brad had ‘died’ and there had been a successful claim against his life policy. The person who authorised the cheque for $350,000 was a Craig Sellars, who was a senior manager in the claims department. Also, the person who made the contact details changes worked for Craig. It all looked a bit simple, but then the most successful frauds often can be quite uncomplicated and easy to unravel once you got hold of one end of the ‘string’. The trick with this one was that you had to know it had happened in the first place otherwise you wouldn’t be looking for the piece of string in the first place. It looked as though Craig had hidden this transaction well by keeping it small and banking on the likelihood that nobody was game to unravel the ball of string that was the multi-billion dollar insurance company.
Isaac sent Persephone a text to meet up with him later that day. She got back to him and told him it would have to be later as she was meeting Sophia after work for a drink, but that she would call him once she was done. Isaac happily visualised a cosy evening with Persephone going through the details of the fraud and, having time on his hands until she called, decided to see where else this trail led. He started by looking for other claims that followed the same pattern of address changes followed by death within a couple of years, were under the financial delegation limit that Craig had and were for people under 35 years old. He quickly found about forty such claims, but through cross-referencing the policy holders with other public information, narrowed it down to eleven dodgy claims. When he added up the amounts, it came to just under eight million dollars taken in four years.
Isaac was quite impressed. This was not, of course on the scale of proceeds that he normally played with, but for an amateur it was quite a haul. He then started to have a closer look at Craig. He became even more impressed when he discovered that Craig’s lifestyle, while it was not very savoury, it was also not extravagant. He appeared not to suffer from the impatience that caught out many fraudsters – that of spending their ill gotten gains too publicly and too early. This was going to be great news for Persephone, as it looked like all the proceeds of this fraud were going to be intact, and all they had to do was find them. Now he was in his element – finding and moving money without anyone knowing he was there until it was too late was his day job. He settled down as his software trawled across the world tracking down and marking Craig’s money. This was too easy.
Meanwhile back at the office, Persephone had spent her time looking at the company’s organisation chart. This was going to be the main document that she would work from and by the end of the exercise, her personal copy (never to be included in any report) would have exactly 250 red dots applied to the lucky (or unlucky, depending on their personal circumstances) people who were about to receive a smaller cheque than they thought they were entitled to and a rest from the daily grind. She resolved to ensure that the poisonous Crispin was not going to be one of these people. For starters, she reckoned that Élan deserved people like that to stay around and continue to screw up their ability to hire good people, and secondly Crispin had been with the company for far too long and would have been given a generous payout that he clearly didn’t deserve. She would enjoy enrolling Crispin in the project and would get him to do all the redundancy calculations, rubbing his nose in the fact that he wasn’t getting any.
She put a list together of middle management and gave it to Sophia’s PA, asking her to set up interviews with all these people for the next two weeks. This would give her the initial group of staff that their managers wanted gone, and also a chance to meet her fraudster, assuming that he or she were in middle management. Having thought about it, she suspected that the process to undertake this type of fraud would generally require a reasonably high level of access that was only given to management level staff. Once this was done, the only item left was to get Sophia to the bar and pump her for information, hopefully lubricated with liberal amounts of alcohol. She still had a few hours to kill, so she spent it writing the report that would be the covering document for the list of people and costs: the thing she was being paid for. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t done the work yet; the result was so predictable that she could write the report now and it would require almost no modification at the end of the assignment.
At 6pm, she tracked down Sophia and they both hopped in a cab and headed off to Elizabeth Bay, where they secured a table in the garden and Persephone leaned back and appeared to relax. Surrounded by the eclectic mix of pretentious items that decorated the bar, including a stuffed upside-down fox hanging from a plastic vine set off nicely by the ever so stylish basket of pink lipsticks, she waved at a waiter.
“The barman here does a spectacular martini. I recommend the T10 martini, naked with a twist of grapefruit. It depends if you prefer a more citrusy gin, but I personally love the balance between the spices in T10 – I’m sure he can do anything you want though, they have some great margarita recipes as well”, Persephone put just the tiniest hint of derision into the comment about the margaritas and Sophia bit.
“A T10 martini sounds fabulous”, she retorted, not actually knowing that she was about to get a quadruple measure of neat gin, chilled so that it had a syrupy texture that was just perfect to slide silkily down the throat, leaving you wanting more.
Persephone was an old hand at this, and years of drinking had left her with a harder head than most. She was confident that she could remain in charge of the situation while the gin did its inexorable damage to Sophia’s self-control.
“So tell me about what it takes to become the head of HR at Australia’s most successful insurance company”, was Persephone’s opening gambit on the basis that most people loved to talk about themselves and how great they were. After a boring potted resume and two more lethal martinis, and with very little encouragement from Persephone, Sophia started to spill the beans on the sort of behaviour that really happened at Élan. It turned out that Crispin was indeed pretty much the scumbag that Mark had earlier disclosed, but he knew about an incident that had occurred at a Christmas party five years ago, where Sophia had one of the staff on her desk. The man who Sophia had sex with had boasted to Crispin and he had seen the opportunity this presented to have a hold over his boss. Every time Sophia tried to discipline Crispin, he hinted that he might not be able to continue to keep the information about the desk sex to himself. As Sophia had been married to the CFO for the past 9 years, and had two young kids, a beachside mansion and a great lifestyle, she was not prepared to risk all this in order to get rid of Crispin, so he stayed. Sophia and Crispin had reached this understanding years ago and she now relied on him to be her ‘hatchet man’ and take on the jobs that she needed done but didn’t want her reputation tarnished by being associated with them.
“What a pair” thought Persephone, “I just need to find out who this bloke is and m
y job tonight is done.”
One more martini was all it took for Sophia to disclose the name of the person she had shagged on her desk. Great, thought Persephone, first red dot for the chart.
Persephone poured Sophia into a cab and called Isaac. He was very animated and told her to get her cute backside round to his joint straight away. He refused to tell her anything over the phone but promised to give her all she wanted as soon as she got there.
“Make it strong coffee,” Persephone told him “I’ve had a couple of martinis and no food. Got anything to eat?”
Isaac quickly ordered a couple of pizzas to be delivered. They turned up at the same time as Persephone, who fell into the boxes like she hadn’t eaten in a month. Wiping tomato and cheese from her face with the back of her hand, she started into Isaac
“So, spill the beans darling, what have you found out? Come on, don’t keep me in suspense!”
Isaac laid out the full details of the fraud, giving Persephone the names, amounts and dates of each of the fraudulent claims. They looked closely at the Brad Jones claim and saw why he had looked like an attractive target – single, about to go overseas for an extended period, no dependants and had let his policy lapse for a couple of months. As they got further into the scheme they were more and more impressed at the analysis, patience and care that he had taken. When Isaac first mentioned Craig’s name, Persephone didn’t react, but by the third time he said his name, the gin-sodden brain cells in her brain snapped to attention.
“You’re not going to believe this!” shouted Persephone, startling Isaac who was trying to sneak a slice of Pizza from the box next to Persephone.
“This is the bloke Sophia shagged! What a coincidence! This doesn’t get any better – she has already told me to make sure he gets on the redundancy program, so I don’t have to worry about questions being asked about him.”
Isaac was cautious, as he didn’t believe in coincidences, but no matter how closely they looked for a connection between Sophia and the frauds, they couldn’t find anything and they both finally agreed it was just a stroke of good luck. By this point, Persephone was tired, drunk and full of pizza, so she dragged herself up from the desk and staggered into the spare bedroom, face planted the bed and passed out. Isaac followed her into the bedroom, took her shoes off and gently covered her with a blanket. He turned out the light and went back to his computers. He still had a bit more work to do to tie up all the loose ends.
Early the next morning, Persephone woke up disoriented and hungover. Upon hearing the swearing and groaning from the spare bedroom, Isaac went to his kitchen and made a very strong espresso and took it into Persephone.
“Rise and shine, sweetheart” was his over-cheery exclamation, “gotta get going, day two striking a blow.”
Persephone threw a pillow at him, which he neatly dodged and placed the coffee on the table beside her head.
“You might want to do something about your hair and makeup darling. Not sure if madwoman with scary hair and panda eyes is quite the latest look for corporate consultants these days.”
Persephone gulped her coffee and persuaded Isaac to give her a lift home as after looking in the mirror, she agreed with his assessment and wasn’t prepared to expose this particular vision of poor grooming, even to a taxi driver. On the way home they discussed the next steps. Persephone thought that her best approach at this point was to get on with the management interviews, making sure that she got to meet with Craig early on, while making sure her cover was intact and that Sophia was reassured that Persephone was on the job. In the mean time, the issue of what had actually happened to Brad needed Isaac’s attention. They already had the police files, but despite their suspicions that Craig had killed Brad, they needed to check that he wasn’t just off the radar for some reason. Isaac was confident that if Brad were hiding out somewhere that he could find him, so they agreed that if he couldn’t find Brad within a week, then they would assume he was dead. They deduced correctly that the reason why he had escalated from fraud to murder was that Craig’s fraud had potentially been exposed due to Brad’s sister asking questions both of the company and the police.
This seemed a big step to take for Craig, but it was consistent with his careful and meticulous approach to this crime and showed them how far he was prepared to go to keep his involvement secret. It dawned on them now how far would Craig go if he felt threatened that the other ten ‘dead’ people who weren’t actually dead might also turn up. This needed careful consideration. Now, even more than keeping Persephone’s real task secret, stopping any more murders was going to be their highest priority.
Isaac dropped off Persephone and headed home to sleep. Like most hackers and geeks, he played best at night and while Persephone had been sleeping he had been at his normal work. This time, funnily enough, helping the Federal Police build up a body of evidence to help them take down the CEO of another major insurance company for insider trading. Once this was over he was never going to go near an insurance company ever again, neither inside it spotting dodgy stuff, nor as an investor.
At her apartment, Persephone stood in the shower contemplating her situation. It was all moving a bit quickly and she hadn’t expected to be sitting down opposite a murderer within a day or so. She wasn’t sure she was really prepared to carry this through. Even though she had lived through some pretty violent and hair-raising situations in her time in the military, this was different. Craig didn’t have a good reason to kill anyone and Persephone believed he had only done this out of a selfish desire for money. This made him very different from the bomb-throwing, gun-toting types she had run into years ago, who at least justified their actions with political or religious rhetoric. Was Craig the archetypal cold-blooded killer? From the profile drawn up by Isaac, there was nothing particularly hot-blooded or unplanned about his behaviour. She was now getting a bit worried about whether she could carry this off. Despite her many and varied talents and experience, when had she ever had to actually deal face to face with a totally ruthless murderer?