Page 66 of Broken Brothers

“Go somewhere private and quiet, please,” he said urgently, his voice a sharp whisper.

Now I began to worry something besides business had transpired, although I had my doubts—a family emergency would not have required me to go somewhere private and quiet, at least not for the sake of secrecy.

But that only made my worries even more pronounced—a family emergency would be sad, but as fucked up as it may have sounded, it was preferable to business concerns. Family would bring us together and push the politics of business to the side; a business emergency would have made things much, much worse than they already were.

“Yeah?” I said. “I’m in the corner. No one can hear me.”

“Good. Chance, Edwin’s also going after Virtual Realty.”

No.

“Does he know?” I said.

There was just no way he didn’t know. This was too much of a coincidence—just minutes before flying home to New York City, right when I had left Andrew, Edwin Hunt was swooping in?

That was too coincidental. He had to have known in some fashion. He was, once again, trying to take advantage of me in some fashion.

Naturally, this pissed me off even more.

“I don’t think he does, it’s not like Virtual Realty is a secret among potential investors.”

Well, that was true, and that did make my fears seem a little on the deluded and paranoid side… except that had I had the exact same thought with the Taylors, I would have considered the whole ordeal ludicrous and, well, here we were.

“Even if he does, though, it doesn’t change anything,” Morgan continued. “You have to continue to be the boots-on-the-ground person. Father is getting suspicious of how tired I am, albeit not about this particular deal. Right now, he thinks I’m just drinking too much. But if he finds out you and I are doing something on the side…”

“It would make him easy to cast you out of the business heirdom.”

“Which maybe wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but you know what I mean,” Morgan said. “Apparently, he hasn’t said this, but the rumor going around is that he would just use the buyout to purchase the IP of Virtual Realty, shut it down, and then give it to his largest realty company for their own use. He believes a company like that with that kind of technology will experience a boon.”

Well, duh. That wasn’t the problem—that was the goal. The problem was that I could easily see Edwin Hunt persuading Andrew that he had his best interests at heart and would take good care of the company, only for a little over a half-dozenpeople to realize less than six months later they were out of a job. Even if it made the most financial sense, it would not make for a good ethical decision.

Not that Edwin Hunt ever believed in ethical decision making. The only thing that mattered to him was the bottom line.

“So he’s going to fuck over a startup to make his largest investment happy, which in turn will make him rich.”

“Exactly.”

“Doesn’t your dad ever tire of money at the expense of his soul?”

A long pause came on the phone. Even as his brother, I had never fully understood the dynamic between Morgan and Edwin Hunt. It was always difficult to pin down. I had always assumed that Morgan felt overshadowed by his father, but whenever I said something critical, at best, Morgan would clam up as he did now, and at worst, he would call me an idiot who didn’t know any better. The angriest and most scalding I had ever seen Morgan came when I said no one should aspire to be like his father.

“I wish he did.”

That was about the closest I would ever come to hearing Morgan criticize his father.

It made me wonder if maturity and age, or maybe just fatigue, was getting to him. I never saw them talk about anything much beyond business. That didn’t mean, of course, Edwin was a father who did nothing but make money. He came to Edwin’s games as a kid when he could, but that wasn’t that common of a thing. It seemed, if I was being generous to Edwin Hunt, he just stuck to what he knew and that was business.

That didn’t excuse his unethical business behavior, though.

“In any case, Chance, we have to move fast on this deal,” Morgan said, his voice still sharp and quiet. “I know these kindsof deals can take a couple of months to execute, sometimes longer depending on their size, but we need to hammer out something as soon as we can.”

“You’re telling me,” I said. “Do you want me to stay here in San Francisco?”

“I wouldn’t, too weird,” Morgan said. “Dad is on the next flight out there right now.”

The next flight.

I guess things are going to move really quickly one way or the other.