Page 28 of Nash Falls

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NASH CAME IN THROUGH THEgarage and noted that his daughter’s BMW was not there.

Oh boy.

His wife was in the kitchen and she marched toward him, the look on her features a warning light blinking brightly in Nash’s face.

“What did you say to her?” Judith demanded, her usually lovely eyes now seeming like twin electrical circuits misfiring.

Nash sighed. “She gave me a proposal for her influencer business. She asked for my honest opinion. I gave it.”

“She ran out of here crying and drove off in a terrible state. I hope to God she doesn’t get into an accident.”

“Look, Maggie basically wanted toblowher college fund plus three hundred thousand more ofourmoney on traveling around the world in high style to concerts and Cannes and expensive restaurants with no prospect of making any actual money. Nice job if you can get it,” he added. “But she won’t be getting it from me.”

“You must have been very harsh for Maggie to storm out of here like that.”

“She asked me to be brutal and I wascandid, like I would be with anyone else.”

This comment did not smooth over matters. Judith fingered the locket at the end of her necklace and snapped, “She’s not anyone else. She’s your daughter!”

“Do you really want her wasting a half million dollars of our money?”

“I’m simply saying that there are different ways to convey youropinion and feelings on the subject. Don’t you offer constructive criticism at work?”

“There was nothing I could say constructively about her proposal. And you were the one to tell me not to get suckered in by Rosie Parker.”

“How dare you compare our daughter to a woman we don’t even know?”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” protested Nash.

But Judith had already stalked off.

Nash heard Maggie come home at two in the morning because he stayed up listening for her. He had dreaded getting a visit from the police saying that his daughter had wrapped her BMW around a tree. He had texted her numerous times, but they had all gone unanswered. He had even attempted to call, a blasphemous thing to do to a Gen Z, apparently. It had gone straight to voice mail.

She had stomped up the stairs and slammed the door to her room.

Nineteen going on four, thought Nash.What did we do wrong? What did I do wrong?

Later, unable to sleep, Nash went downstairs to his study. He poured out a scotch from his private stock and took it to the back patio. He stood in the exact spot where he’d been when Reed Morris had appeared and torpedoed his life.

He had slipped the man’s card into the pocket of his robe, and now he took it out and looked at it. There was an address for an office in town, a main number, and then Morris’s extension. Nash had looked up the FBI field office number online, and it matched the number on the card. So it all seemed legit.

And if itis? I have a decision to make. Please let it be a huge prank, Shock crapping on me one last time in my dad’s honor. That I can handle.

Two floors above were women he loved dearly and who wereboth angry with him. As he then stared out into the darkness it seemed to him that there was something, or someone, out there, watching him.

Okay, Nash, paranoia is not going to help you, but logic and fact-finding will.

Rankin had suggested that a potential target do a little snooping on their own. Thus, Nash sat down in a chair and thought about what Morris had told him. Rhett Temple working with dangerous people. But what exactly was he doing with them? He began to look at this through both his general business prism and his specific knowledge of how Sybaritic Investments operated.

The firm had both working capital and investment funds. The former mostly paid for the salaries, rents, and light bill, and the latter was deployed into other companies as investments. Some of the firm’s funds were maintained in accounts at leading financial institutions around the world. All secure, all aboveboard. The invested funds were obviously held and used by the myriad companies in which Sybaritic invested. Nash was head of the division that found, vetted, and closed the deals with the companies they decided to invest in. Sometimes Sybaritic bought specific assets. Occasionally they negotiated a majority stock interest. But they most often purchased the firm outright, everything from rolled-up chains of car washes to real estate to AI enterprises and windmill and solar farms.

The key was picking exactly which companies and sectors to invest in, and Nash was meticulous about that: reading all the available information, going over the numbers with a fine-tooth comb, asking probing questions of both management and rank-and-file employees. Traveling to their places of business; seeing things for himself on the ground; researching competitors, intellectual property strengths and weaknesses; the full business terrain. Sometimes it was the seemingly unimportant facts that turned out to be the most critical.

Sybaritic’s bond department was the staid, boring part of the business, but that was the intent. There was nothing champagne-poppingabout getting a few dozen basis points of return, but they were vital for consistent, dependable cash flow.

The third division at the firm dealt with special deals, which Rhett ran personally. If the FBI was looking for a place where criminal actions were taking place, it would be there. This division was not doing well. They needed grand slams and hadn’t registered one in almost two years, while the losses had piled up to nearly unsustainable levels.