Flawless (15 page)

Aidan was about to make some quip about talking being the last thing on his mind, when his inside jacket pocket began vibrating. “Sorry,” he said, whipping out his cell phone with a flourish, like a cowboy brandishing a gun. Seeing the name “Brogan” flash across the screen, he turned it around to show the girl, who looked duly impressed, before lifting it to his ear.

“Hey boss,” he yelled. “Whassup?”

“
Whassup
?” Even on the crackly long-distance line, Brogan sounded scathing. “Jesus, Aidan, enough with the jive talk, all right? You are not black.”

Stung but grateful that no one else could hear him being so summarily put down, Aidan smiled and nodded, trying to act like nothing had happened. Tragically, his hero-worship of Brogan was not an act. It always hurt him when the boss exposed their “friendship” for the master/servant relationship it really was.

“How’s Moscow? Have you had time to do any scouting while you were out there? Find us some new girls?” he asked, trying to get back in Brogan’s good books. Premiere had professional employed model scouts in all the major capitals, including Moscow, but both Aidan and Brogan liked to indulge themselves with a little freelance dabbling when they traveled. It was one of the few interests they genuinely had in common.

“One or two,” said Brogan, without enthusiasm, thinking of the dead-eyed Georgian twins he’d amused himself with last night. “Nothing to write home about.”

“Well, worry not,” oiled Aidan. “I’ve got us a great Latina here. If she’s any good in the sack I’ll pass her on to you when you get back. My treat.”

“I don’t need you to find me pussy,” snapped Brogan. There were times when he was happy to play along with his attorney’s drooling schoolboy enjoyment of the “freebies” on offer at Premiere, but tonight wasn’t one of them. This trip had been a washout. He was pissed off with Russia, with the unions, with the shitty excuse for a hotel his assistant had booked him into, and with being away from home generally. Diana was starting yet another IVF cycle this week—her fifth—and he didn’t like leaving her.

“It’s insanely hot over here,” he grumbled. “I’ve been in Yakutia the past two days, trying to sweet-talk the unions into dropping their demand for health insurance. Why can’t these people get it through their thick, Slavic skulls that I am not about to admit liability for those wheezing, work-shy sons of bitches? I mean, do they have any idea how much lung cancer treatment costs?”

Aidan shook his head and mumbled something conciliatory.

“You’d have thought they’d be happy to be employed,” Brogan ranted on. “It’s not as if they have so many other, more attractive options.”

“Exactly. So why sweet-talk them?” said Aidan. “Tell them pay and conditions are what they are, no health coverage, and they can take it or leave it.”

“Hmm,” growled Brogan, who’d certainly thought about it. “Maybe I should. But the men are scared. Some upstart from the union, Gregor something-or-other, has been whipping them into a frenzy. When’s that Harvard report gonna be finished?”

As soon as the first cancer cases emerged, Aidan had taken the precaution of commissioning an official scientific investigation to disprove any link between air quality in OMC mines and the workers’ respiratory problems. With a multimillion-dollar
research grant at stake, there was never much doubt about what the eminent scientists’ findings would be. But Brogan wanted his answers today, in black and white, for shareholders, the press, and anyone else who asked.

“All this bad feeling isn’t good for business,” he complained. “An unhappy worker is an unproductive worker, and I’ve got a lot at stake out here.”

“I know,” said Aidan. “I’m on it.”

“Really?” Brogan’s tone sounded ominous. “The way you were supposed to be ‘on’ Trade Fair and that meddlesome Drummond Murray woman?”

Carla’s hand had been creeping ever farther up Aidan’s thigh while he was on the phone, and was now coiled unashamedly around the modest bulge in his pants. As enjoyable as this was, it was making it hard for him to concentrate. Holding up five fingers to indicate he’d be back shortly, he slipped outside to take the rest of the call in the relative quiet of the street.

“Scarlett Drummond Murray?” he asked, playing for time, as if there could possibly be another. “She’s no threat to us. Trade Fair hasn’t been active for months.”

“Wrong again,” seethed Brogan. “The stupid bitch was here, in Yakutsk, less than a week ago.”

Aidan swallowed nervously. “In Yakutsk? That’s not possible. Are you sure?”

“Am I sure?” Brogan roared. “Yes, Aidan, I’m sure. Three hundred of my miners turned up to hear her speak! The whole fucking province is talking about it.”

“All right, all right. Calm down,” said Aidan firmly, struggling to conquer his nerves. This was a major fuckup on his part—how the hell had Scarlett arranged this without his knowledge?—but he’d learned long ago that it never paid to apologize to Brogan, or admit a mistake. There were no prizes for honesty with the boss.

“So she gave one stupid speech. So what? We’re squeezing her tighter and tighter in London, financially, professionally, personally. Soon she’ll have to drop the ball with this ridiculous campaign of hers.”

“I’m not interested in
soon
,” spat Brogan. Pacing his suite at the Ararat Park Hyatt in his purple silk pajamas, he picked up a brass paperweight from the desk and hurled it across the room in frustration, shattering the bedside lamp. Fucking ugly thing anyway. Three thousand bucks a night and his suite looked like it had been furnished from a goddamn Kmart catalog. “I want that girl out of my hair
now
. Yesterday.”

He’d always prided himself on his cool, even-tempered public image. When he lost his temper, or lashed out at enemies or business rivals, he preferred to do it in private. At the Tiffany party, he’d been no more than mildly reproving of Scarlett when she’d shown him up in front of Michael Beerens and his wife, spewing her socialist nonsense like Trotsky with Tourette’s. But he never forgot a slight. Nor did he ever knowingly leave a declared enemy unpunished or allow threats to his business or personal life to go unchecked.

The morning after that party, he’d phoned Aidan from the car before he even got to his office and set the wheels of retribution in motion. That was over six months ago. Scarlett should have been dead in the water long before now.

Brogan had never liked Aidan, but he was an excellent attorney. Crucially, he understood the concept of plausible deniability—the importance of keeping Brogan’s hands clean—and could usually be relied upon to do whatever was asked of him quietly, efficiently, and without sharing unnecessary and potentially damaging details of his working methods with his boss. It was unlike him to leave a task unfinished, as it seemed he had done with Scarlett and her Trade Fair campaign. But one mistake was one mistake too many.

“I don’t care how you do it,” he said bluntly. “But I want Trade Fair to disappear. I want
her
to disappear. Do we understand each other?”

“Of course.” Aidan did his best to sound confident. “Loud and clear.”

After Brogan hung up, he took a deep breath and tried to clear his head. Outside the club a growing gaggle of wannabes had assembled, some of the girls dressed in little more than their underwear, but for once Aidan’s mind wasn’t in his pants. His career was on the line here, his entire relationship with Brogan at risk. He needed to think.

He’d been too complacent about Scarlett; that was the problem. He’d considered her and her charity so small-fry that he’d delegated the task of scaring her off to his London underlings. Clearly that had been a mistake. It never occurred to him that such a slip of a girl might be as stubborn and determined as Brogan when it came to getting her own way.

Well, if she wanted a fight, she’d get one. As far as Aidan was concerned, anyone who made him look bad with the boss deserved everything that was coming to them.

Slipping the phone into his pocket, he headed gloomily back into the club.

“Everything OK?” Carla’s pupils dilated wildly as she handed him his drink. She’d obviously taken advantage of his absence to shovel buckets of Colombia’s finest up her perfectly straight nose.

“Not really,” said Aidan, sitting down heavily on the barstool. “But it will be. It will be.”

Clicking his fingers imperiously for another drink, he repositioned her hand over his cock.

“Now, where were we?”

The next morning, across town in Park Avenue, Diana O’Donnell gazed mindlessly out the window of her penthouse apartment. It was a glorious day. The sun blazing down on Central Park was bright and dry, a welcome change from the cloying, humid summer weather that for weeks had had New Yorkers sweating in their cars and offices like melting Popsicles, deserting the city on the weekends in search of cooler breezes on the coast. Trees bright with blossom provided welcome shade for the shorts-and-T-shirt-clad multitude who had thronged to Manhattan’s only real green space to enjoy the heat wave, content to venture outside now that the sauna-like mugginess had passed.

Briefly, Diana contemplated joining them. Perhaps it would do her good to get some fresh air? But ultimately, she decided against it. It was strange to feel on the one hand so desperately, achingly lonely and on the other so frightened of normal human contact. As a teenager, she’d thrived on the buzz of New York City, the daily banter with the hot-dog sellers and street vendors, the sense of community, of a unique, shared energy that made this greatest of cities feel so constantly, throbbingly alive.

Of course, New York was still alive. It was she who had died, suffocated in the gilded cage of her marriage and the private hell of her battle to conceive a child, a battle that lately seemed to have sucked all the joy and excitement and beauty out of the world. It had gotten to the point where she no longer trusted herself to be around other people without bursting embarrassingly into tears.

“Come on, Diana, get a grip,” she said out loud, walking over to the fawn suede B&B Italia couch and flicking on CNN. Perhaps some footage of the real tragedies unfolding in Iraq and Darfur and Somalia might help jolt her out of this ridiculous, relentless depression.

When she’d first met Brogan, over fifteen years ago now, they’d both been such totally different people. She was a twenty-year-old art student from an old-money family, reveling in the freedom of living alone in the big city for the first time in her
short, sheltered life. Never wildly ambitious, as least not in the traditional sense, she was passionate about her art and soon became an accepted part of the rich, bohemian set that hung around the cafés of the East Village, talking about Dali and disarmament, daringly eschewing their Republican parents’ politics. Very pretty in a neat, American, unexotic sort of way—had she been born a generation later she’d have been snapped up as a model for Abercrombie & Fitch or Tommy Hilfiger—she was never short of boyfriends but tended to go for the long-haired, idealistic types who liked to rant against Reagan and encouraged her to go Dutch on dinner.

Then she met Brogan and stepped into a whole new world.

At thirty-eight, almost two decades her senior, he’d blazed into Diana’s life like a comet of worldly self-assurance, as experienced and confident as she was innocent and naive. Already a multimillionaire and big noise in the diamond fraternity, as well as a renowned Manhattan playboy, he had the sort of charisma and presence normally associated with movie stars or certain rare types of politician. He was also, in Diana’s eyes at least, extremely good-looking, with his thick, dark hair and broad, powerful shoulders, the antithesis of all the weedy, earnest guys she’d dated in the past. Later, she would describe their first meeting, at a party at The Plaza, as the archetypal bolt of lightning. Until Brogan smiled at her, she’d never have guessed she could be so powerfully attracted to a rich, middle-aged, unapologetic Republican. But there it was. She was smitten.

For his part, Brogan’s attraction to Diana was more thoughtful and considered, at least at first. He was pushing forty and ought to acquire a wife. Whomever he chose must be beautiful, naturally, young but not silly, reasonably educated, socially connected, and ideally independently wealthy. Diana Frampton ticked every box. She was also, he rapidly discovered, kindhearted, quick-witted, and funny. It wasn’t long before his feelings for her deepened, to the point where he felt quietly confident
that they must now qualify as this much-talked-about “love,” an emotion that thus far in life had eluded him completely, but which he had gotten along perfectly well without.

They married in a quiet, low-key ceremony on Nantucket, where Diana’s people had a summer home. Brogan loathed the island on sight—cutesy clapboard houses and khaki-wearing trust fund kids called Chipper were complete anathema to the boy who’d grown up semiferal, roaming the streets of Brooklyn. But it didn’t matter much. After the honeymoon (St. Bart’s) he brought her back to the city and set about controlling every aspect of their married life as closely and ruthlessly and he has always had his businesses.