Taking Flight (A Devereux Novel) (10 page)

Maybe Evan was
right. Distancing ourselves from the company might not have been the wisest
move. Not to mention coming out and living large so publicly.

Derek had spent a long and
sleepless night thinking about the danger to his life. During two years of
partying, socializing and having a great time in Los Angeles, he hadn’t had
cause to be worried about anything. Even his pastimes, dangerous though they
seemed to the average person, had never worried him. He’d always felt in
complete control while flying or driving; he could always count on his honed
reflexes to carry him to safety, even while pushing the machines to their
limit.

This threat could change
everything. He felt as though he
were
on the edge of a
precipice, and it wouldn’t take much to shove him over into oblivion. First the
incident being run
off the road earlier that week, and
then the attack that night while at the club.

He pulled on the collar of
his shirt. He could still feel the arm of the man, hard as steel, digging into
his windpipe and threatening to choke out his existence. Life had never seemed
so fragile and fleeting as it did after being so utterly in another human’s
power and coming so close to the end.

The company might offer
answers or a solution. Derek didn’t understand the details of the business, and
the executive board had never offered them, but they had a lot to do with
military contracts and operations. The way his attacker moved and fought was a
sign he had received serious training, and it was possible there were people
out there who had been on the wrong side of the battlefield from the company
and wanted revenge.

It was the best theory he
had to go on, and so he dug up the last quarterly statement, emblazoned with
the strong Onyx Company logo, and he called the number on the front. It didn’t
even complete a full ring before someone answered.

“Good morning, Mr. Devereux.
How may I help you?” It was the voice of a lively young woman on the other
side.

He was taken aback. They
either had access to his phone number, or else they had given him a specific
number no one else had access to. He hoped it was the latter.

“Good morning. I want to set
up a meeting with a director. I have questions, and I would like answers to
those.” He didn’t want to go into too much detail on the phone with a
secretary.

“Very well, Mr. Devereux.
Our Los Angeles offices are located in the U.S. Bank tower downtown. Would two
o’clock this afternoon work for you?”

“That would be fine.”

“Excellent. We will have a
representative waiting in the lobby for your arrival. Please let us know if we
can do anything else for you.”

~

Derek took a more
understated car than was his habit. He didn’t drive for pleasure this time, and
he was particularly wary of making himself too noticeable after the events of
the night before.

The U.S. Bank building was
tall and impressive. It cut an imposing chunk of the sky out as he walked up to
it, but Derek drank it in. He had long ago moved beyond the point of being
intimidated by the kinds of things that affected most people.

“Mr. Devereux! Please come
this way. My name is Cindy and I will be your liaison with the company.”

He no sooner walked up to
the front doors than they opened for him, and he was ushered into the large
lobby by what sounded like the same young woman he had talked to on the phone.
She led him to the bank of elevators, maintaining a pleasant level of
deferential chatter as they went.

“It’s a pleasure to have you
to our L.A. office, sir. I understand you have not toured many of the company’s
facilities, and I believe you will find the offices here, while fairly mundane,
to be suitably impressive.”

They entered an elevator,
and he couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow when she pressed the highest button
on the panel.

“Top floor? That can’t be
cheap. Surely, the company has better things to spend money on than prime
office space in a city I’ve been told isn’t even the headquarters.” It seemed
like an absolute waste to him, but then again he wasn’t the aspiring
businessman. He’d let Evan figure it out.

She nodded. “It’s not cheap,
but it helps to be impressive when entertaining clients. It’s true we are one
of the smaller office locations—the New York offices are even grander.”

The elevator ride took some
time, but that was to be expected considering the heights to which they
traveled. It went by quicker than Derek expected.

The door opened onto a
tranquil lobby, complete with a bubbling water feature. Green ferns and shrubs
followed the water, a distinct contrast to the black marble that lay underneath
it all. It was an interesting blend of hard and soft, living and inanimate.
Over it all was the Onyx logo, a large symbol emblazoned on the wall. Derek caught
a bit of a chill at the
sight,
despite it being his
father’s own company he’d built from the ground up.

And now it’s ours. Remember that.

He still felt like a
petitioner who may not be deemed worthy. It reminded him of the infrequent
audiences with his father while growing up after his mother passed away. Those
meetings had always filled him with nerves and trepidation, the worry that his
progress in his studies since the last meeting hadn’t been enough to impress
the stern man.

“This way, Mr. Devereux.”
Cindy gestured him through a pair of
double-wide
doors, and into an elegantly paneled oaken hallway. It felt like the interior
of a luxury resort, not a business office. It was hard to believe it was
all necessary
.

A benefit of not being publicly listed.
He
and his brothers were the only shareholders, and he already had enough money he
could never spend it all. Once more he wondered what exactly the company did
that it could print and waste money at will.

They didn’t have far to go
before Cindy held open a door into an expansive boardroom for him. His
attention drifted to the view outside the windows, the extreme height showing
him the city as it looked from the cockpit of his plane or helicopter.

“Mr. Devereux, your visit is
a surprise, but it’s good to have you with us.” A man approaching his sixties
stepped forward, one of eight people who stood in a respectful semi-circle
around the entrance of the boardroom. Derek shook his hand—it was warm
and papery, as though he spent most of his time inside air-conditioned rooms
without enough humidity. “I am George Carter, and I’m the director of the Los
Angeles branch of the Onyx Company. I’m sorry for your loss. I knew your father
well. He was a good man with extraordinary vision.”

Derek cast George a puzzled look.
It wasn’t the way he would have described Father, but then George had likely
spent more time with his old man than he had. “Thank you for welcoming me on
such short notice, George. I apologize if I pulled you away from anything
important. I’m sure you must be a busy man with a lot of responsibilities.”

“Nothing is as important as
you and your brothers, Mr. Devereux. You are the owners.”

As hard as he tried, Derek
couldn’t detect anything in the way of sarcasm. He wouldn’t have blamed the man
for a lack of respect. His father was the founder of the company—Derek
had merely inherited it and used it to fund a playboy lifestyle.

“Tell me, what exactly
happens at this office, George? I know the company has a lot of military
contracts, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge of the operations. Why
do we need a penthouse suite in the tallest building in the city?”

As he asked, Derek studied
the rest of the people in the room. Several looked to be executive types like
George, with soft hands and graying hair. Each of those people had the same
attentive look on their faces as though they were waiters at a fancy
restaurant. He didn’t like it at all.

Two of the others looked
interchangeable with Cindy. They might be secretaries or administrative
assistants for others in the room. Their skirts were just a little tighter than
he would have expected, the blouses cut a little lower.

The last remaining man was
curious, not because there was anything particularly strange about him at first
glance, but because he didn’t match either of the previous two types. He was
much
younger,
likely in his mid-thirties, and in very
fit condition. One of his hands was easy at his side while he held the other
behind him oddly. Derek met his strangely intense eyes.

“There are several very
large, very lucrative clients here in Los Angeles,” George replied. “We find it
suits our business interests the best if we can dazzle and treat them in a way
our competitors cannot. We do that with more than just the location, but we
find it helps open their minds to fresh new ideas. The numbers have been run,
Mr. Devereux, and I believe the cost is justified.”

“Are these clients in the
military?” Derek asked. He wanted to steer the conversation in a direction that
would be more useful to him and the reason he came. “How many of them are
there?”

George hesitated. “I’m not
sure it would be best if I disclosed that information, Mr. Devereux. It’s
confidential, and while you deserve to know what’s going on, we would need to
get you clearances, both internally and with the government. Sometimes, I
assure you, it’s better if you let us handle what needs to be done in the
business and you focus on enjoying yourself like you’ve been doing.”

It was the biggest
non-answer Derek had ever been given.

“Tell me, George, if you
can—who do we have by way of competitors? Are we doing anything in
particular to them they wouldn’t like? Would they try to strike back at us in
any way?”

“Oh, no,” George replied.
“That’s not how we run our business. In fact, we ensure we are the sole
supplier of much of what we do. The majority of our business is so secretive
that no one outside the company even knows of the market for half of it. The
company is very much safe from outside threats, I assure you.”

Derek was frustrated. George
wasn’t telling him anything useful, and his “answers” raised more questions
than they answered. If there weren’t any competitors that might want to cripple
them, then why was he attacked? He was wary of bringing up the attacks
directly—a part of him was convinced the less people who knew the better.

“What about foreign
countries or firms, then? If we do military contracts, then there must be
people who end up on the other side of whatever we do. If that’s the case, they
wouldn’t be very happy with the Onyx Company, would they?”

Again, George shook his
head. “No, no. We take complete and utter care that no one even knows we exist.
There are a select few people outside of the company who know of it, and they
are all American government officials.”

“Tell me, George, how is
this even possible? What do we do or make that is worth so much money and yet
no one knows about it?” Derek could see why Evan wanted to dip into the
company’s affairs.
What had Father been
up to?

George answered with a
pained look on his face. “Mr. Devereux, your father established the Onyx
Company with all the care he possessed. We provide a valuable service to the
American public, and indeed the world. It must remain secretive to be
effective. Please ask no further details I cannot divulge to you. As I
mentioned, if you applied for the proper security clearances as your brother
Evan has done, then eventually you could access such information. Until then,
I’m afraid I can’t say.”