The Kiss Plot: Book Two of the Quicksilver Trilogy

by French, Nicole

  Everyone turned to him.

  “You were in the society too?” Zola asked, now scribbling furiously.

  Brandon shook his head. “I was tapped, but I didn’t join. Partly because I couldn’t find out much about John Carson beyond his title. And I couldn’t find out about anyone else because they all used the fake Hellenistic names.”

  “What do you mean?” Zola asked.

  “Greeks,” Eric said lamely. “And Roman, mostly. They use The Aeneid to come up with code phrases too.”

  Brandon rolled his eyes. “Can I just say that Titan is a stupid choice, by the way? It’s not even a real name—just a type of god. Yours makes more sense—Triton, son of Poseidon, god of the sea. Shipping, ocean. It had a logic to it. Carson’s is just lazy.”

  “This is why you didn’t join?” Skylar asked with a raised brow. “Because their naming procedure was inconsistent?”

  Brandon cast her an impatient look. “No. I didn’t join because the guy who tapped me was shady as hell, like I told you. Some random asshole in a big suit invites me into his super-secret club by blindfolding me and forcing me to sit in a fuckin’ dungeon for three days. What do you think I said?”

  “You’ve been there?” Eric asked with a shudder. “His…place?”

  Brandon gave his friend a queer, knowing look. “Might have. They took me to a few different spots. But I wondered where you might have ended up.”

  Eric didn’t reply. I swallowed and fought the urge to take his hand when he flexed it, looking for mine.

  “But you met him?” he asked Brandon incredulously. “You got to that point and he just let you…go?”

  Brandon shook his head. “Well, it wasn’t that easy. He did try to talk me out of it. But after three other abductions, I was done with that shit. So I finished my lunch, told John Carson to go fuck himself, and left after that last meeting. Except leaving still meant being blindfolded and dumped in a ditch somewhere in Western Connecticut. I got a couple of good punches in, though, even with the blindfold.” He shook his head, looking like he wouldn’t mind delivering those punches again. “Took me nine hours to get home from there. Bastards.”

  His south Boston accent was starting to emerge, demonstrating just how much he hated remembering this guy. Carson had long morphed into “Cah-son” again. By the way Skylar was grinding her teeth, she sensed the tension as well. I could sympathize.

  “What about the other members?” Zola asked. “Jane, you mentioned someone Eric called Jude when we last spoke. Is that his real name? It’s not Greek, right?”

  “That’s Jude LeTour,” Brandon said. “His family negotiates a bunch of Asian imports. Glorified middle men.”

  “Hermes,” I murmured, thinking of the Greek messenger from whom Jude took his name.

  Eric shook his head. “None of them will talk. Trust me. Carson makes sure of it.”

  “I’d still like their names,” Zola said. “You never know what will make people move. People who are a part of these kinds of organizations aren’t quiet out of loyalty—it’s because they are protecting themselves. There’s always a pressure point.”

  “There is,” Eric said bitterly. “And John Carson knows all of them for every single member. I really can’t—”

  “Yes, you can,” I put in. “You have to at some point.”

  But Eric just remained tight-lipped.

  “What?” Skylar asked. “What is it?”

  “He’s worried,” Zola suggested. “Because two years ago, Chariot became the biggest military industrial lobbyist in Washington. They were responsible for increasing the military budget by about fifteen percent, and most of that went to them.”

  “So?” Skylar said. “That doesn’t give John Carson an excuse to break the law and extort people.”

  “No,” Brandon said gently. “But it does mean that a lot of very powerful people won’t give a shit if he tries.”

  Eric sank his head into his hands again, looking very much like he couldn’t breathe. Brandon reached behind him to take Skylar’s hand—whether to comfort himself or her, I didn’t know.

  “So…what does this mean?” I asked. “He can’t track you anymore now that we ruined his thingy. Can’t we…Jesus, can’t we just tell him it’s over? I’m his daughter, after all, maybe he’d…maybe he’d listen to me.”

  “Jane.” Eric’s voice was flat. Lifeless. Even I didn’t believe my own suggestion.

  “I have some friends at the FBI,” Zola said. “I’ll contact them, see if there is an investigation already running into the Janus society or John Carson. In the meantime, you two have a choice: go back to your life and wait for him to send another whatever that thing is, or you can tell me the rest of what you know, and maybe I can help you get some protection while I start my own investigation…”

  He trailed off. Again, it was clear that no one in the room thought we could just escape someone like my biological father.

  “We could probably handle our own protection,” Brandon said snidely, earning an elbow from Skylar. He wasn’t wrong, though.

  I turned to Eric, prepared to fight. “I don’t want to go back,” I said plainly. “I can’t do this. It’s…we’re not going to last. He’ll break us, and honestly, part of me thinks that’s exactly what he wants.”

  Eric was quiet for a minute. Then he reached out and took my hands. This time I let him.

  “I don’t want to live in that apartment, pretend we’re strangers,” I said quietly. “I d-don’t want to pretend to hate you anymore.” My voice cracked on the last bit, basically blaring my truth.

  But when he looked up, all I saw was that same truth reflected. He was scared, of course. Much more than me—he knew firsthand what kinds of personal terrors John Carson was capable of. But Eric’s mask, the one he used to protect himself at all costs, was gone.

  He squeezed my hands even tighter, his thumb brushing over the empty space where my rings should be.

  “I don’t want to hate you either,” he whispered. “I can’t, Jane. I just can’t.”

  “So what do we do?” I asked, my voice uncharacteristically small. “Do we—do we face him?”

  “No,” Eric said, looking at me with wide eyes. “We run.”

  Twenty-One

  Zola’s next suggestion was to research Carson’s company rather than the man himself.

  “That makes sense,” Skylar remarked as we bent around her computer back at the house. “What do historians always say? Follow the money?”

  So we did. And while John Carson appeared to have hardly any web presence, after he became CEO of Chariot approximately twenty years earlier, his mark was obvious on the company’s life. After becoming one of the original purveyors of biological weapons during the fallout of the Vietnam War (and suffering the public blowback for it), Chariot quietly went back to electronics and parts manufacturing for a solid twenty-five years. They didn’t seriously get back into warmongering until after 9/11, though it was clear they never completely abandoned the research.

  “Look at the shareholders’ reports,” Zola muttered, pointing through a few charts. “Their profits tripled. Every year.”

  “Whoa,” Brandon said from his place on the couch, where he appeared to be looking at the same documents. “Looks like that’s also when they became a major supporter of a bunch of the war hawks in congress too. Did you see?”

  When we looked closer at nearly every political contest, local and national over the last twenty years, Chariot’s political donations were nearly on par with the Koch brothers or Tom Steyer. Simply put, John Carson appeared to have nearly every major politician in his pocket, and had for the last two decades.

  “I’d bet a thousand dollars that John Carson helped co-write the Patriot Act,” Ray said. “No more warrants on domestic surveillance? They would have been all over that kind of technology.”

  “So Chariot now just makes stuff that spies on people?” Skylar asked between her teeth. “Or other stuff too?”

  “Ohhh,
they make a lot more than that,” Ray said gravely.

  “Weaponry. Systems. Missiles,” Brandon chimed in. “You name anything that blows shit up, they make it. And they sell to about half the countries on the planet, or have since John Carson took over from his father in the nineties. Think Tony Stark before he became Iron Man, and that’s basically your dad, Jane. Well, maybe not Tony Stark. Obadiah Stane’s a better fit. Iron Monger, you know?”

  He bounced between Skylar’s and my blank looks. Brandon always was a closet comic book fanatic, but it was actually one of the things I liked most about him. Underneath his sleek exterior, the guy really was a total dork.

  “Since when did you become anti-gun?” Skylar asked.

  Brandon glanced nervously at me. He didn’t realize I knew about his past—the one where he used to run around with hoodlums in South Boston until he was about twenty-one or so. I happened to know he still kept a loaded gun in a safe next to their bed. It was cause for many an argument between him and Skylar.

  “This has nothing to do with that,” Brandon replied acerbically. “Over the last twenty years, Chariot Industries became the largest arms dealer in the world. John Carson has most of the federal government in his pocket, and probably most of the military too. NRA. GOP. DNC. Name your political acronym—he controls them all and sells bullets to everyone else on the planet that matters. He is the last person you’d ever want to piss off.”

  Eric sank further into the sofa, where he hadn’t moved since we’d all migrated back to the house.

  “Oh, fuck,” he moaned softly to the ceiling. “What the fuck are we going to do?”

  We spent another few hours combing the internet for anything else that could get Zola started on an investigation he now insisted on spearheading. Even if the Brooklyn DA didn’t want to take it on, he had friends at the FBI who might. But Brandon was right: John Carson was a ghost. The fourth-generation head of a company that first made its millions profiteering during World War I, there were virtually no photographs of him past the age of fifteen or so.

  “Here’s…oh, no, I think this is his father again, Jane,” Zola said when he found yet another picture of a heavily side-burned Gabriel Carson from the seventies. “Your grandpa sure liked a good leisure suit.”

  I scowled. “He was not my grandfather. None of these people are my family.”

  Zola shut his mouth—it wasn’t the first time I’d snapped at someone for making that kind of remark.

  “Here!” Brandon said triumphantly. “Found him!”

  We crowded around his laptop to look at a grainy People Magazine spread from the late eighties.

  “That’s not him,” I said. “That’s Gabriel again.”

  “Not him,” Brandon said. “Him.”

  He pointed a big finger at a man lingering behind the principal three in the photo. It was unclear, but if I squinted, I could make out the features of a much younger man who had the same hooked nose and curly hair as the one who had so rudely disrupted my wedding. His eyes were dark, and he scowled in the photo.

  “It says President Bush and the First Lady with Gabriel Carson and son, in Kennebunkport, 1988.”

  I shoved my face closer. “Holy shit. That is him, isn’t it?”

  I backed up so the others could see. He stood with the Bushes, one of the most important political dynasties in history. It was well documented that George W. had been a Skull and Bones member during his time at Yale. Maybe he had been a member of Janus too.

  “Send me that link, will you?” Zola asked. “Right now, it’s the only identification we have. But I’ll need it to start the investigation.”

  “And you’re sure your friends at the bureau won’t tip him off?” Eric asked for the fifteenth time.

  Zola nodded. “These guys are friends of mine from the Marines. We did two tours together. Patriots, all of them.”

  Eric nodded, and Brandon typed away while the rest of us adjourned to the living room. The photo felt like the hammer coming down on a nail. Our fate, somehow, was sealed with the realization that John Carson wasn’t just a strange, vindictive man who seemed to appear out of thin air to ruin Eric’s and my life. He was a real person. And real people had real weaknesses.

  * * *

  A few hours later, after Zola had left to get the last train back to New York, Eric and I finally lay down together in the dark.

  We had not, after all, decided to sleep in separate bedrooms. But oddly, neither of us had gotten undressed, just lain on the bed in our clothes and faced each other on the pillows.

  Everyone had decided it would probably be best to leave in the morning. An evening storm had hit Boston with the first snow of the season—even if Carson knew the coin was out of commission, no one thought he would retaliate until at least the morning, and that was only if he really was monitoring it that closely (Eric seemed to think he was, but I had my doubts that a very busy CEO was that obsessed with our sex life). At best, he’d send a new one with a strict order to wear it immediately or else. At worst, his thugs would try to force Eric into a van again.

  “If he tries to abduct you…well, it’s not like we don’t have security,” Brandon added as we made our way upstairs to the bedrooms. He’d already called in two extra security men to guard the house that night, just as a precaution on top of Tony plus Skylar and Brandon’s usual detail.

  So we decided on England, and from there, Europe. A perverse version of the honeymoon we never took.

  “The U.K. has a good relationship with the U.S., but they don’t buy from Chariot,” Ray had informed us before leaving. “Lockheed wrapped up those contracts years ago, and I happen to know the current Prime Minister really does not like Chariot or any of its champions. It’s unlikely John Carson has MI-6 at his disposal.”

  It didn’t make us feel completely better. But it was something.

  So we packed our things that night, ready to make our move as soon as we could. Eric had only placed one phone call—a telegram to be delivered to Nina’s apartment tomorrow evening, informing her that we were taking a sudden honeymoon for a few weeks and requesting her to step in at board meetings. It wouldn’t go over very well, but it was a stopgap at least. Because we were together, we wouldn’t be violating the terms of Celeste’s will, and on top of that, it wouldn’t tip Calvin off immediately as to where we were.

  “I don’t want to run,” I finally admitted as I turned onto my back. “It feels…wrong.”

  Eric sighed. “We’ve been over this. It’s temporary. Just until Zola, Brandon, and I figure out what to do next. Brandon and I aren’t Jeff Bezos, but we’ve got resources between us. And Zola has at least a few people at the FBI on his side. We just need to figure out what Carson wants. His pressure point.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it’s just easier for you. This is what you do, right? Run away?”

  Eric frowned. “Is that really what you think?”

  “It’s becoming a bit of a pattern.”

  He stared at me. “Takes one to know one.”

  “That’s not fair. When was the last time I ran away from you?”

  “I had to chase you into the ocean. You ran then.”

  I didn’t say anything. It was true. But it wasn’t the same thing. Over the last six months, for the first time in my life, I had become the more tenacious of a pair. I had changed. I had stuck around. I had wondered where this man had gone. And it had hurt. So. Much.

  “I’d follow you anywhere, you know,” Eric said quietly.

  I remained silent. Would he, really? When he’d been so eager to leave?

  Eric reached and turned my cheek so I was looking at him. I closed my eyes. He waited until I opened them again. And still, there was that open, almost plain face that sometimes flashed with such extreme, heart-wrenching charisma, I almost couldn’t take it. There was that earnest sorrow. The mask had evaporated.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For the way I’ve been acting. For that comment at dinner about Caitlyn. For everything.”
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  “Did you really talk to her?” I asked, surprised by how much the idea really hurt. In the grand scheme of things, Caitlyn Calvert’s pettiness seemed so small now. But she fit into Eric’s world in a way I didn’t. There was a part of me that might always feel threatened by that.

  He shrugged. “Over speaker with everyone else. To be honest, she’s a big reason I didn’t want to go to Violet’s for Thanksgiving. They’re…well, I missed Nina. But Jane, you’re my family now. You have to know that.”

  He pulled my chin toward him and examined my lips a moment. His mouth trembled, and I could feel mine do the same. I wanted to kiss him, but at the same time, that never seemed to rid us of the past that hung around like a ghost.

  Eric seemed to understand. Instead of a controlling, forceful movement, he simply stroked the side of my cheek. Then only after our breathing calmed, he placed a chaste kiss on one corner of my lips. I welcomed the touch, but the rankling from the past several weeks still lingered.

  He broke away with a sad expression. “It’s going to take more than that, isn’t it?”

  I quirked a brow. “You think?”

  Eric sighed, but didn’t argue. “We could go back. Be roommates for the next month. Pretend the necklace was run over by a car and let him give me another until you can leave for good. I never—Jane, I swear to God, I never thought it would be this insane for you. You don’t have to bear this shitty burden. I don’t for one goddamn second think I’m worth it.”

  I toyed with his hands. His fingertips were calloused—from climbing, he told me once. So unlike what you would expect from a blueblood like him.

  “The problem in the church wasn’t that you screwed Caitlyn five years ago,” I said, surprising myself when I changed the subject completely. “I just want to make that clear. It’s that you never told me. Just like you never told me about your family, your dad, Penny, Janus…” I started to feel dizzy with all the secrets this man had kept. “It’s that even now, I’m still kind of in the dark…”