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jaybee65Title: Succession
Fandom: La Femme Nikita
Rating: Probably a hard R, for sexual situations and violence.
Pairings: Contains Madeline/Paul (Operations) and Charles Sand/Madeline as well as references to Adrian/George, but this doesn't fit comfortably into "shippy" categories.
Length: The whole thing is 120k-plus words. There are 31 chapters, which are distributed among four "Parts."
Warning: Michael and Nikita do not appear in this story, except as minor references at the very end.
Summary: Set during the 1980's, this story traces the events that ultimately led to the overthrow of Adrian as leader of Section One and to her replacement by Paul Wolfe (Operations).
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lisa cracked her knuckles and began typing at a rapid-fire pace. She executed commands, tried out others, and as she read the lines on the screen she gradually relaxed and shook off her nervousness. On the desk beside her sat a disk containing the files Madeline wanted her to plant. She tried not to look at it too often; every time she did, it just reminded her how utterly insane a mess she'd allowed herself to be dragged into.
Framing Adrian. Jesus. Lisa thought she'd been living on the edge just nosing around classified research projects, but her risk-taking had nothing on Madeline. Madeline was actually going to take the old bitch down. That took one hell of a nerve just to think about, much less dare try. And now Lisa was in the thick of it. Not exactly by choice, either. While Madeline had framed her request as an opportunity for Lisa -- both for personal advancement and a bit of revenge -- Lisa had the distinct impression that "no" wasn't going to be an acceptable answer. She didn't really want to find out what would happen if she did something Madeline found unacceptable, because Madeline had this chilly look, even when she was smiling, that made Lisa feel like the living, breathing definition of "expendable."
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Lisa, you dummy, she thought. She swallowed hard. Let's get this over with.
The main objective was to crack Adrian's password so as to save these files under her login. But it wasn't just a matter of passwords: there was an entire login sequence for the upper echelons of Section's management designed to thwart security breaches. Madeline had supplied Lisa with the sequence for George's login. God only knew how she managed to get that -- probably best not to ask -- and Lisa had been able to use it as a model to emulate what would probably -- probably! -- work for Adrian. One last line of the sequence to go. She typed some more, hit the enter key, and ta da! She was logged in as Adrian.
I am Queen of the Freaking Universe! She felt like pumping her fist, but settled for a whispered "Yes!" instead.
Okay. All she had to do was pop that disk in, download the files to a selection of appropriate locations, backdate them convincingly, clean up her tracks, and log the hell off before she got caught.
So where should she dump these things? She opened a few directories and eliminated them from consideration. "Garbage, garbage, garbage," she muttered to herself as she opened and closed a series of folders and files. Sighing, she scanned their names and tried to guess their contents. "Projects" -- that might be something. Or wait, maybe "Financial." She opened that one and scrolled through the list of files -- and then stopped abruptly.
One of the subdirectories was called "Centre." Centre, as in the source of all those instructions and directives regarding her son. Centre, as in the mysterious entity she'd spent months trying to track down. Finally at her fingertips.
Madeline and her grandiose coup attempt could wait a few goddam minutes. Lisa wasn't going to get this close to the answer and not take a look.
Her skin hot with anticipation, she selected the subdirectory. She pressed the enter key. In an instant, the screen began flashing "ACCESS DENIED. SECURITY VIOLATION."
"Fuck," she said aloud. She struck keys desperately, trying to exit, trying to shut down, but she'd lost control of the terminal. Panicking, she manually powered the computer off.
She sat there, staring ahead but not really seeing anything, for what could have been thirty seconds -- or what could have been an hour. And then she ran to the restroom and began to vomit.
***
There wasn't a knock or even a discernable noise, but Madeline nevertheless sensed a presence hovering behind her. She swung around in her chair to look. Lisa stood in the doorway to the office. Her face was pinched and pale.
The last time Madeline remembered seeing someone with an expression quite like that was right after an operative cut the wrong wire trying to defuse a bomb during Madeline's first year at Section One. Madeline managed to dive behind a wall for cover; the operative who cut the wire, however, became human shrapnel seconds later. Looking at Lisa, Madeline felt a rising urge to find another wall to crouch behind.
Lisa opened her mouth to speak, so Madeline held up a warning hand. She stood, grasped Lisa by the arm, and walked her briskly out of the office and down the corridor. There was a utility closet full of ventilation equipment around the corner. It was cramped and noisy, but it was also free of surveillance, so it would do.
Inside the closet, they could barely stand without touching. The physical proximity rendered Lisa's anxiety palpable, like a noxious miasma of fear. As if to ward it off, Madeline crossed her arms tightly and leaned back against the door. It vibrated with the hum of the nearby equipment.
"What's wrong?"
"I set off some sort of alarm." Even at a whisper, Lisa's voice nearly cracked. "The system locked me out."
"What kind of alarm?"
"How the hell should I know? It was flashing something about a security breach and everything just froze." Lisa covered her face with her hands. "I am so fucking dead."
What in God's name had Lisa done? From somewhere in the pit of Madeline's stomach, an eruption of fury seared her entire body. She had to clench her teeth to control it.
"I thought," she said, enunciating slowly -- glacially -- because if she allowed her rage to take over, she might just tear Lisa to pieces, "that you knew the system inside and out."
"I do! But I was sticking my nose into places I'd never gone before. I wasn't in the regular network. I was looking around for someplace good to plant the files."
"So you didn't plant them yet?"
"No. I didn't get the chance to." Lisa closed her eyes, and her shoulders slumped. "God, I'm so sorry."
Madeline unclenched her muscles, and the fury abated. If there was no evidence of what Lisa was doing, then there was nothing to implicate Madeline. Assuming Lisa could keep her mouth shut, at least.
"Do you have the disk?" Madeline asked.
"Yeah."
"Give it back to me."
Lisa complied, and Madeline slipped it into her jacket pocket.
"Now," said Madeline, "if Adrian tracks you down as the source of the breach -- and we don't know that she will -- I want you to confess."
"Excuse me?"
"Admit that you broke into the system. Spare yourself the unpleasantness of an interrogation." An interrogation that Madeline was likely to be the one conducting, in fact, but she refrained from pointing that out to Lisa. "But when you confess, just say that you were trying to find information about your son. Don't mention me or the disk. Don't even bring Jules or Mireille into it. Make it sound like you did everything all by yourself."
Lisa gave a snort of disbelieving laughter. "What, you want me to fall on my sword as a glorious martyr for your cause? I'm sorry, but I'm not exactly that committed."
"What if I give you an incentive?"
"Like what?" Lisa scoffed.
"Like freedom for your son." At Lisa's look of dumbstruck shock, Madeline smiled. "If we succeed in overthrowing Adrian, I can make it happen."
In the dimness of the closet, it took a moment before Madeline saw the tears streaming down Lisa's cheeks.
"All right," said Lisa, her voice choking, "you've got yourself a scapegoat." Then, unexpectedly, she seized Madeline in a hug. Her fingers dug painfully into Madeline's back. "Thank you," she whispered. Finally, she pulled away and glanced at her watch. "Oh, shit. I've got a mission heading out in less than an hour. We'll deal with this when I get back. If they don't drag me straight to Containment, that is."
***
After Lisa left, Madeline returned to her office and worked. She worked on large projects, then small, then trivial. With each task completed, she attacked the next with increased vigor. She worked for several hours straight without stopping even once to think about anything else. Work was calming, relaxing, comforting, even quite pleasant, and as long as she kept her focus trained strictly within its bounds, she didn't have to dwell on those things that were spiraling out of her control.
Like whether Adrian would trace the origin of the security breach. Like whether Lisa would keep her word and take the blame. Like whether Adrian would believe a word Lisa said. Or whether the whole plot was unraveling faster than Madeline could hope to stitch it back together.
There was nothing further Madeline could do at the moment to influence the outcomes of any of the above; hence, it was not a productive use of her time to think about those prospects. Instead, she reviewed reports, completed profiles, studied intelligence briefings and processed files from her inbox into her outbox, until she had cleared her desk of every single scrap of paper that could plausibly be construed as needing her attention.
It was then that the worries began drifting back.
She put her hand on her pocket. The disk was still there -- the one task she couldn't complete, didn't even know how to complete. George had been emphatic about the importance of planting the false financial data. But what could she do? Lisa had failed, and even if her error escaped Adrian's detection, Madeline didn't dare trust her to try again. Should she try to do it herself? Turn to Jules in desperation? Or just tell George that it couldn't be done?
None of those were reasonable options.
A dull ache began to tighten along her neck and temples. She took a deep breath and released it slowly, then she rolled her shoulders to loosen the muscles. One crisis at a time. She could manage if she simply approached things in a rational manner. The more pressing concern was whether Lisa's mistake would expose the entire conspiracy. Madeline logged onto her computer and opened up the listing of current personnel deployment. There were no shifts in resources within Systems. No one in Specops assigned to meet Lisa's mission upon return. Nothing unusual at all.
Perhaps Lisa was worried over nothing. Why, there were probably attempted systems breaches by nosy operatives every single week. Knowing Jules, he'd bury this one -- especially if he realized who had caused it.
She needed to clear her head. She shut down her computer, pushed back her chair, and rose to her feet. A walk. That's what she would do. She could take a walk somewhere. Anywhere. Nowhere. It didn't matter, so long as she could use the physical activity to trick her brain into thinking she had a purpose.
Without planning to, she found herself at the entrance to the cafeteria. That was as good a place as any. There would be tea, which would require steeping and stirring and adding lemon -- another ritual to perform while she did her best to shut her mind off.
A handful of operatives sat at the tables. Others wandered around clutching their trays; it wasn't mealtime, but there was always something available to alleviate the hunger pangs caused by round-the-clock shifts. Today, it appeared to be some sort of noodle soup. A man slurped loudly from his bowl as she passed by his table toward the urn of hot water.
There were two operatives pouring cream and sugar into their coffee at the counter nearby.
"The explosion came out of nowhere," said one of the operatives to the other. Terence, if Madeline remembered his name correctly. She'd just finished writing up his biannual psych evaluation. A kleptomaniac? No. That was someone else. "The mission was over and all the hostiles dead, and everybody thought it was all wrapped up," Terence continued. "It caught the team on egress. A big boom, and the building just went up like fireworks."
Madeline selected a cup from the rack and pulled the spigot on the urn. Steaming water began to fill the cup.
"So did anyone bite it?" asked the other operative.
"Just Lisa," said Terence.
It wasn't until she felt her fingers scald that Madeline realized the cup was overflowing. She dropped it with a smash.
***
"It's too convenient. It can't just be a coincidence." Madeline's grip on Paul's arm was tight. She leaned in and whispered, and he could feel her breath in his ear. "The mission was sabotaged. Someone must have known what she was doing."
Madeline didn't often give in to worry. But Paul could see it now, cracking open the seams of her customary imperturbability. It seeped out through the distracted expression in her eyes, through the rigid stance of her body, and it was beginning to infect him, too -- a cold prickling of dread crept from her hand, up his arm, to his chest.
My God, he didn't need this. She was supposed to be helping him, not giving him more to deal with.
He pulled away from her grasp and began to pace. "You shouldn't have used her."
It sounded like an accusation, and it was intended as such. She reacted accordingly, a look of defensiveness tightening her face.
"Who else was there? No one in Systems is reliable."
"Then you shouldn't have bothered." He'd moved beyond accusation; this was a rebuke. "We don't need to frame Adrian."
"George seems to think so."
He gave her a long, disgusted stare. "I didn't know you held George's opinion in such high esteem."
No more accusations. No more rebukes. He'd thrown down a gauntlet. She couldn't keep pleasing everyone. There would come a time when she'd have to commit to him irrevocably, when she could no longer hide herself in that cloak of ambiguity she so loved to wear, when everyone would finally see exactly where she stood, once and for all. That time might not be now, but it would come. And she'd damned well better understand that. If she couldn't, then he would cut her off. If she assumed that he wouldn't go that far -- if she took her place at his side for granted, counting on the strength of his romantic sentiment -- then she didn't understand him nearly as well as she thought she did. Nor did she understand the nature of their working relationship. Sure, they were a team. A partnership. But not of equals.
It never ceased to surprise him just how cold those brown eyes could look when she was angry.
"I'm simply being cautious," she said. "There's a lot to lose."
So now she'd resorted to explaining herself. That, he didn't mind. While still a form of disagreement, it also meant that she acknowledged -- at least implicitly -- that she owed him an explanation. That was enough for now.
Satisfied, he cracked a smile. "Sometimes, Madeline, you have to stop calculating the odds and just throw the dice."
She said nothing. But she didn't need to. His point was made.
"I make my move tomorrow," he said. "If you can figure out a way to fix this before then, then fix it. If not...." He shrugged in a deliberate show of indifference. "We're going ahead, whether George likes it or not."
************
To go on to Chapter Twenty-Eight, click here.
Previous Chapters
Fandom: La Femme Nikita
Rating: Probably a hard R, for sexual situations and violence.
Pairings: Contains Madeline/Paul (Operations) and Charles Sand/Madeline as well as references to Adrian/George, but this doesn't fit comfortably into "shippy" categories.
Length: The whole thing is 120k-plus words. There are 31 chapters, which are distributed among four "Parts."
Warning: Michael and Nikita do not appear in this story, except as minor references at the very end.
Summary: Set during the 1980's, this story traces the events that ultimately led to the overthrow of Adrian as leader of Section One and to her replacement by Paul Wolfe (Operations).
Lisa cracked her knuckles and began typing at a rapid-fire pace. She executed commands, tried out others, and as she read the lines on the screen she gradually relaxed and shook off her nervousness. On the desk beside her sat a disk containing the files Madeline wanted her to plant. She tried not to look at it too often; every time she did, it just reminded her how utterly insane a mess she'd allowed herself to be dragged into.
Framing Adrian. Jesus. Lisa thought she'd been living on the edge just nosing around classified research projects, but her risk-taking had nothing on Madeline. Madeline was actually going to take the old bitch down. That took one hell of a nerve just to think about, much less dare try. And now Lisa was in the thick of it. Not exactly by choice, either. While Madeline had framed her request as an opportunity for Lisa -- both for personal advancement and a bit of revenge -- Lisa had the distinct impression that "no" wasn't going to be an acceptable answer. She didn't really want to find out what would happen if she did something Madeline found unacceptable, because Madeline had this chilly look, even when she was smiling, that made Lisa feel like the living, breathing definition of "expendable."
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Lisa, you dummy, she thought. She swallowed hard. Let's get this over with.
The main objective was to crack Adrian's password so as to save these files under her login. But it wasn't just a matter of passwords: there was an entire login sequence for the upper echelons of Section's management designed to thwart security breaches. Madeline had supplied Lisa with the sequence for George's login. God only knew how she managed to get that -- probably best not to ask -- and Lisa had been able to use it as a model to emulate what would probably -- probably! -- work for Adrian. One last line of the sequence to go. She typed some more, hit the enter key, and ta da! She was logged in as Adrian.
I am Queen of the Freaking Universe! She felt like pumping her fist, but settled for a whispered "Yes!" instead.
Okay. All she had to do was pop that disk in, download the files to a selection of appropriate locations, backdate them convincingly, clean up her tracks, and log the hell off before she got caught.
So where should she dump these things? She opened a few directories and eliminated them from consideration. "Garbage, garbage, garbage," she muttered to herself as she opened and closed a series of folders and files. Sighing, she scanned their names and tried to guess their contents. "Projects" -- that might be something. Or wait, maybe "Financial." She opened that one and scrolled through the list of files -- and then stopped abruptly.
One of the subdirectories was called "Centre." Centre, as in the source of all those instructions and directives regarding her son. Centre, as in the mysterious entity she'd spent months trying to track down. Finally at her fingertips.
Madeline and her grandiose coup attempt could wait a few goddam minutes. Lisa wasn't going to get this close to the answer and not take a look.
Her skin hot with anticipation, she selected the subdirectory. She pressed the enter key. In an instant, the screen began flashing "ACCESS DENIED. SECURITY VIOLATION."
"Fuck," she said aloud. She struck keys desperately, trying to exit, trying to shut down, but she'd lost control of the terminal. Panicking, she manually powered the computer off.
She sat there, staring ahead but not really seeing anything, for what could have been thirty seconds -- or what could have been an hour. And then she ran to the restroom and began to vomit.
***
There wasn't a knock or even a discernable noise, but Madeline nevertheless sensed a presence hovering behind her. She swung around in her chair to look. Lisa stood in the doorway to the office. Her face was pinched and pale.
The last time Madeline remembered seeing someone with an expression quite like that was right after an operative cut the wrong wire trying to defuse a bomb during Madeline's first year at Section One. Madeline managed to dive behind a wall for cover; the operative who cut the wire, however, became human shrapnel seconds later. Looking at Lisa, Madeline felt a rising urge to find another wall to crouch behind.
Lisa opened her mouth to speak, so Madeline held up a warning hand. She stood, grasped Lisa by the arm, and walked her briskly out of the office and down the corridor. There was a utility closet full of ventilation equipment around the corner. It was cramped and noisy, but it was also free of surveillance, so it would do.
Inside the closet, they could barely stand without touching. The physical proximity rendered Lisa's anxiety palpable, like a noxious miasma of fear. As if to ward it off, Madeline crossed her arms tightly and leaned back against the door. It vibrated with the hum of the nearby equipment.
"What's wrong?"
"I set off some sort of alarm." Even at a whisper, Lisa's voice nearly cracked. "The system locked me out."
"What kind of alarm?"
"How the hell should I know? It was flashing something about a security breach and everything just froze." Lisa covered her face with her hands. "I am so fucking dead."
What in God's name had Lisa done? From somewhere in the pit of Madeline's stomach, an eruption of fury seared her entire body. She had to clench her teeth to control it.
"I thought," she said, enunciating slowly -- glacially -- because if she allowed her rage to take over, she might just tear Lisa to pieces, "that you knew the system inside and out."
"I do! But I was sticking my nose into places I'd never gone before. I wasn't in the regular network. I was looking around for someplace good to plant the files."
"So you didn't plant them yet?"
"No. I didn't get the chance to." Lisa closed her eyes, and her shoulders slumped. "God, I'm so sorry."
Madeline unclenched her muscles, and the fury abated. If there was no evidence of what Lisa was doing, then there was nothing to implicate Madeline. Assuming Lisa could keep her mouth shut, at least.
"Do you have the disk?" Madeline asked.
"Yeah."
"Give it back to me."
Lisa complied, and Madeline slipped it into her jacket pocket.
"Now," said Madeline, "if Adrian tracks you down as the source of the breach -- and we don't know that she will -- I want you to confess."
"Excuse me?"
"Admit that you broke into the system. Spare yourself the unpleasantness of an interrogation." An interrogation that Madeline was likely to be the one conducting, in fact, but she refrained from pointing that out to Lisa. "But when you confess, just say that you were trying to find information about your son. Don't mention me or the disk. Don't even bring Jules or Mireille into it. Make it sound like you did everything all by yourself."
Lisa gave a snort of disbelieving laughter. "What, you want me to fall on my sword as a glorious martyr for your cause? I'm sorry, but I'm not exactly that committed."
"What if I give you an incentive?"
"Like what?" Lisa scoffed.
"Like freedom for your son." At Lisa's look of dumbstruck shock, Madeline smiled. "If we succeed in overthrowing Adrian, I can make it happen."
In the dimness of the closet, it took a moment before Madeline saw the tears streaming down Lisa's cheeks.
"All right," said Lisa, her voice choking, "you've got yourself a scapegoat." Then, unexpectedly, she seized Madeline in a hug. Her fingers dug painfully into Madeline's back. "Thank you," she whispered. Finally, she pulled away and glanced at her watch. "Oh, shit. I've got a mission heading out in less than an hour. We'll deal with this when I get back. If they don't drag me straight to Containment, that is."
***
After Lisa left, Madeline returned to her office and worked. She worked on large projects, then small, then trivial. With each task completed, she attacked the next with increased vigor. She worked for several hours straight without stopping even once to think about anything else. Work was calming, relaxing, comforting, even quite pleasant, and as long as she kept her focus trained strictly within its bounds, she didn't have to dwell on those things that were spiraling out of her control.
Like whether Adrian would trace the origin of the security breach. Like whether Lisa would keep her word and take the blame. Like whether Adrian would believe a word Lisa said. Or whether the whole plot was unraveling faster than Madeline could hope to stitch it back together.
There was nothing further Madeline could do at the moment to influence the outcomes of any of the above; hence, it was not a productive use of her time to think about those prospects. Instead, she reviewed reports, completed profiles, studied intelligence briefings and processed files from her inbox into her outbox, until she had cleared her desk of every single scrap of paper that could plausibly be construed as needing her attention.
It was then that the worries began drifting back.
She put her hand on her pocket. The disk was still there -- the one task she couldn't complete, didn't even know how to complete. George had been emphatic about the importance of planting the false financial data. But what could she do? Lisa had failed, and even if her error escaped Adrian's detection, Madeline didn't dare trust her to try again. Should she try to do it herself? Turn to Jules in desperation? Or just tell George that it couldn't be done?
None of those were reasonable options.
A dull ache began to tighten along her neck and temples. She took a deep breath and released it slowly, then she rolled her shoulders to loosen the muscles. One crisis at a time. She could manage if she simply approached things in a rational manner. The more pressing concern was whether Lisa's mistake would expose the entire conspiracy. Madeline logged onto her computer and opened up the listing of current personnel deployment. There were no shifts in resources within Systems. No one in Specops assigned to meet Lisa's mission upon return. Nothing unusual at all.
Perhaps Lisa was worried over nothing. Why, there were probably attempted systems breaches by nosy operatives every single week. Knowing Jules, he'd bury this one -- especially if he realized who had caused it.
She needed to clear her head. She shut down her computer, pushed back her chair, and rose to her feet. A walk. That's what she would do. She could take a walk somewhere. Anywhere. Nowhere. It didn't matter, so long as she could use the physical activity to trick her brain into thinking she had a purpose.
Without planning to, she found herself at the entrance to the cafeteria. That was as good a place as any. There would be tea, which would require steeping and stirring and adding lemon -- another ritual to perform while she did her best to shut her mind off.
A handful of operatives sat at the tables. Others wandered around clutching their trays; it wasn't mealtime, but there was always something available to alleviate the hunger pangs caused by round-the-clock shifts. Today, it appeared to be some sort of noodle soup. A man slurped loudly from his bowl as she passed by his table toward the urn of hot water.
There were two operatives pouring cream and sugar into their coffee at the counter nearby.
"The explosion came out of nowhere," said one of the operatives to the other. Terence, if Madeline remembered his name correctly. She'd just finished writing up his biannual psych evaluation. A kleptomaniac? No. That was someone else. "The mission was over and all the hostiles dead, and everybody thought it was all wrapped up," Terence continued. "It caught the team on egress. A big boom, and the building just went up like fireworks."
Madeline selected a cup from the rack and pulled the spigot on the urn. Steaming water began to fill the cup.
"So did anyone bite it?" asked the other operative.
"Just Lisa," said Terence.
It wasn't until she felt her fingers scald that Madeline realized the cup was overflowing. She dropped it with a smash.
***
"It's too convenient. It can't just be a coincidence." Madeline's grip on Paul's arm was tight. She leaned in and whispered, and he could feel her breath in his ear. "The mission was sabotaged. Someone must have known what she was doing."
Madeline didn't often give in to worry. But Paul could see it now, cracking open the seams of her customary imperturbability. It seeped out through the distracted expression in her eyes, through the rigid stance of her body, and it was beginning to infect him, too -- a cold prickling of dread crept from her hand, up his arm, to his chest.
My God, he didn't need this. She was supposed to be helping him, not giving him more to deal with.
He pulled away from her grasp and began to pace. "You shouldn't have used her."
It sounded like an accusation, and it was intended as such. She reacted accordingly, a look of defensiveness tightening her face.
"Who else was there? No one in Systems is reliable."
"Then you shouldn't have bothered." He'd moved beyond accusation; this was a rebuke. "We don't need to frame Adrian."
"George seems to think so."
He gave her a long, disgusted stare. "I didn't know you held George's opinion in such high esteem."
No more accusations. No more rebukes. He'd thrown down a gauntlet. She couldn't keep pleasing everyone. There would come a time when she'd have to commit to him irrevocably, when she could no longer hide herself in that cloak of ambiguity she so loved to wear, when everyone would finally see exactly where she stood, once and for all. That time might not be now, but it would come. And she'd damned well better understand that. If she couldn't, then he would cut her off. If she assumed that he wouldn't go that far -- if she took her place at his side for granted, counting on the strength of his romantic sentiment -- then she didn't understand him nearly as well as she thought she did. Nor did she understand the nature of their working relationship. Sure, they were a team. A partnership. But not of equals.
It never ceased to surprise him just how cold those brown eyes could look when she was angry.
"I'm simply being cautious," she said. "There's a lot to lose."
So now she'd resorted to explaining herself. That, he didn't mind. While still a form of disagreement, it also meant that she acknowledged -- at least implicitly -- that she owed him an explanation. That was enough for now.
Satisfied, he cracked a smile. "Sometimes, Madeline, you have to stop calculating the odds and just throw the dice."
She said nothing. But she didn't need to. His point was made.
"I make my move tomorrow," he said. "If you can figure out a way to fix this before then, then fix it. If not...." He shrugged in a deliberate show of indifference. "We're going ahead, whether George likes it or not."
************
To go on to Chapter Twenty-Eight, click here.