Brotherly Love

"Would you mind stepping outside for a few minutes?" I didn't wait for his answer. "Now before you say anything, let me tell you how this site will work. I am responsible for the over-all running of this project, not Henry, so you can forget about any arrangements you have with him. If you have any problems on site, you will raise them with George in the first instance. He will sort the matter out if possible, if not he will report to me. Years ago my ex-wife asked me why I was doing all of those stupid courses, and I told her that there would be moments when they would come in handy. This happens to be one such moment. As you are aware I am a qualified Building Inspector, and my job here is to ensure that all matters relating to the specifications are adhered to. I am also a qualified Occ. Health and Safety Inspector, and as such I have to ensure that all issues concerned with OH&S are complied with. If you have any problems with any of the individual contractors on this site, you are to bring them, firstly to George's notice and, if they cannot be resolved at that level, to me. When this project is completed, if it is brought in ahead of schedule, there will be production bonuses all round, including you. If, however, there are any malicious industrial actions brought by you, or any other union organiser, you can not only kiss those bonuses good-bye, but punitive legal action will be brought against the union concerned. If you're unsure what that means, it is a claim against the union concerned to recover all lost time and, if that involves the implementation of time penalties on the contract, the cost of those as well. Do I make myself clear?" I gave him no time to answer. "We will run this site in a completely professional manner, and bring this project in ahead of schedule. As a result we'll all be happy little vegemites. Any problems, and life will become very miserable for the culprit. I look forward to working closely with you."

For once in his life Hamish was at a loss for words, for fully thirty seconds. "I didn't know that you would be running this project."

"I find that hard to believe since I saw you talking to my wonderful brother over the other side of the site. Now, you should go back to him and inform him that your hands are tied on this site." He left.

"You came in hot and strong with him, I've never seen him so meek and mild." George said.

"I believe in being up-front with guys like him. He now knows where we both stand, and there will be no surprises down the track, I hope."

"How are we going to pay bonuses?" Sasha asked as we drove from the site and headed back to the office.

"I have a rabbit up my sleeve. I'll explain when we get back to the office."

"Okay, what have you got planned?" She was sitting on my desk, her beautiful thighs enticingly close to my hand.

"You know how I went to see the suppliers the other day?" My hand had found her thigh, not that it was hiding from it. I cast a quick look around to see if anyone was interested in us, the other staff couldn't care less.

"Yes." Her thighs opened just a little.

"Well, I cut a deal with them. They were all caught out when the industry crashed and were left with a huge inventory that they couldn't shift in a hurry, and their creditors calling out for payment. So I agreed to buy all the gear that we'd need at a premium. They get rid of the stuff that they couldn't shift, and the banks off their backs, and I got it cheaper than last years prices, much cheaper." I was finding it extremely difficult to keep my mind on what I was saying.

"And here I was thinking that Henry had the brains in the family." Her eyes were closed as my fingers brushed her panties, her moist panties.

"Not a word of this to anyone. When the invoices begin to come in you'll notice that they will be for this year's prices. I want him to think that I am rapidly getting deeper into the red with no chance of saving the day. What will happen is that there will be separate accounts for this project, Henry's and ours. Ours will be kept in a safe place where he can't find them. I want to see his face when he realises that he has been shafted big time. Christ Sasha, it is getting increasingly difficult to keep my hands off you."

"I'm having a hard time stopping myself from ravishing you tight here on your desk. I think that we should give ourselves an early mark and go home to your place, it's closer than mine."

"We'd better leave separately, we don't want people talking now, do we?"

"Heaven forbid that a rumour should start concerning us." She saw the look on my face. "Oh alright, I'll go first, I'll take some files with me to make it look as if I'm taking work home with me." She grabbed a copy of the engineers specs and left.

I waited a respectable time before leaving myself. "If anyone should call looking for me, take a message and I'll contact them in the morning." I told the receptionist. "I have an appointment at . . ." I looked at my watch. "Shit, in ten minutes. Gotta scramble, see you."

I wasn't lying, I did have an appointment, one with a beautiful, sexy, and very sensual young woman called Sasha, who had just enough time to change into something that made her look even more sensual before I arrived home. I silently thanked myself for giving her a key. It was a little black see-through number that, even if I couldn't see through it, wouldn't have hidden anything, The sheer black panties were just as ineffective as a cover-up, but very effective in other ways. She chuckled to herself, in that deep throaty way that I found so sexy, as I swept her off her feet and carried her to our bed.

Minutes, or was it hours later, we paused long enough to replenish our energy stocks. "You are a wicked woman." I whispered to her after the resumption of our lovemaking. "I mean that in a positive way, You have the power to take my mind completely off the misery that has been my life to date, and to focus on what I have to do to make you happy for the next hundred years."

"In a hundred years all that we'll be able to do is to sit in our rocking chairs and think back to moments like this and wish that we had the stamina to still do it."

"Yeah, but being able to think about it will be enough to make us smile. We can be happy with our memories."

"Which dress?" She stood in the doorway as I worked on breakfast, a dress in each hand, two of the several that took up some space in my closet. I pointed the butter knife at the one in her left hand. "Okay." She slipped it on. "Do me up." I wiped my hands and pulled the zip up and she went back to the bedroom to finish dressing. Seeing her next to naked when I got home last night was a turn-on, but her appearance as she walked into the kitchen ran a close run second. It was no wonder that site personnel creamed their jeans whenever we visited a site.

"You look almost indecent, you know that, don't you?"

"For you I'm indecent, for anyone else I'm out of reach." She kissed me to reinforce that statement.

"We'd better stop this or we'll never get to work on time. I'm expecting an order to appear before our lord and master as soon as we get in."

"Why would he do that?"

"Hamish would have gone back to him yesterday and told him that I had left them no wriggle room for industrial turmoil. Henry is counting on it."

"You are going to have to sit down with me and tell me what you know about Henry and his devious methods, and I'll tell you what I know."

"While I'm in with him this morning, could you clear the decks for the rest of the morning and we'll compare notes about him."

"This morning might not be long enough."

We only just managed to get to work on time and I had no sooner sat down when the phone rang. "Guess what?"

"The man has requested my immediate presence in his office. Tell Janice that I'm on my way."

"It isn't her on the line, it's him. Please don't get angry with him."

"I'm beyond angry, don't worry, I won't deck him or yell at him. Deep breath, keep calm, deep breath, keep calm."

"Go. Get out of here and find out what he wants." I went.

Henry was waiting for me, no keeping me waiting this morning. "What the hell are you trying to pull here?"

"I am just doing the job for which you pay me, nothing more, nothing less. You have asked me to bring this job in on schedule and under budget, and I am giving it my best shot, which, considering I have my hands tied behind my back is near as damn it to impossible."

"What do you mean?"

"The contract that you negotiated is like a millstone around my neck. Because we are locked in to last year's price schedule for materials, we are between five and ten percent behind the eight ball before we even start. There have been no allowances for any holdups, no allowances for inclement weather, or industrial actions. My job here is that close to impossible that I get the feeling that you want me to fail. If I didn't know better I would say that this is your attempt to prove to Robyn that you really are better than me. She isn't having doubts, is she?" His expression confirmed it. The one thing that I have known about him for some time now, is his inability to maintain that initial good impression he makes. His bullshit wears off over time, hence the two and a half ex-wives, and the lover losing interest. Stiff shit I say, my life is suddenly looking good in comparison. I left him still thinking about what I'd said, and before he remembered what he was going to say to me.

An idea was galloping through my head as I walked back to my office. Sasha handed me a coffee as I walked past her and followed me in. "Well, how did it go?"

"First things first. The contract for this project that he has given me, I don't think that it is the real one. I think this is one that he has cobbled together to scuttle me, and when I go down he will lose it and produce the real one, the one that is priced at today's prices and has allowances for inclement weather and industrial disputes. It will also have a contract price considerably higher than that shown on this one, one big enough to cover the kick-backs that he has promised the Department Head who has approved this. He has a clause in it that allows him contingency funding to cover industrial disputes as long as he can show that he was in no way responsible for them. The contractors will of course be responsible, and he will step in and broker a settlement and come out of it as some sort of hero. Can you find me the original contract documents?"

"I can try. What has started this line of thought?"

"I remember that when he first took over this company, Father had told him that the one thing that he should ensure was to maintain the status of 'Designated Contractor' for government contracts. 'This is a license to print money' he was told, 'lose that and you'll struggle. Paying off the right people is essential, but it has to be hidden, this is your priority, the contracts will take care of themselves.' I had forgotten about that conversation until now. It seems as if my talk with Hamish yesterday may have thrown a cat amongst the pigeons, by offering him a bonus if the project came in on time I had effectively cut off his access to kickbacks from Henry."

"But how can we do anything about it without hurting the company and ourselves?"

"I don't know, I'll need to think this through. First off, if we can get a copy of that contract it will give us an idea of what we're dealing with."

"I'll get right on it." She went back to her desk and picked up the phone. While she talked she cranked up her computer, and whoever she was talking to was leading her through a menu that saw her accessing files that I had never seen before, I have never dealt with PDF files before. With a smile on her face she came back in with several sheets that she had taken from her printer, the original contract documents, signed, sealed and delivered by Henry and James Robinson, the CEO of the department that controlled Public Works. The bottom line was stratospheric compared to figures that I had been given to work with, the contingency budget was almost as big as I had been given. Someone, more than some one was getting very rich from all of this, and my decision was whether or not to try and stop it. If I was successful it would be the demise of the company. If I didn't, could I still work for Henry knowing what he was doing and costing the tax-payer? The short answer to that is 'no'. So, whatever I may do, it will almost surely mean me being out of a job yet again.

Sasha saw me deflate before her very eyes. "What is it?"

"How would you feel, being out of a job?"

"That bad huh?"

"Yes, it's that bad, it doesn't matter which way I jump, I'll end up in a pile of shit."

"What can I do to help?"

"I need to find a way to kill off Henry's cash cow without involving the company. Any bright ideas?"

"Firstly, I don't care much what you do, if it means that you and I are without a job because of this, then I would rather be out of work with you than in work without you, so whatever you are going to do, I am in it with you. The next thing is to see if there is some way that we can find out if this is a corporate fraud or one of Henry's own personal fiddles, and I think I know how I can manage that, It will mean bringing someone in on this, someone that I know that I can trust not to spill his guts, but who, with the proper inducements, and I don't mean money, will be willing to do things that might not be legal, in fact I know that they're not."

"Who is this person?"

"My IT friend who gained me access to Henry's personal computer."

"Let's do what we have to. Once we get the information we can then make an decision as to how we react."

"You know Rob, darling Rob, I have this enormous sense of relief. As time went by I was becoming more and more depressed at having to report back to Henry on what you were doing so that he could undermine you. In the beginning I was loyal to him because he told me that he thought that you were working against him. because your wife had left you for him and you were blaming him for it. He told me that you were entirely to blame for her leaving you, but couldn't see it, and that he only gave you this job out of a sense of loyalty. I have come to realise that he has some weird concept of loyalty. I feel like the rat that left the sinking ship. I'm standing on the pier, not giving a shit about the captain of the ship but feeling some remorse for the passengers. Enough of this deep and meaningful crap, we have work to do."

"Okay, we need to get access to his banking records to see if we can establish a link between him and the Department head who makes the project decisions. I have a feeling that the money won't be going into his normal account, so we have to look for a hidden account, he may even be using Robyn to channel his funds into payments to the Departmental head, Hamish, and probably an offshore tax haven."

"If he has transferred funds electronically we could try to find a link between funds going in and out of his accounts, and deposits into the other accounts."

"Do you think that your friend can come up with that information?"

"If he can't then no-one can."

"We can't do this here, all computer traffic goes through the company's server. Our computers are hooked up to the company's network, so he could quite easily check up on what we are doing." I said. "I think that we should buy us a laptop that is separate from this network and work from home."

"When you say home, do you mean your place or mine?"

"How would you feel about it being mine?"

"How would I feel?" She came to me and put her arms around my neck and pulled my face to hers. The kiss lasted until there was a knock on my door. She took her lips away and we turned to face Janice.

"I hate to break up this tender moment, but Henry wants to see you Sasha. I tried buzzing you but you didn't answer, and now I can see why."

"What does he want, do you have any idea?" Sasha asked.

"No, but it doesn't sound good."

Sasha followed Janice to Henry's office. "What the fuck do you think that you're doing?" Henry was angry.

"What do you mean?"

"Don't come the innocent with me young lady, you are supposed to be feeding him wrong information so that he fucks up, but what are you doing? I haven't heard from you in over a week and now he's gone and screwed up my arrangement with the unions."

"What arrangement? If I'm to be effective I need to know what you are doing so that I can either steer him away from interfering or arrange for him to do something to exacerbate the situation. I'm not a mind reader, I don't know what your plans are other than to make him look bad. Give me something to work with here, or get someone else." She was going out on a limb here, but by taking the initiative she has lessened the chances of Henry replacing her, she hoped.

"I've noticed you getting a little friendly with him, what's the story there? You are fucking him, aren't you?"

"Yes. I felt that I should not repulse his advances if and when he made them, it would look strange if I did, so I'm going with the flow and getting closer to him, and winning his confidence, so that he will never suspect me when the shit hits the fan." Henry was not used to women talking like this to him and he didn't know how to handle it, if he pushed too hard she could have him up for harassment.

"I can't tell you everything that is going down. What I can tell you is that I have arranged it so that he fucks up big time on this project. I need you to keep an eye on him so that he doesn't twig to it."

"But if he fucks up, won't that affect the company?"

"No, and this is the clever bit, I have someone on stand-by ready to jump in and save the day, at the same time laying the blame for the fuck up solely at his feet. He will never worm out of having to carry the responsibility, and he'll never be able to work in this industry ever again. Then let's see his wife want to go back to him."

"So that's what this is all about? His wife is thinking of ditching you and going back to him."

"The bitch keeps telling me that she should never have left him."

"Then why doesn't she just leave?"

"I can't have that, I have ways of stopping her and she knows that. She can never leave me, but she can suffer for wanting to."

"Remind me never to get on your wrong side."

"You would do well to remember that, now get back to work and I want results."

"What did he want?" I asked her when she returned.

"If you hadn't told me what you thought he was going to do I would have said that you wouldn't believe me if I told you. You know your brother very well, and yes, he wants you to fuck up, and he has someone on stand-by to save the day and the company, and do you know why he's doing this? Knowing you I think that you've already worked that out, but let me see if you have."

"Robyn is giving him a hard time and telling him that she should never have left me and now he's jealous as hell of me and wants to crucify me so that he can hang on to her."

"Close with cigar. You did however leave out the bit about him needing her for some reason, and I think that you were also close to the mark when you suggested that he was using her to transfer funds."

"So, how can we prove it?"

"I'll talk to my mate eBola and see what he can come up with."

"eBola? Obviously a pseudonym, but how did he come up with that?"

"The 'E' part refers to electronic, and he was rather taken by the 'Plague' name given to the computer hacker in the Millennium trilogy, you know, 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' etc., so he took the name of a real virus and turn it into an E virus. Thankfully he has a little better hygiene than that character."

"So, where do we start?"

"I think with Robyn. I'll get him to hack into her bank accounts and look for large unexplained payments going in and out. If he can decode the electronic account details we should be able to find the origins and destination of those transactions."