“This isn’t hardball. Not even close. I’m not quaking in my boots, boy. In fact, I find you rather amusing.”
“You’ve got ten seconds. One.”
“She cannot come to the phone.”
“Take the phone to her.”
“I do not stutter, Nick. When I said she was indisposed, I meant it.”
“If she has one fucking scratch—”
“You think I’m torturing her? Well…” I laugh for a third time. It’s bad form and it’s a wholly inappropriate moment, but I can’t seem to stop it. “She’s pretty fucked right now. But not the way you think. So this little I’m-OK-you’re-OK chat you wanna have won’t be possible. And if you argue with me, I’ll just hang up and proceed without your input, how’s that?”
“What. The fuck. Have you done?”
“I need information. I need to know if you truly are a special kind of scumbag liar. I mean, I’ve seen the clues. You’re on the board, right? You post on there? You and Wendy have a little code going, maybe? Yeah. I’ve seen it. So while I am fucking astonished that you would put Sasha through the kind of pain most people don’t ever recover from, I am not entirely surprised that you really are that special kind of scumbag liar.”
He stays quiet. Which means he’s plotting something.
“Nothing to say to that?”
A loooong sigh from Nick Tate.
“So.” I sigh too. “Wendy has been very helpful in figuring out what the actual fuck is going on here. And here’s something that might surprise you, or perhaps make you a little sick—do you know who gave me her name?” Again, I laugh. Stop it, Merc. It’s just wrong at this point.
“I’m gonna ask one more time. Where is she and what have you done to her?”
“Sasha,” I whisper, ignoring his question. “Sasha gave me her name, Nick. Kinda karmic, right? I mean… you trick her into killing—who the fuck was that guy, anyway?”
“My brother.”
“Your—wait, wait, wait. Hold the fuck up. You have a twin brother as well as a twin sister? You guys were triplets? Oh, fuck. You Company people are so… gross.”
He pauses. Three whole seconds of pause from the legendary Nick Tate. Then he says, “You remember Vincent, right?”
“Vincent. What a pussy. I can’t believe he ran on the beach that night.”
“He didn’t run, he swam. Right to the fucking superyacht, in fact. Right into the hands of Santos himself. That’s the guy Sasha killed that day out in Kansas. Santos. The Saint. That’s what they called him down in the slums of San Pedro Sula. Vincent didn’t run away. Vincent got himself tangled up in a mess that hasn’t even ended yet.”
“What is your point? No one gives a single fuck about Vincent Fenici.”
“My point is that he was James’ twin, right? One of them was sent into the dark world of Company assassins, the other into the hands of the elite to be groomed for bigger and better things. You do realize that’s how this world works, right? I mean, it’s common knowledge in the Company, but you never were Company, were you, Merc?”
I scoff again. “What the hell is that? Are you trying to make me feel inferior because I don’t have the blood of murderous assholes going back a thousand years running through my veins the way you do? Are you for real right now?”
“No. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m explaining the ways of the world. You, as badass as you are, are no one in this world, Merc. And I do mean that literally and I do not mean it as an insult. I simply mean that you don’t know what you don’t know. Nothing you see around you is real. TV isn’t real. And as much as people think they understand that they are watching actors, and sets, and it’s all fake—they still don’t get it. It just doesn’t sink in that the whole world has been staged. It has a director, it has acting coaches, it has a script, and it has a little something called ‘central casting.’ I mean, come on. Almost no one on this planet has the resolve to bootstrap their way up in any kind of business—Hollywood, corporate America, global whatever… none of it is real. It’s a setup, Merc. The entire world is nothing but a greenscreen playing in the background.”
I kinda knew this. I mean, I’ve seen shit. I’m not Company. Not even a lowlife Company worker, let alone royalty the way Nick is. But I’ve been deep inside. I knew the whole world was fake. I knew the Company was pulling strings and that’s why I keep my family well away from everything whenever I can.
But it was a general sense of fake. Like… OK. That fucking Bieber kid? Is this a joke? Where the hell did he come from, am I right? Sell-out concerts, screaming tweens, magazine covers and a world tour? What the hell is happening? And look at that asshole now. Fucking mess is what he is. There’s a whole list of child stars like that.