Dreams in the Tower Part 1 Read Online Free Page B

think of (from where, he wasn’t sure). The little door on the unit opened to reveal two glasses, each containing two fingers of clear brown liquid covering several perfect cubes of ice, and an open bottle of some fancy whiskey with flamboyant cursive on the label. Mike drained one of the glasses as he was setting the other across the desk from him. He refilled his own glass just as the door to his office slid open.
    “Mike,” Leutz said as she crossed the room hurriedly with those impossibly long strides of hers. “I would have knocked, but your secretary said to come on in.” She took the seat Mike offered her across the desk. “For me?” Without waiting for a reply, she quaffed the whiskey and poured herself a second glass. Mike drained his own glass again and let her fill it for him.
    “Look, Monika,” he began, letting the warmth of the whiskey drive on what he had been anxiously preparing for all morning, “you need to clear up a few things before you begin. What’s going on here? Why do I get in this morning to find most of the building empty? And this me ssage about indefinite leave…” He trailed off, sensing her hard stare. She had a way of making him forget what he wanted to say. Why does this woman scare me so much?
    About a year or two shy of forty, Leutz was tall and robust. She kept her dark hair in a close pixie cut and plastered it neatly against her head in a perfect mold the same way every day. Today, like most days, she wore a pair of slacks and a matching blouse—both dark gray and modest. As always, her cold blue eyes stared out from behind thin, rectangular smart glasses. Usually her pupils darted back and forth as she did things on the lens screens no one else could see, but just now her gaze was fixed intently on Mike, somehow warning him off and beckoning him closer all at once.
    “You’re to the point this morning,” she observed. “I would be angry at you for speaking to me like that, but it so happens that’s exactly what I was here to talk to you about.”
    Now thoroughly embarrassed by his rashness, Mike said, “I’m sorry, I… I didn’t know.” He sipped from his third glass of whiskey and set it back on his desk, nervously drumming his fingers on the cool, wet glass. “So, uh, please, go on.”
    She stared at him for a lingering moment then looked at her own glass and said, “You’ve been in Mr. Silvan’s corporate family for a while—since college, right? I thought so. Nearly twenty-five twenty years then. And last year you finally broke through the grind and landed a senior management position at headquarters.” Her eyes began fidgeting, and Mike wondered what she was looking at on her lenses. “Through this long, distinguished tenure,” she said with a trace of boredom, “you’ve certainly piqued the attention of the higher-ups—no need to worry, it’s a good thing.” She sipped from her glass. “ Loyalty , Mike, that’s a thing few have, truly, and a thing everyone wants, a thing everyone needs. You have proven your loyalty, which is why you are one of the few people left in the building right now.”
    She paused as if expecting a response, but Mike didn’t have anything to say to that. I nstead he fiddled with the empty glass, the melting ice cubes clinking as the glass turned in his hand.
    “The simple truth is,” Leutz continued, “you’ve earned the right to know; Silvan and I agree on that. Do you want to know what’s going on here, Mike?”
    “Yes,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat. “Yes.”
    “I’m sure you’ve wondered,” she said, “about the major acquisitions Silte Corporation has been making these last, oh, five years or so. Maybe you’ve even realized Silte now owns sixty percent of the US communications industry, sixty-five percent of marketing, eighty percent of media and entertainment, forty of banking; the list goes on. What you may not realize is we now either own or are unofficially controlling more than three