Shoot First(Stone Barrington #45)(20)

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FRED CLEARED their dishes, and Stone poured them both a cognac, then he leaned back in his chair and regarded her. “Why do I get the feeling that I haven’t heard the whole story about you and Gino Bellini?”

“Well,” she said, “I guess that’s because I haven’t told you the whole story.”

“If I’m going to stop him from ruining your business and killing you, I think I should know everything.”

Meg sighed. “I suppose it would be ungrateful of me not to tell you about it.”

“Worse, it could be dangerous.”

“All right,” she said. “I guess it’s time, and I’ve had just enough to drink.”





15




Meg took another swig of her brandy, and, her tongue thus loosened, she began.

“Gino and I met at Stanford and had what, for that time, would pass as a torrid affair. He was more attractive then—less bullish-looking, slender, and at times, quite funny.

“He got me through my coding courses, being something of a prodigy, where I was klutzy. I had good ideas for what the software should do, but I was not good at telling it how. Gino sort of came behind me with a broom and a dustpan and made my ideas work. We were a good team, two sides of the same coin.

“I also took a lot of business courses, and I was way ahead of him in that regard. I planned for several years to do a start-up, and when I was getting ready I finally told him about it. He went nuts, accusing me of shutting him out of the profits that should come from his work. I took a hard line. I told him I would give him five percent of the company and he could buy another five percent, and that if he objected to that he could pay for the whole ten percent. He borrowed money to scrape up the investment. What I didn’t know was that he borrowed it from a guy who was a loan shark.

“By the time we got the company operating smoothly, I had to loan Gino the money to pay off his lender, and his investment ended up costing him twice what it should have. I saw that his debt to me was paid from the proceeds of the sale, and I made sure that in the transaction, he didn’t get to keep any of his stock, whereas I hung onto forty-five percent of mine.

“By the time of the sale I had managed to shunt him aside from the self-driving car to another product with much less promise. After the sale, my new partners insisted I drop development on that product, and Gino was just sitting at a desk, doing not much of anything. I hadn’t cheated him, but I hadn’t been very kind to him, either. Our affair had ended a couple of years before, and he had married Veronica, a very sharp cookie who brought out the worst in him. She’s certainly a partner, or even a moving force, in any criminality he’s involved in.

“Finally, I made it impossible for him not to resign, and he did. What I didn’t know was that he took copies of all the software on the car project, and although I had changed all the passwords, he managed to hack into our system and steal them.”

Stone interrupted: “That’s when you should have called the police.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Meg replied. “Not because I didn’t want to or didn’t have the guts, but because I was in hot negotiations to sell the company. The kind of news we would have made in Silicon Valley would have blown that for me, and I didn’t have the development money to continue the project without a sale. So I didn’t call in the authorities, and my lawyers tell me it’s too late now, that Gino could make a case for at least partial ownership of the software, thus having the right to access it. Now I’m stuck with Gino lying in wait around every corner, metaphorically speaking.”

“Not entirely metaphorically,” Stone said. “He’s already made two attempts on your life, and the last one came very close to success. If Dino hadn’t had the presence of mind to interfere, and the weapon, you and I would both be food for the gulls on Loggerhead Key.”

“That was very timely of Dino,” Meg agreed.

“And not for the first time,” Stone said. “He and I have a history of his pulling my fat from the fire, not to mention my ass.”

“That’s a good friend to have,” Meg said. “I wish I had one like him.”

“Stick around,” Stone replied.



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GINO SAT at his computer in his and Veronica’s hotel suite. “Meg is in New York,” he said, pointing at his screen.

“Where?” Veronica asked, looking over his shoulder. “A hotel?”

“Let me try Google World,” Gino said, then watched as the satellite shot zoomed in on the signal from Meg’s cell phone. “I can’t figure out what this is,” he said. “It’s not marked as a hotel—it must be a house, a town house.”

“Well, after we’ve looked at apartments today, let’s see if we can find it. The desk just called—the car is waiting for us downstairs.”

Gino grabbed his jacket. “Then let’s go find a place to live.



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IT WAS a condo on Park Avenue, in a new building. Gino had steered the agent away from a co-op, since the board would do a background check and demand tax returns, an area where his background was spotty.