James Lawson could seriously do without having dinner with the French President but it had been planned some months earlier and Lawson was very keen to get his hands on a major French utility company. The deal was worth billions and the payback in synergies within his own organizations was being measured in months. It really was too great an opportunity to miss.
He had spent the last hour calming down John Mellon. The death of the President was as great a shock to the Horsemen as to everyone else and had certainly made their plan almost impossible. Russell would, as Mellon put it, prefer to have a tree hugging leftie lesbian than him as a running mate in the coming election. Mellon had been assured of his place as President as long as everything had run to plan. This was definitely not to plan. A conference call had been arranged with his counterparts and all five came on line as planned. He wondered at the technology. He was flying almost 600 mph and 40,000 feet in the air but could still video conference, it was beyond him.
“How’s the new jet, James?” asked Koch.
“Very nice, glad I went for the 650, just a little more comfortable and certainly faster than the 550.”
Harkness did not rise to the bait. He had just ordered a Gulfstream 550 himself.
“Gentlemen, what the hell are we going to do?” Mellon was in no mood for the one-up-manship bullshit.
“He obviously outflanked us. I’ll give him that,” offered Hathaway.
“Personally, I didn’t think he had the balls,” said Koch who knew him best.
“I don’t think he has,” suggested Lawson, the first to put any doubt as to Russell’s guilt on the table.
“You don’t think he did it?” asked a surprised Harkness.
“I know he didn’t do it. There is no way Andrew Russell grew enough balls to take down a sitting president. Jesus, he almost wet himself over the Baker fiasco.”
Silence followed as each of the attendees considered the viewpoint. It was Mellon who broke the silence.
“That, my dear friend, is exactly what we need to find out. While Russell has someone like that at his side, we’ll be sidelined.”
“Sidelined!” exclaimed Koch angrily.
“Absolutely.” Lawson was not one of the world’s richest businessmen for no reason. He read people, understood how their thought processes worked and used it to his advantage. “Trust me, you put a call into his office and I guarantee you the little shit will be too busy to see you.”
“Never.”
“We’ll see but anyway once we find out who did it, we need to take them down and we’ll get our pawn back.”
“Now gentlemen, if you don’t mind, I need to grab some shut-eye before I land. Good evening.”
Half an hour later, Ben Meir was reading through the transcript of the videoconference. He had been keeping an eye on the Horsemen for some time and had his comms team keep a close eye on anything they got up to, particularly as a group. Ben knew the whole sordid detail of their plan to make Mellon VP and ultimately President. He of course had no intention of allowing the right-wing fascist to come anywhere near the presidency. It was Mellon who would have an unfortunate accident, not Russell.
Ben had been reliving his call with Russell and it had made him very uneasy. The change in his demeanor had been obvious even over the phone. However, if what the Horsemen believed were true, it meant Russell had not turned, as Ben had thought, entirely to the dark side but it did mean that Russell probably unwittingly was going to be beholden to whoever had made him King. The Kingmaker was the person Ben worried most about and it was he that Ben would have to ensure was dealt with very soon. Otherwise, everything he had planned for Ararat could be in jeopardy.
Ben picked up the phone. He needed to know exactly how the president had died and more importantly, who was there at the time of death.