“Yes, sir.”
“Good girl.”
Those two words made her fly.
She watched him as he left, a lump in her throat, and butterflies crowding her belly. He was handsome, stern, powerful, and he was taking a paternal interest in her. It was like looking at a walking bingo sheet of personal triggers and buttons. This was going to be a disaster.
Sophie didn't have a chance to dwell on Alex’s appearance. The work was real, and the volume of it was incredible. She felt as though she was being buried alive under files and emails, cc’s and bcc’s and the occasional phone call. Her voicemail was perpetually full.
And then Carlyle dropped by.
“Sophie, I need your help with some of these accounts,” Carlyle said, breaking the spell of intrigue and overwork with his warmth and easy charm. “Can I get you in over lunch? Could be another late night.”
She liked Carlyle. He was solid and dependable, and for a CFO, he was remarkably polite. There was none of the ego of the other c-level executives. He just wanted to get the job done, and done well.
According to her research, he had military experience just as Alex Roth did, though there was relatively little information on that even with the most intense of searches. Some would have called it stalking. Sophie called it knowing what she needed to know.
Carlyle was something of a closed book, even now.
He went out of his way to make himself look as average as possible, including thick-rimmed, dark intellectual glasses. His hair was brown, as were his eyes, and there was a scar which ran from the back of his palm all the way up under his shirt. It looked like it could have been nasty, but Sophie knew better than to start asking people about their scars. They might notice hers and ask questions back.
“Sure. I can come help," she smiled, even though she really wanted to squeal, no, fucking no, no, fuck off already.
It was a long day at work, followed by a very late night.
“I hate to ask you to do this, but would you mind staying until we’re finished?”
At least Carlyle had splurged on high-end Chinese for everybody working on the project — and when he asked her to stay late, he asked with very real humility, and an apologetic tone.
“Sure. No problem,” Sophie sealed her fate.
It was a very late night. Economically ruling the world was hard work for everybody involved at Apex. Every day she was there, the eerie feeling that she was part of something absolutely terrible, something which probably shouldn’t really be allowed to exist grew a little stronger.
But then she’d remind herself that she was a good person, and like all good people, she was trying to effect change from within. Apex might be a behemoth of a company beyond the understanding of most people, an organization with rice fields in China and factories also, well, in China, as well as African mines, Norwegian fishing fleets, Japanese robot designers. There was literally nothing Apex did not do. There was no avoiding them for the consumers who relied on the modern supply chain for food, clothing, medication, furniture, and generally existing.
On nights like these, the enormity of the company became very obvious to her. The accounts were disparate creatures, numbers flowing in from across the globe in various currencies. There were a good dozen lower level managers working with Carlyle on these matters, shuffling paper to one another in a practiced concert of checks, double checks, finalizations, and rechecks. One by one, each of them bailed on the project and went home to husbands, wives, families, dogs, all connections to the real world which Sophie hadn’t managed to achieve yet.
Their work may have seemed dry to an onlooker, but these spreadsheets represented the fortunes and lives of many hundreds of thousands of people directly, and millions more indirectly. She was so immersed in it, she barely noticed when the last of the extra team went home, leaving her alone with Carlyle.
It was well past midnight when Carlyle pulled his glasses from his face and wiped his eyes with his hand.
“After a while, those numbers all start to swim, don’t they? Could be sending funds to Alabama or Afghanistan.”
“That’s why we have checks and balances,” Sophie reminded him.
It was a little strange for a CFO to be doing this kind of grunt work at all, but Carlyle said he liked to keep his hands dirty, and some of the accounts were of the sensitive kind. Couldn’t have generic employees knowing the secret inner workings of the great and mighty Apex empire, after all.
Still, there was usually an executive accounting team for that. Not a CFO and a relatively new hire… she pushed away the doubts as Carlyle smiled at her in that easy, all-American way he had. She told herself nobody ever really knew how the sausage was made, and even a place like Apex occasionally had to run in a way that was a little unorthodox just to get things done.