White. We’re not monsters, Senator Williams.” He shook his head. “And as for why we began with a pleasant phone call—I much prefer it when things are pleasant. Don’t you?”
Tad could hardly see straight he was so angry. The doubletalk was beyond infuriating. “If you like things to be pleasant, why did you have those photos in your briefcase?”
Metcalfe stood and buttoned his suit jacket. Now he did look pitying, and Tad hated him for that. “You’re not the first senator to promise they wouldn’t take bribes,” he said. “Didn’t you ever wonder why the others all left their morals behind in the end?” He went to the door and looked back. “Think about it, Senator,” he said, and in the next moment, he was gone.
He stood and began to pace. All the urges he had right now—to drag Metcalfe into the back alley and teach him a lesson, to hold a press conference, to flip his desk over—were the opposite of productive. If he intended to do this, if he wanted to stay the course, he needed to be as cold and calculating as they were.
It was imperative that he be as smart as they were. Because, like an idiot, he’d expected that not taking bribes would be as simple as saying no to them. He hadn’t expected blackmail, much less blackmail over something he’d never done.
Before all this began, he would have said that to cave now would be senseless. If he caved, it would be to betray everything he stood for.
But when he’d promised that, Justin’s life and his career hadn’t hung in the balance. If Metcalfe made good on his threats—and he had no doubt that he would—he could lose everything and his blackmailer would never suffer any consequences. Too late, he realized he should have held onto the forged images and perhaps approached law enforcement. Unfortunately, he’d been too surprised and perhaps naïve to think of that.
There had to be an answer. But what in the name of God was it?
Chapter Eight
Dru Metcalfe made sure to keep moving as he hurried out into the sunlight and got into his car. For one thing, he had a busy schedule. Senator Williams might be the only US senator in the city right now, but there were dozens more California senators taking vacations and visiting their home districts nearby. It was going to be a busy day.
That wasn’t why he kept moving, though. He’d learned long ago that after a meeting like this, after turning the screws that would bring someone around to his side, he preferred to not think about it.
Dwelling on it all usually meant he didn’t like the tone of his thoughts. He remembered things like his law school days and the pro bono clinics he served in before he graduated. It brought back the times when he’d held out for his first job, shared a studio apartment, and waited tables to make ends meet.
He also remembered the dinner where he’d told his friends about his new job—the one with the big salary and the annual bonus. A vivid recollection always surfaced of how he’d told them that he would take them all out for dinner at Christmas, how they would take the big corporations down from the outside and he would help them from the inside.
Inevitably, he remembered the first case he hadn’t helped on.
A couple of years later, he’d moved away from New York. It was easy to not move in the same circles when one group watched for sales on toilet paper and the other drank a thousand-dollar bottle of champagne. Still, he hadn’t liked the possibility of running into them all again.
It had been ten years since then, and he’d learned very well how to quiet the little voice in his head that told him this wasn’t what he’d wanted to do with his life.
The thing was that it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Dru had told himself he would change the world, but that wasn’t something anyone could do. The world was too big. You could make a ripple but the ripple died away soon after. Even if you thrashed around with all your strength, you would still go under and leave no trace. People like Raymond White and IterNext always won in the end.
So why not get some of the profits for himself?
He didn’t even blame them. People went stupid when money was involved. Ethics went out of the window. It was simply human nature. There was no