I add to Darius, “And you were in the same boat until Taylor.” She’s an old girlfriend who came back into his life and was now to be his wife. “At this point, I can understand the tabloids being all over your stories. They have some juice to them. But before…” I let my words trail off for the unspoken thought to fill their minds.
Gabe sees my point and nods. “So, you think that the motive is to bring the senator down?”
“I think that the senator pisses off people every day,” I explain. “I think that those same people have the means to acquire that kind of apparatus. I also think they have the motive to listen in on my conversations in the hope that I will say something they can use against the senator, because who is the senator’s closest confidant?”
“You,” Darius offers.
I nod. “And who are my closest confidants?”
“Us,” Micah adds.
“Precisely. It makes sense that if someone wanted dirt on the senator they’d go through me. It also makes sense that they’d look for my weak spot.” And Gabe’s pub is where I let my guard down. “There are still missing pieces here.” I see the question in everyone’s eyes, Is he right? But I know I am, so I push on. “But I finally feel like I’m on the right track.”
Darius watches me a moment, his chiseled jaw clenches twice. “I can see where you’re going with this. But why would the stories about us be printed, too?”
“Perhaps it’s a decoy.” I offer the logical assumption. “It’s possible they are giving up dirt on all of us to make this look personal, when it’s not that at all.”
Micah snorts. “Which is exactly how we’ve looked at it since all this began.” He shakes his head in frustration, placing his beer down hard on the coffee table in front of him. “Did the senator say who exactly is attempting to corrupt him?”
“I get the impression it’s not one person specifically. I can only imagine as a senator, he’s getting some push from the other side, but at this point, it’s only gentle pushing, nothing too forceful.”
Darius asks, “But it could turn into something to worry about?”
I nod. “It can always become dirty, that’s the game of politics.”
Gabe drums a beat with his fingers against his beer bottle, still resting on his armrest. “What exactly does that mean for us then?”
“It means you need to be extremely careful.”
Micah gives a dry laugh. “More careful than we’re already being?”
“More careful than you can possibly imagine. It’s a different game if we’re playing against politicians rather than the tabloids. This isn’t about getting a hot story. This is about shifting power. And that means there’s no limits to where they’ll go.”
Heavy silence fills the room, and it’s a silence I understand. Weeks ago we worried that the tabloids would catch wind of us owning sex clubs and it would be the next big scandal. But that’s the least of our worries. Micah has Allie. Darius has Taylor. Now they are tied up in all this and it’s pretty obvious from their firm expressions they don’t want their women involved. And for that I can’t blame them. I don’t want Hadley near this either, and she’s not even mine.
Micah finally breaks the silence. “Will you continue to search for the person behind the bugs?”
“Honestly, it’s a dead end,” I admit, because I’d investigated all angles after Darius was in the tabloids and we first discovered the bugs. “There were no fingerprints to find out who put them there. Yes, if I find the person behind them, I’m sure it will lead us to the one responsible for all of this, and I can only imagine that will lead me to some shady politician. But I’ve gotten nowhere on that front.” I ask Gabe, “Have you gotten anywhere on the video?” The last time we talked, we discussed the security cameras that Gabe had put in his pub. From what I’d seen, an hour had been cut from the feed and Gabe was contacting the company to see if they had a backup.
He shakes his head. “Sadly, I’m helpless there. That missing hour couldn’t be recovered from the server.”
Thick tension fills the room, nearly vibrating off the men around me, till Darius finally asks me, “What’s your plan then?”
“I’ll need to focus on the senator for the time being,” I tell them, carefully choosing my words so as not to seem disloyal to them. “If I find out more about the senator’s situation, I think it will lead to the person recording us.”
Nods follow, and it’s an amazing show of our long friendship that no one questions my plan or doubts my direction.
Gabe asks, “What do you need us to do?”
“Keep playing along,” I instruct the group. “We need to wait for that story about Micah being investigated for fraud to come out.” Days ago, we’d purposely fed the tabloids this story while sitting in the pub, knowing the bugs would record our conversation. One, to keep the heat off us for a little while so we could find out who was tapping us. Two, because the story had no truth to it whatsoever. In time, the tabloids would learn this. But that’s why I hadn’t removed the bugs. We needed to control what the tabloids were printing. None of us wanted our dirty laundry spread across a cover for all to read. We all had something to hide. “While they’ve recently taken an odd interest in me, I’m hoping you can deter them. I need them off my ass.” I pause, considering my next steps. “Perhaps go back to the pub, talk again at the table, and leave something on the recording that’s juicier that they could print regarding this fraud.”
Micah nods. “That I can do, but since they haven’t printed the story yet, I wonder what else could entice them to do it now?”
“Whatever you do, make the story good,” I say, feeling the weight of all this landing on my shoulders. “The second the stories stop, whoever is responsible for this is going to realize we’ve caught on to what they’re doing. The best chance at finding them is keeping up the illusion that we are clueless about it all.”
“And you have no doubt you’ll find them?” Gabe asks.
“Find?” I shake my head, thinking of the position they’ve put Hadley and my friends in, and promise, “No, I’m going to squeeze until they have nowhere to run.”