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.He caught Cate’s eye.She was scared all right, and despite his distrust of her, his unremitting fury that she had deceived him not once but time and time again, he wanted to be next to her.The shaking worsened.The starboard overhead luggage bin fell open.A handheld fire extinguisher tore loose from its clasps and crashed onto Boris’s head.Oxygen masks dangled from the ceiling.In the galley, plates tumbled from their shelves, shattering.A chaotic choreography danced to the nerve-jangling accompaniment of Tatiana’s grating scream.Then, just as suddenly, there was calm.The plane righted itself.The nose came up and they resumed a steady climb.The engines purred.Sunlight flooded the cabin.Unbuckling himself, Gavallan crossed to the Russian.Boris was shaken, and a gash on his forehead was seeping blood.Bastard, thought Gavallan, too bad it didn’t break your neck.Finding his handkerchief, he pressed it to the cut.“Keep pressure on it.”“Spaseeba,” said the Russian, removing the compress, seeing the blood and swearing.“You want to talk, you go now,” he said, jutting a thumb over his shoulder toward Cate.“Maybe you don’t have so much chance later.I take Tatiana to the bathroom.Clean her up.Go.I owe you favor.”Gavallan waited until Boris passed him, an arm around Tatiana’s shoulder en route to the lavatory, then walked fore and took a seat facing Cate.He wanted to make light of the bumpy ride, to offer her his pilot’s confident smile and say, “That was nothing,” but the words caught in his throat.He’d left his store of niceties back on the tarmac, along with his willful naÏveté.One question needed to be asked.“Did he know about us?”Cate looked at him for a moment, not saying anything, her flashing eyes boring into him with unsettling frankness.“Who? Father?” She gave a tired laugh.“Yes, Jett, he knew.”Gavallan glanced out the window.They had climbed above the clouds and were soaring across an azure sea.Sporadic lightning flashed below in a downy gray quilt, smothered eruptions that reminded him of distant gunfire.“Well, that explains a lot,” he said.“You both had me going, I’ll say that.Jett, the consummate dealmaker.Mr.Big Shot wangling Mercury away from Goldman and Merrill and every other big swinging dick on the street.Hell, those suckers didn’t have a chance.At least I know how Pillonel learned that Black Jet was getting the deal a month before I did.”“What do you mean?”“Didn’t you hear him this morning? Your father recruited him in November to do his dirty work.You know, to fake the due diligence and say that Mercury was more than the sum of its parts.The funny thing is, Black Jet didn’t win the deal until January.Remember? You refused to toast the occasion.I drank the entire bottle of DP myself.”“Yes, I remember.”“I paid your father fifty million dollars of my firm’s money to win a deal he had every intention of giving me anyway.This is enormous, Cate.I handed a man fifty million bucks to give me the royal screwing of the century.I sank my company for no reason whatsoever.”“Jett, don’t do this to yourself.”“And you knew the whole time that it was rotten.The story just gets better and better.”“My father was involved.It couldn’t be legitimate.It’s that simple.” Her tone was apologetic, conciliatory.“I tried saying everything I could to put you off the deal: ‘Kirov’s a crook.’ ‘You can’t trust an oligarch.’ I reminded you he’d gone bankrupt twice before.”“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Gavallan.“We’ve already had this conversation.”“What else did you want me to say?”“How about the truth?”“I already told you.If you’d done your job, you would never have touched the deal to begin with.”“If you’d told me he was your father, if you’d told me about what happened to Alexei, I would have pulled the plug in a New York minute.” He looked at the floor for a moment, then back at Cate.“Why?” he asked again.She hesitated, her emotions close to the surface.“I couldn’t.I just couldn’t.”“Of course you could! Ten people, Cate.Ten people are dead.Graf.the company.” He shook his head, and then the anger, the frustration, the deception, grew too much for him to bear.Balling his hand into a fist, he pounded on the armrest once, twice, three times, with all his might.“He’s my friend
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