Susan Phillips - Hot Shot

"Sorry, lover," Paige said. "Big bad duty calls. That's the night I have to hostess FBT's annual party at Falcon Hill. Not that I wouldn't rather spend it with you. God, I hate those things."

"Then why do it?" he asked.

"Cal does so much for me that when he asks something in return, I try to accommodate him."

Mitch and Susannah exchanged a glance. Neither of them approved of the amount of power Paige had transferred to Cal Theroux. Since he was a forbidden subject between the sisters, Susannah had asked Mitch to urge Paige to take more interest in FBT affairs and reclaim her voting rights. Paige had told him to mind his own business.

That evening after the men had left, Paige propped herself on the living room couch with a magazine, and Susannah carried her briefcase over to the armchair. When she opened it, she discovered a fat manila folder she had thrown in just as she was leaving. For a moment she couldn't remember what it was, and then she realized it was the file on Edward Fiella that the security department had finally returned to her office that day. She had tossed it in her case so she could give it one last perusal before it was put away.

She settled back in the armchair and then noticed that Paige was staring off into space, her expression troubled.

"What's wrong?"

Paige snapped back to reality. "Nothing."

"I thought we weren't going to shut each other out anymore. Are you having problems at the shelter?" For months now Paige had been volunteering her services at a shelter for battered women. She loved her work there, but sometimes being in the presence of so much suffering got to her.

Paige shook her head, then set down her magazine. "Nothing that noble. I was just wondering… How come you haven't started dating anybody? It's been nearly a year since you left Sam. Your divorce will be final before long."

"There hasn't been much time. Besides, I'm not exactly the world's best company these days. It's hard to be cheerful when you've just laid off another seven hundred people."

"But don't you miss being with a man?"

"I'm with men all day long," she replied, deliberately sidestepping the issue.

"That's not what I mean."

Susannah knew exactly what her sister meant, but she certainly wasn't going to tell her that she had been having embarrassing sexual fantasies about Mitch. Instead, she told her part of the truth. "It takes all of my energy just getting from one day to the next. I don't have anything left at the moment for an emotional involvement."

"What about sex? Don't you miss it?"

"I miss it a lot."

Paige looked deeply unhappy. "I know it's stupid, but in Greece Yank made me promise not to sleep with anybody for a while. I don't know why I agreed, except you know how he is. Right after I got back, I got mad and told him I was going to sleep with anybody I wanted. But I didn't. And last month when I flew over to Paris for a few days, I was definitely planning on having a good time. I have a friend there. He's a playboy, but he's nice. Anyway, I never called him. God, Suze, it's been forever."

"Celibacy must be catching. Even Mitch seems to have given up all those dreary women he used to date." The moment the words were out, Susannah wished she hadn't brought up his name. Of course Mitch had stopped dating. He was moving in on her sister. She recovered quickly. "Maybe you just needed some time off from men for a while."

"I guess. But I'm starting to think about sex a lot. Which is really ironic, because I didn't use to like it very much."

And then Paige got up from the couch, almost as if she wished she hadn't said so much. "I-I think I'd better sleep at home tonight. I have to meet with Cal early tomorrow about the FBT party. If I stay at Falcon Hill, I won't have to fight rush-hour traffic."

Susannah nodded. She knew she wasn't the best company right now and she didn't blame Paige for taking off. They walked to the door together. Paige grabbed her purse and jacket, kissed Susannah's cheek, and left the town house.

It was a beautiful night. The moon was full, the air sweet. As Paige drove home, she tried to concentrate on how pretty the sky was so that she wouldn't start to cry. But she had barely reached the highway before the tears were dripping down her cheeks. She hated to cry. It was weak and stupid and completely infantile. But from the time Yank Yankowski had walked into her life, it seemed as if she had been doing a lot of it in her private time. God. She had been like a crazy woman for months. Every time she opened Susannah's door and she saw him standing there, she felt as if someone had shot heroin straight into her veins.

All she had to do was shut her eyes and she could see him. She tried to read messages into every change of his expression, and to transform those short cryptic statements he uttered into complex sonnets of passion, but it never worked. She was too much a realist. Of all the jokes God had played on her, this was the biggest. She, a woman who could chose among the most fascinating men in the world, had fallen in love with the nerdy, absentminded geek who was so obviously in love with her stupid, blind sister.

Susannah carried the file on Edward Fiella upstairs. She decided that she might as well do some work, because she certainly wasn't going to fall asleep easily, not with all those dirty dreams waiting for her. After she had gotten ready for bed, she propped herself into the pillows and flipped open the file. She had been through this material months before, and she didn't really expect to find anything new, but she still wanted to take one last look.

There was a coffee ring on the first page, which held a copy of his employment application. She skimmed through the rest. They had hired Fiella right out of college. He had been with them six months and then left. She knew that he had a degree from San Jose State, and she glanced through his college history. No fraternities. No professional associations. The summer before he had graduated, he had taken a job programming the computer billing system at the Mendhan Hills Yacht Club.

Her eyes stopped moving at the reference to the yacht club. Why had she never noticed that before? She had visited the Mendhan Hills Yacht Club many times. Although it was a small club, it was one of the Bay Area's most prestigious.

And Cal Theroux had been a member for as long as she had known him.

Her pulse was racing. Moments before, the bedroom had seemed cool, but now she was burning up. Don't leap to conclusions, she told herself as she threw off the covers. Cal wasn't the only high-ranking FBT official who was a member of the club, and she couldn't make assumptions just because a former SysVal employee had been in the same room with a competitor. She reminded herself that FBT and SysVal hadn't been rivals until the Falcon 101 had gone on the market. Even then, winning the contract with the state of California had been far more important to SysVal than to FBT.

But all of the logical arguments in the world weren't enough to convince her. Snatching up her telephone, she called Hal Lundeen and told him what she had discovered.

It took two days for Lundeen to report back with the information she needed. He flipped open his notepad. "You definitely stumbled on to something, Miss Faulconer. Cal Theroux headed the committee at Mendhan Hills Yacht Club that put in the computerized billing system Fiella worked on. The two of them definitely knew each other."

Susannah's hand tightened around the pen she had been holding. Now she felt free to acknowledge her instincts. The moment she had seen the reference to the yacht club in Fiella's file, she had known in her guts that Cal was responsible for sabotaging the Blaze. She thought of all that hatred festering inside him for so many years. Had she really imagined he had forgotten what she had done to him? That he wouldn't, at some point, strike back at her?

"We need something that will stand up in court," she said. "It'll have to be more substantial than this."

"Give me a few more days, and let's see what I can dig up. The more I find out about your Mr. Theroux, the more I think he's a pretty slippery operator. He's left a lot of dead bodies at FBT on his way to the top."

As soon as Lundeen left her office, she called a meeting with Mitch and Yank and told them exactly what she had discovered. But both men had been trained in the scientific method, and neither was impressed with her conclusions.

"These are serious accusations," Mitch said, "and everything you have is circumstantial. If you're not careful, we'll be facing a lawsuit for slander on top of everything else. Unless Lundeen comes up with something more definite, I don't see how this will help."

"He'll come up with something," she said. "He has to."

But a week later Hal hadn't unearthed anything more than unpleasant anecdotes from former colleagues about Cal's ruthless but effective climb to the top of FBT.

Susannah stopped sleeping. She couldn't eat. The first week of July slipped into the second, and the weekend arrived. She spent all of Saturday at her desk. Mitch's children were in town, and he had taken them to a Giants game. Because Paige was committed to hostessing the annual FBT party that evening, Mitch had postponed the barbecue he had planned until the next afternoon. Susannah looked forward to seeing the children, but she dreaded watching Paige and Mitch together.

By seven that evening she was exhausted, but she didn't want to go home. She got up from her desk and wandered through the empty hallways. Many of the corridor lights were permanently dimmed, the offices unoccupied. She remembered when Saturday nights had been full of activity. Now her footsteps echoed hollowly on the tile floors. She peered into laboratories that only a year ago had been bursting with brash young engineers eager to strut their stuff. Now they were idle. No one announced loose pigs in the hallways or warned of Japanese invasions over the loudspeaker system. It was as if the whole brilliant, brazen world of SysVal had been an illusion.

She rested her cheek against the cool green wall. The adventure had come to an end. A sense of defeat settled over her so all-encompassing, she wanted to sink down along the wall and curl up against it. Cal Theroux had beaten her. Right now the party would be beginning at Falcon Hill. While he extolled FBT's accomplishments, he would be secretly celebrating SysVal's destruction.

She thought of the bright young kids who had arrived from all over the country to work at SysVal, of the thousands of lives his vengeance had upset. And in her mind, she kept seeing Cal dancing in the gardens of Falcon Hill.

She squeezed her eyes shut. From the beginning Mitch had called her Hot Shot, but she had never felt less deserving of that nickname. A real hot shot wouldn't stand by and let all the people she was responsible for be destroyed by a bastard like Cal Theroux. A real hot shot would do something, have some sort of a plan. A real hot shot would-

Her eyes sprang open. For a moment she stood without moving, barely breathing. Then she looked at her watch and began to run.

The library at Falcon Hill was unchanged. Her father's heavy mahogany desk still dominated the room. Susannah stood next to it clutching the telephone receiver in her hand while she waited for someone to answer the phone ringing in the pool house near the gardens. She was dressed in a slim scarlet chiffon evening gown with a rhinestone-banded bodice. As she waited, she remembered the night she had walked into this same room and found Sam seated behind the desk staring up at the embossed copper ceiling. A party had been going on then, too.

"Yes?" The voice that answered the pool-house telephone was male with a foreign accent. Probably a waiter.

"One of the guests is needed in the library immediately," she said. "Mr. Cal Theroux. It's an emergency." She repeated Cal's name for the waiter, reiterated the fact that the matter was urgent, and hung up the telephone.

She took several deep breaths and fidgeted nervously with the rhinestone border on the long scarlet scarf that accessorized the gown. The library faced the side of the house, so she couldn't see the party going on in the gardens at the back, but she could hear the lush sounds of an orchestra playing. She glanced toward the antique humidor on the corner of the desk to reassure herself that the small tape recorder hidden within couldn't be seen.

Less than two hours had passed since she had left SysVal. In that time, she had tested the powerful little machine to make certain it was working properly, dressed in her evening clothes, and driven to Falcon Hill. Using one of the side entrances, she had made it to the library without running into her sister, or anyone else for that matter, since the staff was working out of the pool-house kitchen and the main house was deserted. Now all she had to do was wait.