He grinned inwardly. You’re playing a tricky game, Ms. Verwoerd. And, so far, you’ve played it just about perfectly.
So far.
Humphries refused to admit defeat, although it was obvious that this luncheon idea had been no victory. He listened to her long recitation with only half his attention, thinking, I’ll get you sooner or later, Diane. I can wait.
But not much longer, another voice in his head spoke up. No woman is worth waiting for this long.
Wrong, he answered silently. Amanda is.
As they neared the bottom of the last flight of moving stairs, she said something that abruptly caught his full attention.
“And Pancho Lane flew all the way out to Ceres last week. She’s on her way back now.”
“To Ceres?” Humphries snapped. “What’s she doing out there?”
“Talking to her business associates, Mr. and Mrs. Fuchs,” Verwoerd replied calmly. “About undercutting our prices, I imagine.”
“Undercutting me?”
“What else? If they can drive HSS out of Ceres they’ll have the whole Belt for themselves. You’re not the only one who wants to control the rock rats.”
“Helvetia Ltd.,” Humphries muttered. “Silly name for a company.”
“It’s really a front for Astro, you know.”
He looked around the smooth walls of the escalator well without replying. At this deep level beneath Selene, no one else was riding down. There was no sound except the muted hum of the electric motor powering the stairs.
“Pancho’s using Fuchs and his company to make it much tougher for you to take control of Astro. The more business she does through Helvetia, the more the Astro board sees her as a real hero. They might even elect Pancho chairman when O’Banian steps down.”
“Drive me out of the Belt,” Humphries growled.
“That’s what we’re trying to do to them, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“We’d better do it, then, before they do it to us,” said Diane Verwoerd.
Humphries nodded again, knowing she was right.
“What we need, then,” she said slowly, “is a plan of action. A program aimed at crushing Helvetia once and for all.”
He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time since they’d finished lunch. She’s thought this whole thing through, he realized. She’s leading me around by the nose, by god. Humphries saw it in her almond eyes. She has this all figured out. She knows exactly where she wants to lead me.
“So what do you suggest?” he asked, really curious about where she was heading.
“I suggest a two-pronged strategy.”
“A two-pronged strategy?” he asked dryly.
“It’s an old technique,” Verwoerd said, smiling slyly. “The carrot and the stick.”
Despite his efforts to remain noncommittal, Humphries smiled. “Tell me about it,” he said as they reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped off.
Once he got back to his office, Humphries cleared his calendar and leaned back in his chair, thinking, worrying, planning. All thoughts of Diane left his conscious mind; he pictured Amanda out there with Fuchs. Amanda wouldn’t try to hurt me, he told himself. But he would. He knows I love her and he’d do anything to damage me. He’s already taken Amanda away from me. Now he wants to drive me out of the Belt and stop me from taking Astro. The sonofabitch wants to ruin me!
Diane is right. We’ve got to move, and move fast. Carrot and stick.
Abruptly, he sat up straight and ordered the phone to summon his chief of security. The man rapped softly at his office door a few moments later.
“Come in, Grigor,” said Humphries.
The security chief was a new hire: a lean, silent man with dark hair and darker eyes. He wore an ordinary business suit of pale gray, the nondescript costume of a man who preferred to remain in the background, unnoticed, while he noticed everything. He remained standing despite the two comfortable chairs in front of Humphries’s desk.
Tilting his own chair back slightly to look up at him, Humphries said, “Grigor, I want the benefit of your thinking on a problem I have.”
Grigor shifted slightly on his feet. He had just been recruited from an Earth-based corporation that was floundering financially because most of its assets had been destroyed in the greenhouse flooding. He was on probation with Humphries, and he knew it.