There were three of them in the conference room on the Maple Street building when the Board called; Errol Allen, his son Benton, and Derek Pymon, who’d been the primary programmer on the project.

In fact, in every way other than the official credit and the original idea, the software side of Project Bankhaven had been led by Derek Pymon. The external implementation of that project had been handled by the Allens, though Errol’s name was the one on the documentation.

“The numbers look good, gentlemen,” Nigel Allen informed them. “How quickly are you earning back?”

Pymon shrugged; it wasn’t his department. Errol cleared his throat awkwardly. “Well,” he said. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

Benton read the flash of annoyance in the furrowing of Nigel’s brows. He’d seen it far too often when he’d been in the room for one of these calls. “The calculation is a bit skewed,” he jumped in, “because we didn’t have a MaxiMart here to begin with, and we’ve been taking over local businesses at a rate.

“So the rate hasn’t steadied yet, but if you set aside the cost of Project Bankhaven and just look at the cost of an M-Phone each across the town, projections have it earned back inside a quarter on MaxiMart earnings alone.

“Funding the R&D, investing into town infrastructure, buying businesses…” He made a loose gesture with his fingers. “If you discount the value of our added knowledge, it’ll take a lot longer to clear all of that.”

Beside him, his father closed his mouth and nodded. Benton seethed quietly to himself.

“Mm,” Nigel said, but he’d made a note on the pad in front of him with his Mont Blanc, so Benton thought he couldn’t have done too badly. “Alright. Well. Is there a good hotel out there?”

Errol shot his son a glance that was somewhere between bewildered and fearful. Benton racked his brain, but they lived in town, they’d never tested the hotels. And you couldn’t just rely on a good chain because Bankhaven had been so anti-chain until recently.

“We put our out-of-town interview candidates up at the Ridge Retreat,” Derek Pymon put in. “It’s only four star, but it should do.”

“We can handle four star.” Nigel chuckled. “Honestly we can handle a Motel 6, but if I’m given the choice I’m not going to.”

Feeling like a sycophant, Benton laughed, and Pymon did too; after a moment so did Errol. “Why do you ask?” Benton asked casually.

“Well, before we push a wider roll out on the M-Phone, the Board need to be sure our investment is a wise one,” put in Nigel’s wife, Regina. “So we’ve lined up a little inspection.”

“Great,” Benton said. “Looking forward to it.”

“Probably be end of the week, I should think,” Nigel took over. “We can get into specifics then, yes?”

“Absolutely. See you then.” Benton ended the call as quickly as he could, and while his father sagged back into the chair, he rose quickly and started pacing. “We’ve got work to do,” he told Derek. “We need to hit the Delaney girl with the same treatment you gave that other woman. Liv or something.””

“Hm.” Pymon’s eyes flicked to Errol, then back to Benton. “I have a theory about that,” he said, and rose. “Come on, I’ll lay it out in my office.”

Once firmly ensconced in Derek’s office alongside an underdressed Betty Lyons, he looked back at Benton. “Mind if I speak freely?”

“Why would I object?”

“It’s about your father.”

Benton’s attention sharpened. “I thought this was about Nicole.”

“Oh, we’ll get to her,” Derek said. “But the two are linked.”

He glanced to one side, to Betty. “We have an audience.”

“We have an extremely loyal audience. Betty wouldn’t spill one of my secrets even to a Board member,” Derek said confidently. “Not unless I get fired, anyway. Now, can we talk about your father? It’s important.” Betty smiled, nodding. Eye contact with her unsettled Benton; the beauty had grown up brainy, and it was clear just meeting her gaze that she was still smart. At the same time, there was an almost vapid acceptance of her situation. He couldn’t reconcile it properly.

Benton sat down. “I’m assuming you want to badmouth him, or you wouldn’t bother asking.”

Pymon nodded, but only fractionally. Little enough that he could plausibly claim, later, to have done nothing at all, if it turned out the young Allen scion was offended. “Well, then,” Benton said simply, “let’s see if I can put you at ease.

“My father is an incompetent. Along with my cousin Wilma, he’s the laughing stock of the family, and every time we attend a family gathering I have to deal with the fact that everyone assumes I’m going to be a screwup too.”

His voice had gone low and cold, his gaze steady. “We both know everything that’s gone right with Project Bankhaven except picking the town in the first place is down to people other than my father. And personally I think we’d have a better platform to work from if he was… encouraged to step back, shall we say.” He ran his tongue over suddenly dry lips. “Does that help at all?”

Derek smiled. “It’s a pleasure to work with you, Mr Allen,” he said. “But that said, I don’t recommend putting the captive through the Nystrom process.”

“Why not?”

“Because they haven’t given us days of breathing room just so they can book their hotel and flights cheaper. They’ve done it so Regina and Kent Allen can go through all our documentation and records with a fine-tooth comb.”

Benton knew his great-uncle Kent had a fixation on details. He hadn’t realised Regina was the same way - but it did explain her marriage to Nigel a little more clearly. Presumably, the two of them had recognised a mutual opportunity for advancement.

He sat there thoughtfully. “I forget you’ve worked on other Mandatum projects,” he said. “Very useful. So they’ll find out about Delaney and Nystrom.”

“And anyone else who might be a problem,” Pymon concurred. “But it’s Delaney I’m worried about. They’re realists, they know any rollout has teething problems.”

“What makes her stand out?”

“Nystrom just took forever,” Pymon said. “It turns out she and her daughter had some kind of pact to minimise screen use at home. That’s fine. We can deal with outliers who go slow. Delaney regressed, and regressed hard. Have you read Donnelly’s first-week report on her placement?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, number one, she was heavily bought in, and then suddenly she’s a problem. We don’t even know exactly when it happened.” Pymon sighed. “Number two, just remember some of your family will read it.” He looked at Benton significantly, so Benton nodded.

“Do we know what happened?”

“Not really,” Pymon said. “My best guess is that despite our design plans, her placement actually wasn’t a good fit for her psych profile.” He shifted slightly in his chair, scratching the back of his neck. “Probably need to check how the M-Phone generates them, fix the problem there.”

Betty Lyons took two paces to stand behind Pymon, where she started to gently massage his shoulders as he took his hand back from his neck. Benton wondered abstractedly if that was a learned behaviour or one he’d programmed into her from start to finish. A chill had just run down his spine; not for the first time, he was experiencing a moment in which panic flooded his system and his brain wanted to think about anything else but the problem at hand.

His first school experiences, back when his father lived near the majority of the Allen family, had been at a prestigious private institution, and it had been there that he had learned how to hide the visible signs of that panic. As he forced himself to face the issue, he was grateful for that. Between his own masking and the skilled, or possibly programmed, hands of the young woman Pymon had selected as his project bonus, the programmer didn’t notice his discomfort.

“I have an in with her mother,” Benton said. “Send me the logs, I’ll see if I can sort out the misunderstanding. We can debug on that basis.”

Pymon shrugged agreement. “We’re going to need to roll out the red carpet, anyway,” he said. “Really show off what we can do. Any suggestions?”

Benton considered, and an idea came to mind. He turned it over carefully, calculating, but it seemed like a good one; it should also benefit him with his own problem, the one he now knew he couldn’t tell Pymon about. Not until it was fixed, anyway. “Maybe,” he said slowly. “How far advanced is the Brand Ambassador API?”

Pymon stared at him wordlessly, calculating. “You weren’t supposed to know about that,” he said.

“I know my Dad’s passwords.”

“Fuck.” Pymon threw his hands up toward the ceiling. “Your dad is a liability.”

“And if we play our cards right,” Benton said quietly, “this is our opportunity to solve that problem. When the Board gets here, you and I are going to throw him under the bus. If he’s responsible for the Delaney blunder, and we’re responsible for the solve, what happens?”

Derek Pymon’s eyes gleamed. “You’d better drop by this office more regularly,” he said. “I don’t want us having any of these communications via electronic media.”

Benton nodded. “I’ve gotta go,” he said. “I’ve got someone to talk to. Send me those logs, and if the Brand Ambassador package can be made ready, let me know.”

“You got it, boss,” Pymon said, turning not to his computer screen but to Betty Lyons.

As he left, Benton reflected that he couldn’t blame the man.

*

Tammy’s was busy, as it always was, but Benton walked straight up to the counter and took a seat on his own at the bar. He knew he wouldn’t have to wait long, not with such a loyal company woman running the business, and he didn’t; she finished up a flirty conversation with Rick DeLeon quickly enough, extracting herself gracefully, and made her way over to him, her eyes focused on him in a way that seemed to stress how important he was to her.

Benton positively basked. Watching the sway of her hips as she came, he wondered how long she’d been putting that much wiggle into her walk for. It was definitely exaggerated, like she was putting on a show for him.

“Well, if it isn’t young Mr Allen,” Tammy purred. “What can I do for you?”

“Got a beer?”

“For you? Of course.”

Rather than ask what kind, Tammy turned on the spot, close to the bar, with plenty of room between her and the beer fridges at the back wall. This gave her plenty of room to bend over at the waist, keeping her legs straight.

It was a deliberate ploy, and for Tammy the main thing that made it stand out was just how unsubtle it was. Benton knew he was being played, but he still couldn’t take his eyes off that glorious ass, displayed perfectly in Mandatum-blue spandex shorts that ended just an inch down her thighs.

She straightened up and turned back to him. The beer bottle she had in hand was beaded with condensation; her other hand passed over the top of it, popping the cap off in one smooth motion. He almost hadn’t seen her bottle opener in the hand.

He hadn’t realised quite how hard Tammy Delaney had worked on her presentation until she turned her focus on him.

She set it down on the bar in front of him. He didn’t think it was coincidence that if you drew a straight line from her cleavage through the bottle and extended it on out it would line up with his nose.

Looking at her was no hardship. He tore his gaze away to meet her eyes, which were still fixed on him, above a smile that welcomed him warmly. “Anything else?” she asked, her hands braced on the bar some way apart.

Benton loved plans, but he understood that sometimes you had to follow what seemed like an opportunity and reassess once you’d seen what happened. At the same time, he knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to seem too eager. Allen family gossip had made it clear already what happened when an Allen gave signals to a potential romantic partner that they would let the other person take the lead.

So rather than simply agree and proceed, and certainly not to steady his nerve and get a moment to recover, he picked up the beer bottle and took a long pull.

Only after that did he say “Actually, Tammy, I think there might be.”

Her eyelids fluttered for a moment after he called her Tammy; if he hadn’t been watching for it, he wouldn’t have noticed.

Mandatum had a number of policies about employee naming. They’d first instituted them on the advice of a psychologist back in the 1950s, when the Maximum Value Mart brand had been created after the family acquired its fourth department store. Of course, back then there hadn’t been any other mental manipulation involved more complex than you’d find in any marketing textbook from the era.

Changing someone’s name had an effect on the psychology of the person you did it to, one they were now using the M-Phones to augment.

He took out his own M-Phone and started to fiddle with it. “You’ve got a lot of experience in business,” he said, not really thinking about it but knowing he needed to keep the conversation going while he prepped his next move. “Me, not so much. So I’m hoping I can get your opinion on something.”

“Sure, of course.” She leaned in closer. Her arms came together as she did so, the show she’d been putting on shifting now he’d signalled interest in her intellect. He honestly admired the hustle.

He cued the app to kick in after three seconds and set his phone down on the bar, taking care to look away. Tammy had no such warning; he watched a stillness settle over her as she gazed down into it, watched as peace became motionlessness. He wondered if anyone else in the bar would see anything to remark on, or if it was only this obvious up close.

“Tammy,” he said softly, “you’re going to open up the bar and take me through into your back office. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice even quieter than his, and yet forming the word utterly perfectly. In normal conversation, both of them softened the edges of their words; in the mental state the app could place her in, there were none of these shortcuts, none of the impulse to take them, and so the word was sounded quite precisely.

He tapped the screen of his phone without looking at it, knowing that would end the display that had so effectively caught her eye. Tammy straightened up, all hints of flirtatiousness gone from her posture just as her expression was impassive and empty. Her head was held upright, her eyes looked out directly in line with her belt buckle; as she turned to find the bar hatch, her whole body turned at once, with no turn of the neck in advance.

Benton was already hopping off his stool. He collected his beer and phone, then followed her to the hatch and through, and into the back room.

He wasn’t worried about what anyone might have seen in the bar itself. Without very specific information, they’d put down any odd behaviour to something sexual. That was only good for his reputation, and in a company town like Bankhaven had become, it wouldn’t hurt hers.

He closed the door behind them and stood looking at her for some time, partly to admire her body - but only partly.

Tammy had stopped just far enough into the room that he could enter too. He moved past her and studied her further. He needed privacy, if only to collect his thoughts without someone wondering why he was staring.

He was trying to decide how likely she was to regress, the way her daughter had. Pymon was assuming that the app had failed to correctly assess Nicole’s psychological profile, but he didn’t know what Benton knew.

Nicole’s psych assessment had flagged her as most suited for two different roles, one as an administrator, one in recruitment like Lulu McIntyre. On her first day in placement, Benton had modified that himself. He’d put her into the PA queue.

It wasn’t revenge for her throwing him on his ass that time, he told himself, or even for her obvious contempt. It simply seemed to him that seeing her as a flunky to one of his own underlings would be satisfying.

But he’d also adjusted the plan for Tamara off the system’s profile recommendations. What could be better for employee morale, after all, than a perfectly friendly, welcoming skin bar?

Tamara Delaney had understood the value of her sex appeal, and Benton had figured that was going to be enough. Looking at her now, he realised he didn’t know how much she actually enjoyed it. Certainly there’d been no new man in the lives of her or her daughter since Nicole’s father left the picture.

And she was a shrewd businesswoman, too, no matter how eager to please she was right now.

If Tammy cracked at the wrong moment, it could be very embarrassing. On the other hand…

Orel Allen, the patriarch who’d founded what was now MaxiMart and lived just long enough to see the foundation of the Mandatum holding company, had been a shopkeeper first and foremost. He’d never fully left the shop floor, even as more and more of his time had been given over to management. He’d never wanted to fully leave it behind him.

Benton wondered if Tammy might be made of the same stuff.

He could ask her, of course, but he’d have to wake her out of the suggestible state she’d been placed in to get an accurate answer, and she’d remember that he’d asked. Too many complications, he decided.

It was too late to research and re-run testing, with the board arriving at the end of the week. No, he needed to make a strong guess, back it to the hilt, and he needed it to be right.

He was staring, he realised, at Tammy’s parted lips. Beneath the glassy eyes and in the slack, expressionless features of her face, they somehow retained all of their eroticism.

Most likely the smart thing to do would be to go home and put the way he was feeling to good use on Tilly Roth or Hedy Monroe.

He stepped in closer to Tammy and put his thumb against her lower lip. Without any further prompting, her mouth opened just a little wider and her tongue welcomed him in, her lips closing around his thumb. She blinked for a moment, then began to suck, her head sliding back and forth shallowly up and down his thumb.

His breath caught. He brought his other hand around to rest on the swell of her ass. Tammy inhaled sharply, pushing herself forward at the hip, pressing her body against him and pushing her head down more deeply over this thumb.

Her eyes were still glassy but there was no questioning the reaction. If this was her, Tammy definitely still had a sex drive worth harnessing. If it was the programming, he might be making things worse.

Make a strong guess, back it to the hilt, and be right…

“Do you hear me, Tammy?” he asked. His voice came out soft and quiet as if he was still hiding from the patrons, even though there was a wall to separate them now, and he surely didn’t need to.

“Yes.”

“Are you horny?”

“Yes.”

His hand crept down from her mouth to her breast. “You don’t know what is happening, Tammy,” he said. “Would you like me to tell you?”

“Yes.”

Pushing her too far was still a risk. Luckily, he had an alternative motivation for her.

“I took you back here to be private while I told you something,” he said. “Your daughter has been arrested after an unfortunate incident at the office. It’s very embarrassing for you and her.” He took a deep breath.

“She hadn’t been doing well, and perhaps that’s why she eventually crashed out, but it was very public within the company. I felt you deserved being told personally. Naturally, you were concerned. You worry that this might cost her in future. And since you were already horny before we started this conversation, you decided to kill two birds with one stone.” Which, he reflected, pleased with himself, was more or less what he was doing here.

He took one of her hands and placed it on his hip. “You decided to seduce me, so my influence would be on your daughter’s side.” He put her other hand on his ass, then changed his mind; that didn’t feel right. Instead he guided it up inside his Mandatum polo shirt to rest with the palm on his chest.

“You can remember the whole conversation. I’ve been sympathetic the whole time, but I can only promise so much. So you’re going to have to make me grateful, you think. And if you can do that while enjoying yourself, so much the better. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” she agreed.

Benton snapped his fingers. Her eyelids fluttered several times and he could actually see her awareness steadily return. Her attention focused on him, her fingertips twitched, her nails scratched delightfully across his chest. “I’m sure your father will listen to you,” she purred, “if you plead our case right. Won’t he?”

“Well, he’ll listen,” Benton said. “It might take a bit of time, that’s-”

He didn’t get to finish the sentence. Her mouth was on his, and as eager as she was to please, he believed he could tell the hunger underlying it was genuine. Tilly Roth didn’t have that same hunger, but her psych profile was, honestly, one he respected less. She was perfectly willing to offer anything a provider wanted, in order to be catered for. Or, as he’d put it, a gold digger - just one now who was locked into the most appropriate place.

His arms slid around her, kissing her back, and she moved against him. It was impossible not to remember that Tammy was a beautiful woman when she pressed against you, even with your eyes shut.

Her thigh slid between his legs, and he heard a satisfied noise deep in her throat as she discovered the erection within his pants.

She broke the kiss. “One second,” she breathed, looking into his eyes. Her hands found the waistband of her blue shorts and she worked them down. “Wouldn’t want to stain company assets,” she grinned.

That she could joke even under the pressure of the situation he’d programmed her to believe she was in excited him in a way he couldn’t explain. She reached out, took hold of his polo, pulled him closer to her. “I just worry about her,” she said to him, quietly. “And her future. So…”

Benton knew he had to make more of this opportunity to shape her. He didn’t want her thinking according to her own script. “At Mandatum we thought very highly of her,” he said softly. “Especially with such a devoted company woman for a momma.”

Tammy’s eyelids fluttered. Project Bankhaven wasn’t capable of overriding someone’s train of thought without overwriting their mind, as they’d had to with Liv Nystrom, but the possibility to shape them and steer them certainly existed. If she thought he believed that, the authority he held as a high ranking company official gave him the ability to steer her own assumptions.

“But not now?” She raised her head slightly, looking up at him with wide eyes, the full focus of her attention on him. “If there’s anything I can do…”

He licked his lips. “I can’t promise anything,” he said again.

Her hand crept down, skilled fingers finding and outlining his cock through his pants. “I’m sure a properly motivated Allen can do anything,” she said.

“We can,” he agreed, seeing an opportunity to pull her along the path and push back on her mindset as well. “But it has to be our choice. So are you asking me for help, Tammy?”

For that question she couldn’t meet his eyes. “I… yes,” she admitted quietly, head down, looking away.

“You may already know,” he said, “I’m very hands-on with Mandatum personnel who want to be on my personal staff.”

She giggled, and he smirked; it was nice to feel like he had the upper hand. “So if that’s what you want, you’re going the right way about it. But only because you’re following my cues.”

“Oh,” she said, and her voice was wavery with gratitude, “I completely understand, Benton.”

He lifted one hand to the back of her head and pulled her in for a kiss. She held it a long time, and when she broke it she lifted herself backward onto her desk, sitting with her thighs apart, bare below the hip. Her hands rose and tucked her hair behind her ears; bringing her arms in to her sides, she beckoned him closer, and reached down, stroking and squeezing his cock through the fabric as soon as he came in range.

“Take me out,” he said, but after she’d complied he made sure to take charge, hands on her hips, thrusting inside her. He set the pace and made her comply, and for the first time in a while he was glad to already have the practice. Making an impact on her was important here.

When she was already moaning and gasping, eager on the edge of orgasm, he leaned his head forward, putting his lips close to her ears and said “Mandatum is your life.” Her eyelids were fluttering, her attention elsewhere. It might well have slipped past without her questioning it.

It was going to have to.

*

“Are the logs going to show what we want?”

Nicole heard the question only dimly. She was glad when she heard another voice, equally muffled, speak up in answer. It seemed that Benton hadn’t been asking her.

“Yes, sir.”

She didn’t recognise the other voice. Not in her current state, anyway. Her head was pounding. She was waking up, slowly, but somehow she still felt as if she hadn’t slept.

“Good. And we can make it look like the Delaney phones just misfired?”

“You bet.”

“Right, then. That covers our asses. We just need the Board to see we’re taking action.”

“And that your dad isn’t.”

Benton laughed. Nicole winced. Something about the way he laughed didn’t suit her headache at all. “Exactly.”

“Well, we’ll make it work. Uh, the other thing you asked?”

“Oh.” Benton’s attention had sharpened. “The Brand Ambassador program. We’re good?”

“I just need a few names. I noticed you ran the tool yesterday?”

“Yeah, so far as I can see it works like a charm.” There was amusement dripping from his voice, and something else, some other quality that deeply unsettled Nicole. “I’m a lot happier about Tammy than I was.”

Oh, God. What’s he doing to my mom? The thought came to her instantly. Her skin crawled.

“Is she going to be on the list?”

“Pending Board approval. We don’t launch this program until the visit, because we don’t want to be seen as overstepping. But her, Kiki Morgan, Nattie Doyle, they’re all on my list. They came over fast, and Tammy and Kiki clearly know how to exercise control when they need to. Danni Brough, maybe.”

“You’re picking Morgan but not McKenna?”

“No, for the same reason I’m not sure about Brough. We have enough plans for the Broodmares, I don’t want to deliberately drag them into more projects.”

“Got it. So Delaney, Doyle, Morgan. Anyone else?”

“Mm, Jan Carter, thinking about it. That puts us on four. A round five feels good.”

Nicole cracked an eye open and looked around. She was lying curled up on what turned out to be a desk, in a room with several filing cabinets and a mop. Someone had tampered with the doorhandle so it couldn’t be unlocked from inside.

Resting atop one filing cabinet was a microwave, and on another, a selection of MaxiMart Value TV dinners. The voices were coming from outside, in any case, so snooping wasn’t an option.

“What about the Madison chick?” the other voice suggested. “Her daughter’s been slow to respond. I’d say that’s worth studying.”

“Yeah, she’s not a bad call,” Benton said. “Her hubby could do with pushing further into the right profile. Put Tori on the list, we’ll call those five Wave One.”

“No problem.”

“I’ll sound them out later this week. The moment the Board approves, you can add the API remotely.”

“Boss, it’s a pleasure working with you.”

She heard a door open and close. Moments later there was the clunk of a maglock disengaging and the door to the small office in which she had been resting opened.

Benton Allen stopped in the doorway. “Oh, you’re awake.” He sounded surprised. “Food’s over there, we put some water in the cabinet underneath. You should be out of here before you need anything else,” he said.

Nikki almost thanked him before Nicole caught herself. Instead she said nothing.

This didn’t seem to throw Benton at all, as much as she’d hoped it would. “The only question is where you’re out of here too,” he said. “That’ll depend on how willing you are to work with us. We need to understand how it happened.” He let that hang in the air for a few moments, but she didn’t bite.

“Come on, Nikki,” he said. “At least be a gracious loser.”

That stung her out of her strategy of silence. “The only loser I see in this room,” she retorted, “is you.”

It took Benton a moment to control his expression after that. What had passed over his face in the interim had been fleeting, flickering, hard to read. But Nicole was left with no doubt that her words had stung him, more than he would be willing to admit.

“We know what you put into the system,” he continued. “So it’s obvious you know what’s going on. But you should also understand, it’s an inevitability now.” He waited, but she didn’t answer. “If you tell us what tipped you off, that could be helpful. And that could lead to rewards.”

Again she stayed silent.

“You want to talk about it?”

“Fuck you.”

Benton shrugged. “Not with that attitude,” he said. “But attitudes, you know, they can be changed.”

He shut the door before she could answer. Nicole seethed; Somehow, him giving himself the last word felt like the worst part of that.