Chapter 81
[ 1,056 words ]
Katia’s POV
The board meeting ran two hours and forty minutes, which was thirty minutes longer than scheduled and entirely worth it.
Sam had prepared the expansion deck herself sixty-two slides, every number sourced, every projection conservative enough to be credible and ambitious enough to matter. She presented the first half, and I took the second, and by the time we reached the final slide, the room had the particular quality of held breath that meant the board had already decided and was waiting for someone to say it out loud.
“Dubai and London,” I said. “Simultaneously. Q2 next year p>
The chair of the investment committee looked at the projection on the screen. At the market share analysis. At the infrastructure cost breakdown, Sam had color-coded in a way that made the numbers easier to believe. He looked at all of it for a long moment.
“Approved,” he said.
The room exhaled.
Sam, sitting to my left, made no visible reaction. This was one of the things I most respected about her; she never celebrated until we were out of the room. She said it was professionalism. I suspected it was also superstition. Either way, I had adopted the same habit over the years, and we both sat with completely neutral expressions while the board discussed timelines and resource allocation and the particular logistical challenge of launching in two cities on two continents in the same quarter.
It was only in the elevator afterward, descending from the thirty-second floor with the doors closed and nobody watching, that Sam turned to me and said, “We’re going to be enormous p>
“We already are,” I said.
“More enormous p>
“Yes p>
She grinned that real one, the unmanaged one. “Dubai and London. At the same time. Do you know how many companies have tried to do this and p>
“Don’t,” I said. “Not until we’ve done it p>
She pressed her lips together. The grin stayed in her eyes. “Fine. Professionally: The Dubai office site assessment is ready for review, and the London lease negotiations begin next week.” She pulled out her tablet. “Also — and this came through while you were presenting — there’s an invitation p>
She handed me the tablet.
It was from WEG events. Julian’s office. A formal invitation to the Dubai 24 Hour Race as part of WEG’s VIP sponsor roster, with IG Technologies listed as an associated partner. Black card, gold lettering, the kind of thing that got printed and framed instead of filed.
I read it once. Then I read it again.
Dubai. The 24-Hour Race. The same week as the expansion launch conference.
The same week Catwoman had raced in Dubai every single year for the past four years.
I handed the tablet back to Sam without saying anything. The elevator reached the lobby. We walked through the glass doors into the afternoon, and the city did its usual thing, noise, movement, indifference, and I stood on the pavement for a moment while the implications arranged themselves in my head with the quiet inevitability of things that were always going to happen.
Julian would be there. Of course he would be there; he had just accepted the VIP sponsorship. I knew that from Gail, who had mentioned it with the particular casualness she used when she was telling me something she thought I should know without technically telling me she was telling me.
Julian would be there.
WEG security would be there.
And Catwoman had a race to get to.
“The invitation,” Sam said beside me. “Are we going p>
I thought about the man in the Bronx with the professional camera at my exit point. I thought about Zane’s file and Julian’s intelligence analyst and the calendar pattern that was building itself into something that was going to be very difficult to maintain. I thought about a facial recognition grid deployed across an event perimeter, which was the kind of thing that Julian Windsor would absolutely do and which Zane would absolutely let him.
I thought about the race itself. The Dubai circuit, two kilometers of desert-edge asphalt at the edge of the industrial port, and the specific way the air sat differently at night in the Gulf, and the corner sequence on the back straight that I had studied from footage for three years and never run in a car.
“The expansion conference,” I said. “When does it open p>
“Monday morning. The race is Sunday night p>
Sunday night. The conference is Monday morning. Twelve hours between the circuit and the boardroom, in the same city, with Julian Windsor at both.
I thought about all of that.
Then I thought about that back straight.
“We’re going,” I said.
Sam looked at me. “The conference or the race p>
I took the invitation from her hand. Looked at it one more time: the black card, the gold lettering, and Julian’s office embossed in the corner.
I folded it carefully along its original crease and put it in my bag.
“Both,” I said.
Sam was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet she produced when she was deciding whether to say something. I had known her long enough to know that when she decided not to say it, it was usually because she already knew the answer.
“I’ll book the flights,” she said.
“Business p>
“Obviously.” She was already on her phone. “Do you want adjacent rooms or separate floors p>
“Separate floors p>
“From Julian or from the race circuit p>
I looked at her.
She looked back with the expression of a woman who had been my closest ally for six years and had earned the right to ask exactly that question.
“Book the rooms, Sam,” I said.
She booked the rooms. I walked to the car and sat in the back and looked at the city moving past the windows and thought about a race I had been planning for a year and a man who was planning to find me at it and the specific, exhilarating, slightly terrifying fact that for the first time in four years of racing in Dubai, someone who was actually looking was going to be in the same room.
I had never been caught.
I did not intend to start in Dubai.
But I would be lying if I said the proximity of it wasn’t the most alive I had felt in weeks.
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