Free The Trespassers by Laura Z. Hobson

finally. “This won’t do. These letters reveal bad things.”
    “Wha—why, how do you mean, Jas?”
    “They show me clearly—you’ll deny it, but it’s too clear—that you resent having me the real head of this company. You’re trying already—oh, unconsciously of course—to wrest control from me. The dates on these letters show you’ve been trying it for quite a while. I didn’t suspect it.”
    “Why, you’re mad. I—”
    Timothy sprang to his feet, his features working in sudden outrage. Crown remained motionless, except for the tiny tap-tap-tap of the pencil point.
    “I said it was unconscious,” Crown said quietly. “But I can’t run risks, even with your unconscious. I’ve seen too many companies wrecked on disloyalty.”
    “Disloyalty? Disloy—” His voice rose shrill and oddly helpless. “I’ve worked like a dog, day and night, on this—I’ve stayed here in New York for weeks on end—haven’t seen my family or home—I’ve sold you my station, because I—”
    “Because you recognized that this could make a great public figure of you, Tim, and a millionaire to boot.”
    “Sure. Yes, sure, that too. But you can’t ascribe all—”
    “I’m not ascribing. I’m just putting two and two together. And I say—” He paused. He laid down the pencil. He looked at Tim and his eyes were motionless, stripped of all warmth. Not even anger flickered in their flat, dead quiet. “And I say I cannot and will not have any associate who’s in conflict about whether his first loyalty is to his own interests or to mine. We’d better call it quits now.”
    There was anger in the other’s eyes; rage in them, in his clamped jaws, his hand clenching on the edge of the desk. Tim leaned forward; when he spoke his voice strangled with shock and fury.
    “Why, you wouldn’t dare to give me the brush-off now. Mandreth would—why, if I explained to him, he’d withdraw his whole—there’d be a stink all over the Street—”
    “Mandreth wouldn’t do one damn thing, Tim.” Crown stared at him patiently. “He’s in this now, for his own interests, not for the love of Tim. Go and try it. The papers will be signed, anyway.”
    For one moment there was silence, as their glances held firm to each other.
    “You—you bastard,” Tim shouted. “You double-crossing bastard. You bought my station—you’ve signed a year’s contract with me—”
    “You’ll get a year’s salary. I never break a contract. I simply know I cannot and will not have an active associate—”
    “You never break a contract, don’t you! Why you—you—I sold you my station only because—”
    Jasper reached for a cigarette.
    “You sold it—you and your stockholders—because I offered you the biggest dough you and they had ever seen. I acted in perfectly good faith.”
    Timothy Grosvenor began to laugh. It was ugly. “Good faith. Oh, my God. Oh, Jesus. Good faith.”
    Jasper Crown’s face did not change.
    “And after acting in good faith,” he said deliberately, “I began very slowly to discover what you’ve been doing since”—he picked up the file of letters, riffled through them patiently, competently—“since about the first of the year. Today for the first time I checked back on my hunch. I see I was dead right. So I protect myself at once.”
    For long seconds there was bleak and dying silence between them. Then Timothy Grosvenor turned and left the room. Behind the softly, carefully closed door, Jasper shrugged. It was unpleasant. But only the network mattered. In war, only the result mattered. This was a war. A war with the companies that owned the field, a war with the ones in power.
    He lit the cigarette. There was something deeply, primitively good about spotting an enemy and having the guts to kill him.
    It was always pleasant to return to the office from a vacation, Vera Marriner was thinking, but today, her first day back after a month’s holiday, wasn’t running true to the usual lazy,