Free The Green Gyre by Saul Tanpepper Page A

and gawked. Some chuffed and made equally nonsensical noises, while others scowled bemusedly at his kaleidoscopic choice of words. He was vaguely aware of them, of course, and more than a little irritated that they would be so entertained at his expense. They were the ones intruding on his unhappiness. How dare they pretend outrage? What right had they to mock his misfortune with their piteous stares?
    When Mark pulled the phone away from his ear and glared at it as if he was about to hurl it into the lily pad-stippled cesspool of a pond at his feet, he could sense that more than a few of the onlookers were silently cheering him on.
    Fine! Let them!
    He blinked and scowled defiantly at them, recognizing preemptively the folly of such an imprudent act as tossing away a phone that might still be returnable, yet at the same time remaining wretchedly ignorant of his own impudence. He didn’t throw the phone — he wouldn’t give the ignorant jerks the pleasure — and he certainly wasn’t going to lower his voice. “Shot to bleeping hell,” he bellowed again.
    Adam was currently stuck in stop-and-go traffic on the San Mateo Bridge heading into San Francisco and wishing he’d never answered the call in the first place; an apocalyptic feeling had been building up inside of him all morning, climaxing in the moment the phone buzzed in the readily-accessible nest of his crotch. Don’t answer it, Adam . He was now regretting not heeding this inner prophet and wishing he’d just left the damn thing in his jacket pocket out of reach on the back seat.
    “You hear me?” came Mark’s tinny shriek, crackling and distorting as it attempted to squeeze through the inadequate speaker. Adam pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it with an almost frightening sense of denouement. He wondered what Mark would do if he tossed the thing out the window. “I’ve lost everything!”
    A highly controversial but well-read financial blog, T HE T ECHNOCRAT , had published a scathing exposé of an internal memo which Mark had drafted after meeting with the Grosvenor’s Investment Group two days before. Sensitive details — details he’d painstakingly kept away from the public’s eye — had been leaked. An anarchist by the name of Auntie Dote had claimed credit; Mark had no idea who this self-proclaimed corporate avenger was, but he was sure he’d find out soon enough. As a result of the blog post, people he’d done business with in the past were lining up to make spurious claims of his supposed strong-arm tactics. “Borderline illegal,” was the actual phrase used. He was called several names. “High Seeds Marauder” was just one of the mildest.
    Mark the Shark, indeed , he muttered, sipping his iced latte. I’ll sue this Technocrap blog and its stupid Auntie Dope.
    The epithets shouldn’t have bugged him as much as they did, since they weren’t exactly accurate. He had no interest in the paltry few million those stupid angel investors tried to inveigle him with. He needed at least fifty million; a hundred would’ve done quite nicely, thank you.
    Yet despite these errors and the false claims that he’d ruthlessly stalked and threatened high-stakes financiers, the damage had been done. The scandal managed to completely derail a delicate process which he’d obsessively nurtured over the past eighteen months.
    And, okay, maybe some of the things he’d done during that time weren’t exactly ethical when viewed by the light of day, but they sure as hell weren’t illegal. Not in New York, anyway.
    Now he was taking his frustrations out on Adam, who, Mark would’ve admitted if asked under calmer circumstances, didn’t really deserve the brunt of his unbridled wrath. But the two men had grown up together, had attended college together. They were blood brothers, for God’s sake, having fought side-by-side in a half-dozen boardroom battles. Mark brought the passion and vision, and, as Mark often pointed out, Adam’s