Chapter 23: Specialization

ALL KAITLYN REALLY WANTED to do was play golf. She was certain to become a force in the LPGA within a year or two if she could maintain her training. To maintain her training, she needed support. She hadn’t considered Henry a potential candidate the year before, but her visit home in the summer had moved him up the ladder.

It seemed her family had connections. Their connections wanted control—control of Open Cloak Design.

Her family had established a trust fund for Kaitlyn that could have supported her golf career. The fund, however, withheld that support until she was twenty-five or married. It looked like the family and their connections had nothing against using Kaitlyn to achieve their objectives.

The infant Open Cloak Design had strong potential in the market, but no proven track record. The connections—a company Henry couldn’t decipher the name of because it was named in Chinese characters—had determined the quickest and easiest way to gain control of the Open Cloak was to marry into it. They were ruthless in using other people.

When Kaitlyn had been rejected by Henry, she put together the plan to fake a pregnancy and pressure Henry to marry her. That, too, had failed. She was desperate. The promise of funding for her golf career from the trust fund she would gain control of if she married Henry was disappearing.

Unknown to Kaitlyn, within three days of her confrontation with Henry, all these details were known to him. His AI driven search had uncovered the conspiracy, the email, text messages, and even phone conversations through two degrees of separation.

Henry was up all night Monday, analyzing the data from his search of Kaitlyn. His AI had revealed the data, but making sense of it was a process that could take him days. What he understood immediately, though, was he needed to neutralize the threat from Kaitlyn. That was his most immediate problem. If she wasn’t pregnant—which he assumed—she might try desperately getting pregnant so she could blame him. There was just too much destruction of lives involved with that.

While Henry had gained access to email, bank accounts, the trust, and other documents, the problem with interfering in them was that much of the communication between her parents and their connections was in Mandarin. While his AI could tap other sources to get a reasonably accurate translation of their conversation, he could not depend on it to translate an English message into Chinese. He could comprehend the translated messages from Mandarin to English, but they were nothing like what a native English speaker would say. He could only assume the opposite would also be true.

While Henry had no particularly loving feelings toward Kaitlyn, he didn’t want to see her hurt for the pressure that had been put on her. She needed a secure financial outlook. Her parents could have given her that at any time by changing the terms of the trust. The next four years would be critical for Kaitlyn’s development.

It took Henry two more days to decide what to do. At what point was it okay to do something technically illegal to save someone from people who were applying illegal—or at best unethical—pressure against them?

A year ago, he’d struck out at a man threatening Chastity. He’d supplied evidence of wrong-doing to police and the university. And he’d asked Paul Riordan for help. Tom had died in a supposed gun battle in front of Chastity’s apartment building. He deserved it. Kaitlyn didn’t. And attacking her parents and their connections could lead to a different kind of conflict—one Henry wasn’t sure he could win.

He thought her parents had been pressured to use their daughter as well. The trust fund they’d established for her was in the millions and would give her a great head start on life.

He finally decided to act.

It was not that difficult to break into a bank if you were only targeting one customer. He could impersonate her parents and have access. The bank was in San Francisco, so the documents and communications he needed were in English. He changed the terms of the trust so it would transfer to Kaitlyn upon reaching the age of 25 or having graduated from college. That meant she’d gain control of the trust in June. He also had the trustee changed so her parents could not alter it again. Then he sent the necessary correspondence from her parents to the bank and from the bank to Kaitlyn.

Since graduation was still five months away, nothing would show up immediately other than Kaitlyn being notified that the terms had changed. That should satisfy her need to marry Henry in order to get the trust money and partial control of the company. She was free and he erased all signs of his interference.

Henry did not, however, trust that the connections would be satisfied with the results. They wanted his company and he’d be damned if he let them have it. He’d reduced the range of the hacking counterattack software on the company server. He reactivated the full range but set the software to alert him to any perceived attack rather than to counter immediately. He connected the alert to his phone so he would get it at any time and location.