The Shadow Tycoon
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 41
In little more than three hours, William had eaten a late-night meal, lain on the bed playing weak, and the emergency-center doctors had somehow found certain things he did not recognize and smeared them onto his face, leaving him looking haggard and half-dead.
When he was finally wheeled out of the emergency center, everyone let out a breath of relief, including the Sabine City IRS Director, who had never gone home. He had stayed here the entire time, and only now did his heart settle back into place.
So long as William did not die, the matter would not spiral into something impossible to control. In truth, whether it was him, or the people above him, or the higher administrative organs, how could they possibly not know that there were certain problems in the way the work below was being carried out?
A certain amount of delegated power, even stepping over the line now and then, was not considered excessive. So long as the work was done, so long as the task was completed, then none of it was a problem.
Every year, across the Federation, there were no fewer than several hundred conflicts caused by the scale of law enforcement alone. In earlier years, there had likely been even more. And yet no one had seen the enforcement agencies stop reaching out because of it, still less seen them locked in a cage by their superiors.
But if William died, then this matter would become very difficult. Any effective, healthy mechanism had its own internal cleansing process, a way of cutting away corrupted parts, and the Federation government was no different.
The Federation’s Office of Internal Oversight was just such a special department. Within it were many subordinate branches, among the more famous being the Internal Corruption FBI, the Disciplinary Committee, and the Counter-Infiltration Investigation Office.
The moment public opinion started to boil over, some of those people would appear in Sabine City very quickly and begin investigating excessive law-enforcement conduct and possible abuse of office. Once that happened, the unlucky one would not be Michael alone.
A mere Investigation Unit Team Leader could not bear that kind of weight on his own. There would have to be someone tied to him and removed alongside him, and that someone was very likely to be a Director-level figure who had known and failed to report it.
Fortunately, William woke up.
That meant matters would not get too ugly, assuming one did not count the string of medical bills he was going to see later.
William had spoken with the doctor and brought about their little cooperation. By local standards, what the doctor had done did not count as any grave offense.
It had to be understood that in the Federation, medical institutions were controlled by medical conglomerates. Put another way, hospitals were effectively department stores run by capitalists wearing the skin of healthcare groups.
What they sold was something called health. If you wanted health, you paid money. Doctors and nurses were the salesmen. They did not work there to save lives and heal the wounded, however loudly they might proclaim otherwise.
From the very beginning, the reason they had learned medicine was to enter hospitals and become doctors or nurses, to join the ranks of the high-paid.
In essence, their real job was to generate profit for the conglomerate. So why should a doctor refuse a collaboration with no risk and a huge commission attached?
That, of course, was also why every time a president brought up healthcare reform, the people supported it. Treatment costs remained sky-high, hospitals remained cold and indifferent, and most people desperately wanted that to change, though it was truly difficult to achieve.
It was like asking great capitalists not to make money. They were not philanthropists. And even philanthropists, before they could hold out a bright red heart to others, first had to suck enough blood from common folk to fill it. That was, in practical terms, nearly impossible.
In any case, news that William had been violently coerced by Michael and left critically ill spread very quickly. Michael, still cooperating with the investigation at the station, had never imagined William’s injuries would be reported as this serious.
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