Mixed Signals Read online

  Frank looked over at him with a wan but sincere smile. “I lucked out in the brother-in-law department.”

  “Damn right you did.” He stood up. “You need some time?”

  “No. I don’t. Paulie will attack Corsak with all barrels, and I don’t like the guy for his part in getting me kicked out, but no one deserves that. And Paulie… hell, I guess he deserves what’s coming to him.”

  “Okay. I’ll let them know. For now, we’re having the PR team play off the angle that you had no idea that Benjamin ran MudzNewz, and the whole family is uniting to support you during this difficult time.”

  “True enough,” Frank said with a sigh.

  “And it lets us all get together for meetings without raising any alarms for Paulie. Not sure what Benjamin’s plan is there, but expect him to reach out to you by email or text. We’ve got to keep up the appearance that he’s on the complete outs with the family. Your father has set him up with Fidanza.”

  Frank just nodded. The detective agency had been on retainer with the family since the 1920s, and there were some rumors about how that might have related to prohibition, but no one had proof they wanted to admit to.

  Warren nodded, too, then left Frank to stew in his own misery. His phone pinged again, and knowing it was probably something from Benjamin did not help his mood. He decided to let everyone wait while he caught up on sleep. He thought he might have trouble nodding off, but the exhaustion from his shift and the stress and the after-workout crash sent him into a deep, dreamless slumber.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  FRANK WOKE up just in time for dinner. With a groan he rolled over onto his back and mentally sorted through the previous couple of days, from his training flight with Benjamin to his talk with Warren earlier that day. It all felt surreal from the other side of a good few hours’ sleep, and he was half hoping that maybe it was all just a bad dream.

  He heard his phone ping again from the living room and realized with a sinking stomach that it was all very, very real.

  After getting up and putting on comfy sweats, he ordered a pizza for delivery and sat down with his phone. Not surprisingly, there were rafts of texts from Nancy and Camila, two from his father, and one from Benjamin.

  He decided to get the inevitable out of the way and called his father first. Like ripping off a Band-Aid, he thought sourly.

  “Francis,” his father said, his voice warm and gentle. Obviously things were worse than Frank thought.

  “Father.”

  “Warren let us know that you have agreed to the plan.”

  Frank bit down on commenting how it felt more like he had been gang-pressed into service than that he had voluntarily agreed to anything, but he knew that would not go far with his father. “It’s for the best.”

  “For what it’s worth, Benjamin was against it,” his father said, far too casually.

  “Warren mentioned it.”

  “Hm.” His father paused for a long moment, and Frank let it sit. “You know I have to do this, Francis.” He actually sounded like he had regrets, and that broke through Frank’s resolve to be angry at him.

  “I think I understand. Warren explained some things…. I get it, anyway. I know you are angry at Paulie, and hell, I am too. So, thanks?” Frank squinted in chagrin. He always had trouble having heart-to-heart talks with his father. His mother had been the easy one to talk to.

  “I’m putting you in the hot seat, so don’t thank me yet. But you might call Benjamin; I believe you two have a lot to talk about.”

  Frank ground his teeth together. “He used me. I’m not feeling much like talking that out.”

  “Did he? I’m not sure he did. Nancy’s on the fence about it, but she’s hated that website for a while now, so that’s a natural reaction.”

  “Stay out of it, Father,” Frank grumbled.

  “Ah, okay then.” His father cleared his throat. “He will be contacting you to arrange things. You, in fact, will be his only contact with the family from here on out. Fidanza has set up some kind of anonymous drop. It’s all very Three Days of the Condor.”

  “Am I Robert Redford, or you?”

  “I think in this case it might actually be Benjamin. We’ll see,” his father said with a chuckle. “I love you, my dear boy.” He hung up before Frank had a complete emotional breakdown, which he was grateful for. Sometimes a fast exit was the best way to go, he thought, the sour feeling back in his stomach.

  The pizza arrived, though, and he was legitimately hungry, so he sat down to eat and allowed himself one and only one beer. Getting drunk and maudlin was far too likely a possibility to let happen. He groaned when his phone rang again, assuming it was probably Nancy. Instead he saw it was the number Paulie had texted him from.

  “Hello?”

  “Call him off, Frank,” Paulie said. He sounded exhausted, and Frank was annoyed that he knew Paulie so well that he could recognize that.

  “Who?” He sat back and propped his feet up on the coffee table, interested in where Paulie was going to take the conversation.

  “I know Corsak is working for your little fuck toy, so call. Him. Off.”

  “You do? Because I don’t. Until your text I had no fucking clue what was going on. I didn’t know Kaplan ran MudzNewz, and hell, I had forgotten Corsak’s name. So this is all on you.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Frank. Just give up.”

  “You first.” He ended the call.

  He tapped his phone on his leg for a moment, then pulled up Benjamin’s text from the day before. Out of context it looked fairly innocuous, but it made Frank’s blood boil. Benjamin had clearly sent it after the scandal broke and had been hoping to do damage control. Frank snorted, then typed out his response: Paulie called, asked me to get you to call off Corsak.

  The response was immediate: Check your email, follow the instructions.

  Frank snorted. It was, indeed, all very much like a spy movie. He got on his laptop and found an email from an anonymous source telling him how to set up a completely untraceable email connection through a “tor browser” that Frank had no idea about. The only reason he trusted the instructions was because of Benjamin’s text, and also, the email was signed “Fly Lucha Libre.” He tried not to smile at the inside joke but failed.

  Once it was set up, he sent an email to the address specified in the instructions, then waited. Then he got an email from a different address entirely, also signed “Fly Lucha Libre,” asking what Paulie had said in the phone call. If it wasn’t Benjamin, then Frank was screwed, but he gave a rundown of the conversation and ended it with now what?

  There was no immediate reply so he pulled up Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings extended edition and, instead of a beer, got one of his treasured pints of cookie dough ice cream. By the time everyone was in Rivendell and the carton of ice cream was scraped clean, a reply popped up. Frank was honestly surprised it wasn’t in code, but apparently Benjamin trusted all the encryption-whatever he had Frank do.

  Looks like Teague is getting a little desperate. Corsak sent him a nasty email right after the story broke about MN, and I’m sure he was expecting that story to rein Corsak in. Right now I’m fielding a lot of flak about MN, keeping Teague off the board on my end. Your family is publicly shunning me, so your disappearing act is working to advantage there. I figure you have two ways to play this: 1) turn mean, act like you knew all about the blackmail Corsak and I were up to, demand to meet with Teague because you’re an asshole who wants to see him squirm 2) keep playing it like you were completely ignorant of the scheme and want to get the truth from him. Act like you’re still brokenhearted, can’t believe the “lies” etc. etc. Your call.

  FRANK LET the email sit while he watched the rest of the movie, trying not to dwell on the options. He appreciated that Benjamin had not mentioned their relationship at all, that for the moment he was keeping things businesslike and aboveboard.

  The real question was, what would Paulie fall for? His ego was huge—when t
hey were young, that had been part of the attraction. If nothing else, Frank knew how to play into it. Putting Paulie on the defense would not get the confession Frank’s father wanted on record. No, he was going to have to act like he was innocent and heartbroken. Not that it would be hard to do, because all he needed was to tap his feelings for Benjamin. Gritting his teeth, he emailed back simply with the words Option 2.

  The reply was again quick, this time with simple request for him wait until the morning to reach out to Paulie to set up a meeting.

  Still feeling emotionally whipped, it was easy for him to fall back in bed a few hours later after finishing up The Two Towers. Soon enough, morning broke bright and annoying through his windows and he got up, stomach churning, to fix himself some coffee. After drinking a cup followed by a protein shake, he dialed Paulie back.

  “Come to your senses?”

  “Jesus, Paulie. Give me a break—I really didn’t know.”

  Paulie just grumbled, “Hold on, let me take this to my office.” There were some noises in the background, so Frank kept quiet. “Okay. I’m back.”

  “What do you want me to say? I didn’t know Kaplan ran MudzNewz.”

  “You reopened your discharge. I figured you were using Kaplan to reach out to Corsak to blackmail me.”

  “The hell I would! Does that even sound like me? Come on!” Frank seethed. “It was Dickhead, wasn’t it?”

  “Dick is my campaign manager, Frank.” Paulie sighed. “So yes, I listen to what he says. Despite what your father thinks, I’m not stupid.”

  Gunster had been an asshole when they were all at school together, and Frank was pretty sure time had not improved his personality. The problem with Gunster was that, for all his shady connections, he was smart, far smarter than Paulie, and his ambitions were as high as his IQ. Frank had never trusted the bastard.

  “Whatever. I’m telling you, I had no idea.” He took a breath. It was time to pull the trigger. “Corsak trying to blackmail you…. What the hell is up with that anyway?”

  There was a long enough pause that Frank knew Paulie was scrambling to answer. He had expected Frank to believe Corsak; that was clear. “He’s claiming that I paid him off to set you up.”

  “Did you?” He paused just long enough for Paulie to start to answer, then interrupted. “No. Don’t answer that. I want to see you. I want you to tell me to my face that you did not do that.”

  “That’s… that’s not a great idea right now, Frank.”

  “You owe me that, Paulie! After breaking my heart—”

  “You broke up with me!” Paulie hissed. “I was there for you, Frank. I was there to help you pick up the pieces of your life, and you dumped me!”

  Frank held himself back from yelling about how little Paulie respected him, how many years he had strung him along, how demeaning it was to be treated like a piece of ass on the side of Paulie’s “respectable” marriage. He took another deep breath. “In person, Paulie. To my face.”

  “Fuck you. No.” Paulie hung up.

  Frank nodded to himself. If Gunster got his claws in, he might keep Paulie away, but Frank knew his ex very well. After the first rush of temper, Paulie would decide he could manipulate Frank’s feelings and agree to meet. So for the moment, it was a waiting game. He went about doing some stretches to loosen up the kinks from pushing his workout too far yesterday and then put a call in to Nancy to let her yell at him and then cry, then yell again. She was sympathetic to Frank’s feelings, that much was clear, but 100 percent backing their father on the “destroy Paulie and everything he loves” plan. Frank was torn between feeling grateful and angry, but figured that was for hashing out with the family later.

  He was making himself a sandwich for lunch when his phone pinged.

  It was a text from Paulie with a date, time, and location.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  BENJAMIN WENT home after the horrible yet also terrifying meeting with the Sheldon Unified Front to find not one but two local news trucks camped outside of his house. He barreled inside yelling “no comment!” loudly and repeatedly before slamming the door in their faces. He had texted Rachel earlier to stay at Maddox’s (he made a note that he needed to meet the guy in person soon), then booted up MudzNewz.

  As he suspected, the inbox for the site was overflowing, mostly with trolls yelling at him about being a hypocrite. He pulled up the statement that Warren’s firm had drafted up for him—who knew there was even such a thing as a public relations lawyer? But there was, and she had worked with Benjamin on what to say. Afterward there were secret handshakes all around, and then Benjamin had flounced out of the building looking furious, trying to keep the fiction up that he had been kicked to the curb by the Sheldons for the reporters camped out in the parking lot.

  The statement hurt to post, but it was no less than he deserved. He had betrayed the spirit of the site by literally and figuratively getting into bed with Frank, and he knew it. The statement was official-sounding but not defensive. He admitted the situation in bare, professional terms and then explained that he was already in the process of turning the site over to new management. Whom, he realized, he probably needed to inform of the fact. He emailed the two people he had chosen, offering the site as a turnkey operation and letting them know that they would both have administrative access, so they could either learn to get along or fight it out. He told them he would provide full access one week from the date of the email.

  That was either enough time to break the Teague scandal or for it to collapse.

  Much like, he suspected, his relationship with Frank had already collapsed.

  It was the height of selfishness to mostly be upset about that, he knew it, but he also acknowledged the fact that he was not a saint. Sheldon-Kane’s campaign was important, Frank’s reputation was important, taking Teague down was important—but it all felt like mere shadows of the real pain Benjamin was holding back like a dam.

  He had fallen in love with the last person he should have even been talking to, and now he was going to have to live with the heartbreak. He had no one to blame but himself, because Frank was going through enough shit and did not need guilt on top of that. He thought about texting that much to Frank, but he decided to wait until he could talk to him in person. It was at that point he realized their communication channels were probably compromised, so he emailed Frank very detailed, step-by-step instructions on setting up a secure connection between them via anonymous email. Nothing was 100 percent foolproof, but it was better than using text messaging or their personal emails.

  In the meantime, he put his paranoia to good use and pulled out one of the burner phones he kept in a box in his closet, activated it with a prepaid credit card he had set up under an alias, then called the contact he had been given at the Fidanza Agency. He expected to be treated like a pariah, but the guy, Shemer Wysocki, was very nice and very Jewish, so they bonded pretty quickly, Shemer mostly being concerned about whether or not Benjamin had access to homemade hamantaschen for Purim later that month.

  Otherwise, they did not have much to talk about until Frank contacted Benjamin and let him know if they were green-lit for meeting Teague. Benjamin was too worked up to just sit around and do nothing, but he was not able to leave the house without being followed or otherwise tracked. In what was a total regression to his lost days of grief and anger after his parents died, he got online and logged into his favorite MMORPG and joined the first campaign he could leverage himself into. He figured killing digital monsters was at least 75 percent therapeutic.

  He broke for a late lunch, then spent a couple of hours clearing out the MudzNewz inbox again, aggressively deleting any message that looked even faintly hostile. He was the mod, and he figured it was his right to firebomb trolls. There were actually a couple of possibly genuine hot tips, which he marked for follow up by the new admins. He stayed off the news feeds, not feeling up to seeing his or Frank’s reputations dragged through the mud (oh the irony, he thought with a frown).r />
  A little after 7:00 p.m., he got a text from Frank saying he had talked to Paulie. Benjamin told him to check his email, and soon enough they had a secure connection set up. Frank outlined his talk with Teague and ended with what now?

  Benjamin went back to his MMORPG to stress-shoot anything that moved. He got kicked out of the group he had joined, but that fit his mood.

  He eventually replied and when he asked how Frank wanted to play it, he got Option 2 and that was it.

  Clearly, Frank was not in the mood to talk. At least not to Benjamin.

  From there, things cascaded: Frank set up the meeting with Teague for the next day at 1:00 p.m., at the steak house with the private rooms. Benjamin wondered if that was a good idea, but Shemer pointed that there was no real reason for them to not be seen meeting semipublicly, since they were known to be old friends from childhood, and it could be spun in the short term by Sheldon PR as Teague reaching out to comfort Frank during a turbulent time. Benjamin gritted his teeth, but he knew it was the right way to play it. It was a given that Shemer would have to be the one to meet with Frank to set up the “wire,” which was less a prop from a 1980s spy movie and more a very discreet, powerful, miniature wireless microphone glued to the underside of Frank’s tie. Frank argued by email that he could just use his phone, but Benjamin pointed out that Teague would definitely ask him to turn his phone off for that very reason.

  At that point Benjamin had to decide how to handle the recording. Obviously, it would be broken on MudzNewz, and whatever hit the site’s reputation had taken, there would not be much Teague could do once the recording was out in the open. The real trick would be for Frank to acknowledge that he had made the illegal recording on purpose, which would probably tank his chances of getting his USAF discharge changed but would seal the deal on Teague’s campaign. Tapping his finger against his keyboard without typing anything, Benjamin thought it over. He sent his idea to Shemer, who approved it with reservations, and only with Benjamin’s promise to keep it under wraps.