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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Pascaline gave the panicky ashen-faced Fatima a discreet wave as she found a chair for herself in the back of the worn family conference room. It was fun to have a secret, but maybe not so kind to the help. Grandpere, good old Sadou Moussa, blinked on his throne of an old office chair and asked querulously for another cup of coffee, expressing his usual obliviousness. She wasn’t sure if he was just that tired or if he no longer respected the people on the call enough to project any vitality he didn’t feel. He took the coffee steaming with plenty of sugar despite both the heat and his only semi-controlled type 2 diabetes. The air-conditioning in the family villa had gone out again, but they did have electricity. A backup generator rumbled a steady hum against the back wall. City power hadn’t had brownouts in a couple weeks, but for this meeting they needed to be prepared. Uncle Benoit was fucking everything up. Again.

Personally somewhat clear of his influence, Pascaline did sympathize. It was fun to be the one with the power to break things. She hid a smile at the remembered rage-filled phone call from the City of Yaoundé public electric utilities assistant director. They’d hired away a lot of very good electrical engineering techs for the new geothermal plants. That included the former director, who’d previously been both severely underpaid and severely overworked. Naturally as the new foreman for launcher electrical construction, he was even more overworked now, but he was no longer underpaid. The mayor had called shortly after and apologized to “Sadou Moussa’s granddaughter” for his subordinate’s rude language and asked about buying profit shares in the launcher.

Maurie landed in the chair next to Pascaline only bare seconds before the screens flickered on to display Uncle Benoit’s face. Their comfortably middle-aged uncle radiated confidence, and even had a wineglass filled with something bubbly positioned just so on the desk in front of him so the camera angle would include it in the livestream but not block his face. His silk suit suggested the air-conditioning was working just fine in his home office.

“We are completely screwed, aren’t we?” Maurie whispered into her ear.

Fatima hissed a shushing sound and angled the feed to focus on Grandpere and to leave the two of them tiny in the large screen’s background. It made them look as if they were at a kids’ table for a family meal and not the two people running the most valuable project their family had ever seen. On the screen against the wall, aunts and uncles started to fill in squares on the family call. Maurie craned her neck to try to see. Pascaline chose the more comfortable option and joined the meeting on her own comm with no outgoing audio or video.

A lot of people were present today. Almost all of them. Uncle Jacques was looking tired and wearing working coveralls instead of the pristine suit he usually favored for Sadou events. Aunt Julienne appeared triumphant, but she still had worry wrinkles forming a permanent fold between her eyebrows. More second cousins and extended family with half-share votes joined. Many members were appearing actually live on camera as required in the bylaws for their votes to be counted instead of using the more common unmoving photo profile. They were older than their pictures and a handful had the too wide pupils of narcotic indulgence. The bylaws made no limitation on how sober a voting member had to be.

Pascaline snapped her fingers once below the table to draw Maurie’s attention to a side chat she’d started.

Great Aunt Mami appeared on Pascaline’s comm in the one-to-one call. The woman sat propped up on pillows in her clinic bed, looking exhausted and defeated. She was speaking instead of typing, but Pascaline made the program text-caption the words while Fatima worked on setting up the room’s audio levels to Grandpere’s liking.

“I tried, Pascaline. It’s over. I even paid old debts with some of the narc suppliers to see if our family addicts would get high and miss this vote, but Benoit has enough of their household staffs on his side that it made no difference.” Great Aunt Mami hugged herself tight, pulling an IV line and wincing at the pinch. “I hope no one overdoses.”

Pascaline started typing a response. “Great Aunt, it’s all fine…”

But before she could send, her great aunt shook her head. “I can’t watch this.” The old woman ended her participation in the call. Shit. But, it was still fine. Pascaline pulled up a messaging app to tell Great Aunt Mami the details of why she was sure it would work out.

A bang of the conference room door earned a squeak and a glare from Fatima. Philip Chao stuck his head in and then was pulled right back out again. Endeley Adamou stepped inside alone and shut the door, soundlessly, behind him. He was looking very fine. Pascaline stopped to admire him. But for the brief moment when he met her eyes, he looked embarrassed and a little bit belligerent. It was as if he’d done the wrong thing but didn’t want to admit it yet. He paused to compliment Fatima on something and then seated himself, not in the empty chair next to her, but closer to the exit on the far side of Maurie.

Fatima adjusted the room video feed to refocus on Sadou Moussa and leave off all the back-wall chairs entirely.

Maurie let out a low groan and rubbed her temples.

“Side effects turning bad again?” Adamou asked in a whisper. He put a hand on her forehead.

Maurie flicked off his hand. He looked at the empty side tables and jerked his chin at Fatima, miming for her to bring over some drinks.

“I have a screaming headache, and I’d like to kill you for slamming that door,” Maurie grumbled. “Yes, it is a known side effect of a drug regimen that’s finally letting me not have raging vision-inducing fever spikes. But since I can’t function, I’m going to have to go back to babbling at fuzzy nightmares that aren’t there. Happy, jerk?”

He leaned over Maurie to grin at her. “Her snakes have fur now? Should we be concerned?”

“I meant the way the things waver in and out of focus like heat shimmers over asphalt on a muggy day.” She shook her head. “Never mind. Not important.” Maurie stared straight ahead at the screen.

Pascaline winced at Grandpere’s slumped posture in the director’s chair. He should’ve been either relaxed as a proud king of the lion pride or growling in fury about to destroy Benoit and the cowards who’d enabled him. Instead he was blinking sleepily at his coffee as if Uncle Benoit were right to be taking over the family. Pascaline reminded herself that she didn’t care. She’d protected the launcher. She didn’t have to have a solution for protecting the family too.

Adamou nestled closer to Maurie. Pascaline’s eyes narrowed. The man was trying to pick a fight with her. What had he done now that made him feel guilty enough to try to get her to verbally throw the first punch? He hadn’t given build-site workers orders again without permission. She’d made sure of that.

He leaned even nearer to Maurie. Her cousin twitched like she wanted to elbow Adamou in the gut, but at the final moment decided it would be too rude and pulled her whole arm and shoulder back in. Her move left Adamou gaping at a female cringing away from his touch. It was likely a first-time experience for the man, Pascaline judged.

She muffled her laugh and it came out as a snort.

Fatima bustled over with a drinks cart. She shook a finger at Adamou and then proffered a drink to Pascaline. She sipped. It was a perfect fancy iced coffee. Someone had used fresh roasted beans to make a delicious brew and then mixed it with melted chocolate and just the right amount of cane sugar before pouring it all over a mound of shaved ice. The double-layer metal travel mug would keep it chilled for her through the whole meeting.

“He doesn’t deserve you,” Fatima said, “even if he did message ahead and ask me to make that drink for you.” Pascaline was inclined to agree, but he did apologize nicely. The updated microtremor-predictor model delivered after the screw-up with the launcher build interference was nice. That he’d also included three dozen white roses showed that the man had promise.

“Hey, I’m a catch,” Adamou insisted.

Fatima sniffed, and deposited drinks for Maurie and Adamou. “You have some sort of plan?” She looked to Pascaline and sounded hesitant and scared.

“You’ll be okay even if I have to pay your salary myself,” Pascaline said, “but, Uncle Benoit does have the votes.”

Maurie grimaced.

“What?” Adamou asked.

Of course he didn’t get it. The way the Sadou family operated wasn’t obvious to outsiders. They were the wealthy on their way back to poverty if Uncle Benoit took control. Pascaline let Adamou talk rather, attempting to explain.

He said, “Look, I just stopped by briefly to tell you…”

Fatima cut Adamou off. “Uncle Benoit has the vote to take control of the family funds. To distribute out the launcher moneys in quarterly dividends, including all the working cash, not just the profits,” she said. She handed Pascaline a street vendor’s bakery bag heavy with makala. Maurie received nothing for a beat. Then, following ingrained manners Fatima clearly would’ve rather have ignored, she pushed a bottle of water and some ibuprofen tablets at Maurie.

“I can’t take these,” Maurie said. “They interact badly with what I’m already on.”

“Then drink the water,” Fatima snapped.

On screen Uncle Benoit took an early sip of his celebratory champagne, and an off-camera staffer topped it off.

“Spending the launcher capital would be stupid of him, but he’d do it,” Maurie added.

“I’ll take that as, ‘Thank you, Fatima.’ And ‘I appreciate your help, Fatima,’” the young woman said with a scowl.

“Good coffee,” Pascaline said.

That was not a thank-you, but Fatima gave a sharp nod as if it were. “Yes, it is. Anytime, Ms. Pascaline.”

Maurie groaned some more, continuing to rub her temples.

While the formal conference was getting set up by people like Fatima at family compounds and boats around the world, a lively text chat had sprung up. Several were attempting to plan parties and events with the anticipated money Benoit was expected to forward to their respective trust accounts, but Aunt Julienne had her keyboard stuck in all-caps mode and was ranting about Reuben. Again. It seemed she hadn’t been able to have her weekly phone call with her boy yesterday and thought everyone should be writing complaints to the jailhouse on her behalf.

“We’ll be fine because of Adamou,” Maurie said. The cold water seemed to clear her head enough to process details. And unlike Pascaline, she had the social conditioning to try to explain it all. “Adamou won’t sign off on emptying the TCG-funded accounts for our launcher build prematurely. We should still be protected.”

“Uh, about that…” Adamou said.

Pascaline speared him with a glare.

“So I told him about the family strife,” Maurie said, misinterpreting the focus of Pascaline’s look. “Not like he wasn’t going to figure it out, and besides he needed to know why he had to be added to the accounts as the ‘signatures required’ person.”

“I can’t be that guy,” Adamou said. “But I’ve got a solution.”

“Of course you can be that guy,” Pascaline ground out. “You’ve already accepted. I sat next to you at the bank and watched you become ‘that guy.’”

“Well, about that,” he said again. This time both of them kept silent, demanding he finish. “So Chief Endeley found out. He’s not pleased. The lawyers told him that it really would open up the Bakweri for possible legal entanglements. So I went to the bank to put Philip Chao on the accounts instead.”

Maurie covered her face with her hands.

“He’s not remotely qualified to stand up to this sort of pressure,” Pascaline leaned over Maurie to hiss at Adamou.

“I, ah, didn’t realize there’d be quite so much pressure this soon. And he’s not actually on the accounts right now.”

“Good.” Pascaline sat back. “And he won’t be. You stay on it, and do it like I told you.”

“But I’m not on the accounts either. The bank manager let me withdraw myself, but I couldn’t put Chao on without your two co-signatures. Well, my signature isn’t needed at all now since I’m off it.”

“We’re getting tossed out of the family,” Maurie said. “There’s no other way. We have to say ‘no’ to the fund transfers, and we will get kicked out.”

“Thank you so much, Adamou,” Pascaline said. “I suppose you can also tell your beloved uncle and chief—”

Fatima grabbed Grandpere’s comm from the table and ran from the room. The door slammed. Grandpere sighed and leaned over himself to turn up the speakers and key on his microphone. “Is everyone hearing me okay?” he asked.

“No,” Uncle Benoit said. “Not okay.” His voice was loud and crackly. “But none of that is yours to trouble about anymore, Uncle Moussa. I have the votes,” he said. The call formally began. No chitchat. No inquiries into everyone’s health or even a more thorough check to see if everyone could see and hear. “Moussa is out, and I’m in.”

A clamor of cheers and lifted alcoholic beverages in the various screens confirmed that most did have audio at least.

The door banged open again, and Philip Chao ran in. “She said I have to tell everyone to wait!” he said.

Even Adamou winced. Nobody on the conference call paid Philip’s outburst any attention.

Philip’s brows pinched together, inexperienced with being ignored. He turned, where else, to Pascaline. “What do I do?”

She shrugged. “Quit? Go job hunting somewhere else? Try to sell a tell-all to the tabloids?”

“Ignore that last suggestion,” Adamou advised. “The tabloids in Europe and North America don’t know enough about Sadous to care and the African tabloids are owned by friends of Sadou Moussa and wouldn’t print it.”

“Wait. Is my job gone? I thought I was doing a good job.” Philip paled with genuine shock. “I’m fired?”

Adamou turned back to Pascaline. “We go straight to the bank. Maybe we can get me back on the accounts again before any funds-transfer requests go through. If anyone asks, we just don’t mention that I was ever off the accounts.”

“No,” Maurie said. “We go up to the work site and prepay for as much work as we possibly can. Buy some time to get close to another payment milestone and try to talk Uncle Benoit into giving the launcher a chance.”

“He only got the votes because he promised them immediate cash,” Pascaline said. “If we spend it before they can get it, he’ll lose his support, but that won’t mean support will go back to Grandpere.”

The door slammed open again, and Reuben marched into the room. Grandpere grinned, absolutely unsurprised.

“Little Benoit,” Sadou Moussa said. “You have to actually take that formal voice vote. Reuben can go first.”

Aunt Julienne’s eyes widened as her son sat down next to his grandfather. “Hello, family,” he said. “You’re all assholes. And I’m voting for our Grandpere, who is the only one of you to ever visit me in person. Uncle Benoit, hi there. Thanks for blocking my trust access when I tried to get a lump sum out for bail and blocking it again when I tried to get a retainer for a decent lawyer. Very, very much appreciated. I hate every one of you very, very much.”

Silence followed his announcement. The chat room went wild with accusation and counteraccusation.

“So how’d you get out?” Maurie called from the back of the room. “This is Sadou Maurie, by the way. Hi, family.” She walked up and stuck her head next to Grandpere’s on the other side of Reuben to give a quick wave. “Our Uncle Tchami Fabrice, as you may have heard, has arranged a generously funded project for the business to expand into a new industry. But if the working capital is drained and redistributed as dividends, I won’t be able to deliver and earn us the delivery payments.”

“Multimillions in delivery payments,” Pascaline called out.

“It’s more complicated than that, as I’ve explained,” Uncle Benoit said.

“Like you explained that Reuben would never get out of jail without your help?” Aunt Julienne asked. “Like that sort of complicated? I vote for Grandpere. With all of my voting shares and the fifteen proxy votes I hold from the folks who’ve already signed off to go party.”

“That was not their intent,” Benoit growled.

“Then call another vote in six months.” Aunt Julienne smiled, white lipped. “Son.” She nodded at Reuben. She signed off.

Reuben turned to Pascaline. “Tell DeeDee I said thanks.”

Fatima returned with a tray of champagne glasses, and Uncle Benoit ended the call with a cut-off expletive.


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