Hidden Nexus Read Free Page B

generous to Niigata Kyubin?’
     
    ‘Did you ever wonder who guaranteed the loan when you started your ‘massage’ salon? It was the director of Niigata Kyubin. You’ve also found it expedient to hide your profits by trading through dummy entities that ostensibly ‘supply’ Niigata Kyubin. Did you know that?’
     
    ‘No I didn’t.'
     
    She refrained from a further insult. That little strategy had been completely ill-conceived.
     
    There had been however, one more request that she'd been told to make – and she hadn't been entirely certain how to make it, but make it she did, unaware at the time of the real consequence of her actions.
     
    ‘It’ll be done – as we agreed,’ he’d said before leaving and it was only some fifteen minutes later that she’d had the horrific thought that what he had in mind was far from what she herself had wanted.
     
    Admittedly she hadn’t been able to sufficiently define what actions were needed – her brief had been suitably vague and given that she wasn’t a particularly scheming, double-dealing individual, come to that matter neither violent nor aggressive, she’d failed to adequately express herself. She was actually a virgin at top-end machination.
     
    But the evidence of what they had ‘agreed’ was now playing out in front of her on the morning news.
     
    She sat up in utter disbelief at what she was seeing and was in a state of complete horror at her conspiratorial involvement in the whole affair. A gas explosion and Nakasone's death! Had that really been part of the plan? A frantic fear at what the consequences might be was also rapidly beginning to crawl all over her. She’d heard too many stories about the brutal behaviour of the police and the ruthlessness of the legal system. She sat at the breakfast table in solemn silence and internally wept.
     
    ‘I’ve done something terribly, terribly wrong,’ she thought to herself.
     
    The events on the news forced her to churn over all the events of the past couple of months - and she had many things to consider regarding her behaviour, not just recently but ever since those first fateful merger meetings between her boss Kenji Ozawa and Noboru Nakasone and the sum total of all these thoughts was that rather than experiencing the energy, pride and zest that came with mixing it with the strategy makers she had suddenly found herself in an altogether different place. She now struggled to recognise what had become of herself.
     
    When she’d set off, quite deliberately, to pursue her career rather than to slip into the second, more leisurely, lane of housewife domesticity the plan had been quite clear – to put herself in front of the decision makers, to rattle a few cages, to progress up the ladder and break through the glass ceiling, and yes, deep down, somewhere in her subdued erogenous zonesshe would have quite liked to have had a bit of harmless fun along the way. What she had found, albeit just fairly recently, was unemotional exploitation, manipulation and unexpected collusion with ne’er do wells and thugs. Initially she’d enjoyed her part in the hard-nosed merger negotiations and understood that, at least in terms of straight-forward business, she was quite good at it. She’d enjoyed the pure, incisive application of her knowledge and quietly rejoiced in the recognition that she’d been receiving. The patronage from her boss had been particularly welcoming, the flirting, too. She’d enjoyed that. She’d undoubtedly been experiencing a ‘buzz’. Life was suddenly full of possibility. She’d suddenly become a mover and a shaker.
     
    But not now!
     
    The link-up with Fujiwara had been a shock. As she sat blinking at the news in front of her, the reality of what she had done was slowly beginning to hit home. She struggled to believe that she had been so completely blinded by ambition that her sense of morality had avoided confronting what it really meant to conspire with such a man. But the