Mad Maudlin by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey [Lackey, Mercedes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Homeless children, Epic, Brothers, Problem families, Fantasy fiction, Runaway children, New York (N.Y.), Contemporary, Crimes against, General, Fantasy, Suspense, Fiction, Children
ISBN: 9780743471435
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2003-07-21T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven:

Here's A Health To The Company

Ria always found Washington to be an exceptionally unreal city—like Hollywood, it worked very hard at producing the intangible. Each city could point to a finished product, but the work involved in producing that product was labyrinthine and disproportionate—an elephant giving birth to a mouse—and for every finished task, a hundred were begun and abandoned. In both cities, lies and secrets were the order of the day—and the people with the most power were not necessarily those who were the most well-known.

Like every large corporation, LlewellCo did a certain amount of business in the nation's capitol—you didn't survive in the current commercial climate without keeping abreast of the laws and regulations that would affect your company—and so it maintained a permanent residential suite at the Watergate Hotel. It had amused Perenor to make the place his Washington headquarters, and Ria found a certain wry humor in keeping the address. She made good time from the airport, her limousine pulling up at the front of the building only an hour after her plane landed.

There's a certain fitness in my being here, Ria thought to herself. If she was not in Washington to topple a president, she certainly meant to bring down another man who thought himself above the law: Parker Wheatley.

Reaching the LlewellCo suite, Ria tipped the bellman, locked the door behind him, and went over to the desk. It was already piled high with phone messages and mail delivered by the efficient—and very discreet—LlewellCo underling who would be her assistant during her stay. Ria checked her watch and then her PDA. Siobhan Prowse, that was it, and she'd be meeting her here in thirty minutes. Maybe she could get her to unpack as well—or was that considered employee harassment these days?

She opened her briefbag and began pulling out files, the fruit of almost a year's careful intelligence-gathering on their dear Mr. Wheatley. It wasn't much, but she hoped it was enough to alarm the cautious careful men she was going to meet with in the next several days—men who probably would not have been willing to meet with her at all, Ria realized ruefully, if not for what LlewellCo had been in Perenor's time, and for her own very public profile following the Threshold debacle.

She had been able to do one of them a very great favor with the material she'd dug out of Robert Lintel's Threshold files, and she hoped he remembered it now. He was the one she was pinning her real hopes on, but it didn't do to have only one string to your bow, so she'd made several appointments. The first was in three hours.

Ria sighed, resting her chin on her hand and gazing out the window. She had a breathtaking view of the Mall. The city, seen so often in films and television, had a certain surreal quality to it.

Just as her visit here did. How often in the past had Perenor sent her off on assignments that bore

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