Gears: The Conspiracy - Chapter I, part II

The corporate headquarters of Malverne Oil and Coal was an enormous steel-and-glass tower that rose imposingly over Clampett city and could be seen from anywhere in the prefecture.

Accountant Johann Lofgren had holed himself up in his office on the thirty-second floor of Malverne. His desk was covered with a vast quantity of documents, graphs and charts. He couldn’t figure it out for his life. For the past four years, all of his projections had fallen short of the actual profits by over forty percent and he had absolutely no idea how. There was always a margin of error with projections, but forty percent was beyond all possibility. Johann had checked and re-checked his calculations and reports, but he found nowhere where he or the company could have gone wrong. No changes in the company or its clients had occurred in years that could possibly justify these massive jumps.

Perhaps what baffled him most was the fact that he hadn’t been fired. Jacob Malverne fired people with astounding alacrity, and yet four years of incorrect projections had brought him no repercussions. It was as if Jacob knew something he didn’t.

Looking out his window, he saw a flicker of flames and a thin trail of smoke coming up from Kildare Docks. He paid little mind to it and continued to stress over the papers.

Several floors above Lofgren’s office, Jacob Malverne looked out at the same spot of flames, exhaled through his nose, and smiled.