“I have something that I wanna show you,” I say. “I want you to tell me what it means.”
“I don’t have time for this, Aurora.”
“Yes, you do,” I say as calmly as possible.
I take out my phone and click on the video app then I play him the doctored video.
He doesn’t look away and watches the whole thing. I, on the other hand, watch his face turn pale and all blood drain out of it.
“Everyone in the world saw that self-driving car blow up and nearly kill someone. It was played over and over and all the primetime shows and discussed it ad nauseam on all the daytime ones.”
“I have no idea what this is,” he says, after some of the shock wears off.
I shake my head no and say, “Yes, you do.”
He gets up from behind the oak table and paces in front of me. He walks back-and-forth and then back-and-forth again.
Slowly, deliberately.
I see him thinking. I know him well enough to realize that I’m onto something. He knew about this video but why?
“What does this mean?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
“That video you ran on all of your networks is fake,” I say. “You know it.”
Again, he doesn’t respond.
“You’re not going to explain yourself?” I ask.
“I don’t owe you an explanation,” my father responds.
There’s that anger that I have been searching for. Now all of my suspicions are confirmed. He knew that he was running a fake video. He knew it all along.
“You made that video legitimate by running it on the network and having all of the pundits talk about it all the time. People are afraid of self-driving cars now because it spoke to their darkest fears. About technology taking over everything and about technology making all of us obsolete.”
“So what?” Dad asks.
“Why? Why did you do this?”
“Why else, Aurora? Why else would someone like me do anything like that?” He’s challenging me the way that he used to when I was a kid. Asking me the same questions back so that I will think up my own explanation.
This time, however, I don’t have an answer.
“The company, we’re going under. Franklin is our only hope. It was the only way that I was going to stave off bankruptcy. Before Franklin was an option, before I knew whether you would agree to marry him and all of his demands would be met, I had to make a contingency plan.”
He stops talking. He walks over to the glass bar and pours himself a glass of whiskey. He does not offer me a drink.
“I was strapped for cash,” he says, sitting down across from me in the chair in front of his desk. It swivels and he turns to face me.
Now, we are face-to-face. He doesn’t sit back, instead he leans forward. He focuses all of his attention on me, and his eyes plead for my forgiveness.
“I borrowed a lot of money from the pension fund,” Dad says.
“Borrowed?” I correct him.
“Okay, stole. I wanted to put it back but it just didn’t turn out that way. We just kept hemorrhaging money and there was nothing I could do.”
“What happened?”
“I took a bribe. A pretty big one but it was the only way that I could hold off going bankrupt and losing everything.”
“What was the purpose of that video?” I ask.
“There’s a short seller involved. I had to approve the release of the fake video of the test and of the self-driving car blowing up.”
“Why?” I ask.
“The short seller had put in the short position on that company’s stock. After the video came out, PR5, the company that created the self-driving car, their stock started to fall. The longer that video circulated and the more attention it got especially on primetime, the harder that stock fell. The short seller, he made millions. Probably even a billion.”
I shake my head, not wanting to believe what I just heard.
“PR5 was the kind of company that no one thought could ever go under. It was valued so incredibly high and no one thought that anything would happen.”
“Well, nothing did. That video is a fake.”
“I know but I had to do it.”
“How much money did you get from it?”
“A lot,” he says.
“I need a specific number.”
“At least 400 million, maybe 500. It’s still not all in our accounts but it will be.”
“So, you’re laundering the money on top of that fraud?” I ask.
“Of course, how else do you expect it to come back into our coffers?”
“So, what now?” I ask.
Dad shrugs his shoulders and takes another sip of his whiskey.
“That was major fraud, you know that, right?”
He tilts his head and looks up at me with his big blue eyes. Those were the same eyes that I used to love as a little girl. I grew up adoring him. He could never do anything wrong. He was smart, powerful, and funny. He had every attribute that someone would want to be described as. That was what he was to me when I was a child, but I got older and things changed. Then reality set in.
Perhaps that happens with everyone but mine was particularly small. I realized that he may have told me that he loved me on more than one occasion, probably a lot more than most dads told their children but whether or not he actually did love me, I didn’t know for sure. Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe he did love me in his own way. In his own selfish, narcissistic, self-centered, and completely egotistical way.
“There’s something else, Aurora,” Dad says.
“What?”
“The short seller I told you about, Daniel Kavinsky, he threatened my life if this thing with you and Franklin falls apart.”
I shake my head no. So, that’s it. That’s who had threatened to kill him. My mom wasn’t lying. She just didn’t tell me all of the details.
“Franklin is going down,” I say after a moment. “I found some videos that are not going to put him in the best light. He’s involved in a lot of things and I’m going to make him pay for it.”
“You can’t do that, Aurora. He’s a very dangerous man. He has connections everywhere–”
“He used to have those connections,” I say, smiling at the corner of my lips. “He’s been making videos of all of his friends and acquaintances doing sick and perverted things. He’s been keeping them as collateral. He’s been keeping those videos to try to influence his way to get whatever the hell he wants. Well, I’m going to put a stop to it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet but I’m here telling you this as a courtesy.”
My father sits up in his seat. He has never been talked to in this manner before, not by anyone he considers to be inferior to him, least of all his daughter.
I sit up as well and cross my legs from one to the other. I lean over and say, “You need to go to the FBI. You need to tell them what you know. You need to bring a lawyer with you and try to work out some sort of deal.”
He shakes his head no.
“I’m taking Franklin and all of those other assholes down. He’s going to pay for what he did and they will be exposed for everything they did.”
“I’m not gonna go to the FBI. I can’t. They won’t offer me anything.”