Chapter 292 The Dragon's Bill
POV: Callum | Rookeries operational building
The message from Vermithrax Consolidated arrives on a Monday—of course it does. That's the day financial institutions tend to send communications they've been holding over the weekend. It has the same quality as all Vermithrax communications: precise language that leaves no room for interpretation.
Five years of monthly payments of fifty thousand pounds each. That's two hundred and fifty thousand pounds paid, an accurate count I've maintained because inaccuracy in debt records creates problems that accurate records avoid.
The message doesn't discuss the payments I've made. It discusses the remaining balance.
Outstanding balance: £250,000. Payment required in full. Deadline: thirty days from receipt of this notice.
I read it three times—the number of readings required for information you don't want to be true to finally sink in. I read it a fourth time just to confirm that the third reading was accurate.
Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds in thirty days.
The monthly payment structure established by the summit agreement was built on the financial architecture of a community generating enough revenue to service monthly payments of fifty thousand pounds. That's a large number in itself, and it's required five years of financial management with help from Cormac's contacts, the Rookeries businesses, and some creative resource allocation to sustain a community of three hundred wolves, twenty-four hybrid children, and a medical network.
Two hundred and fifty thousand in thirty days isn't a number the same architecture produces. It requires either resources the Rookeries doesn't have or a fundamentally different mechanism than the one that's been servicing the monthly payments.
I call a pack meeting for Tuesday—the first available time slot, which produces the attendance that financial crises always do: everyone. I explain the situation honestly, without the managed parts, because the managed version of a financial crisis is a lie with a short lifespan, and I don't have time for that.
The debate that follows has the quality that debates about impossible problems always do—proposals coming from genuine places rather than strategic ones. The specific condition of a community that trusts the honest version of itself more than the polished one.
Selling territory is proposed by two wolves from the western sector—the proposal of people willing to give up something large to keep something larger. I understand it, but I also understand it produces reduced territory, equaling reduced community coverage, equaling reduced pack viability over time. The arithmetic of less space producing less capacity which produces less of everything.
Begging Parliament is proposed by three others—the proposal that's true in its recognition that Parliament has resources but false in its assumption that Parliament has any mechanism or motivation to provide those resources to the Rookeries community in thirty days without conditions that would cost more than the debt.
Robbery is proposed by one wolf who has the quality of someone who has thought about it seriously and isn't proposing it as humor. I take it seriously because the proposal has more structure behind it than the word implies, but I decline because the criminal exposure of a supernatural community robbing whatever institution would have the required liquid assets within thirty days would create a legal and political crisis that ends the Rookeries' autonomy as surely as foreclosure.
We have no answer at the end of the meeting—which is the accurate status of the situation. I dismiss the meeting with the specific quality of an Alpha who is continuing to work on a problem but doesn't have the solution yet, and who's being honest about that.
The anonymous message arrives at ten in the evening, through a channel I haven't used in five years but which was in the network before. It produces in me, when I see the routing, the specific quality of recognition mixed with alarm.
I open it.
I can provide £250,000. Price: you owe me. Meet me at midnight. -M
I look at the initial.
I look at it for a long time with the quality of someone deciding whether the information they've received is what it appears to be, arriving at the conclusion that it is exactly what it appears to be, and that the appearing to be is not a coincidence and is not a threat of the kind that can be dismissed.
M.