Chapter 187: Everybody's Fired

Chapter 187: Everybody's Fired

The smile froze on Thompson's face.

He forced out a couple of dry laughs, the corner of his eye twitching. "Ms. Elizabeth… what—what exactly do you mean by that? This is not a funny joke."

The other supervisors in the room caught up a beat later, and the place erupted like a boiling pot. Voices came flying from every direction:

"Yeah, President Elizabeth, what's this supposed to mean?"

"Manager Thompson's put in years out here in Nevada. You can't just fire him on a whim!"

"That's not how Wall Street plays it! The union will never stand for this!"

"You want to fire the plant manager, you'd better have a damn good reason!"

Elizabeth watched the clown parade with cold eyes.

She raised one hand and pressed it gently downward through the air.

An overwhelming aura—the kind that only comes from a lifetime spent at the very top—swept through the conference room in an instant. Every voice dropped without meaning to, lower and lower, until the room went dead silent.

"Maybe I wasn't clear just now. That's on me—poor phrasing."

Elizabeth paused, her gaze slicing across every single face in the room, and delivered the words with the weight of an executioner's blade:

"What I meant was: Thompson included—"

"Every last one of you sitting at this table. Your employment is terminated, effective immediately."

For a moment you could have heard a pin drop.

"And one more thing."

Elizabeth continued, her tone as cold and merciless as a verdict machine with no soul inside it. "The group's legal department and an external audit team move in tomorrow. We'll be conducting a full investigation into each of your personal finances. The Williams Group reserves the right to pursue a class-action fraud suit against every one of you."

Thompson couldn't hold the act together any longer.

He snatched the Montblanc pen off the table and snapped it clean in two with a sharp crack, glaring at Elizabeth like he wanted to tear her apart.

"Elizabeth, have you lost your goddamn mind?"

"You think this is New York? This is Nevada! You fire the whole management team with one sentence—who the hell keeps this plant running?"

Thompson slammed both palms on the table, baring his teeth. "You want to bet? The second we walk out that door, tomorrow morning every production line in this factory grinds to a dead stop!"

Bang!

The conference room door swung open again.

"She's not crazy. You people are."

Caesar's voice rolled in, laced with open mockery.

One hand tucked in the pocket of his tactical trousers, the other dragging Correa in by the collar like a bag of garbage—fingers gone, face white as chalk.

"Cousin… save me…"

Correa held up the heavily bandaged stump of his hand, his voice cracking into a desperate sob. "Cousin, please—help me…"

The moment Thompson saw the state of Correa, his eyelids started twitching uncontrollably, and the mask came off for good.

"Elizabeth!" Thompson ground the name out through clenched teeth. "So you were looking for a fight all along!"

Caesar strolled over to Elizabeth's side, dropped Correa onto the carpet, and grinned. "No. We're just taking out the trash."

Elizabeth pulled the recorder from her pocket and pressed play.

Correa's own smug voice echoed crisp and clear through the conference room:

"The mastermind behind these counterfeit products is my cousin Thompson!"

"He used his position to skim the real grade-A material out of the plant…"

"The whole factory—from the floor supervisors down to the guy guarding the front gate—who hasn't taken my cousin's hush money?"

"The Williams Group's so big, so loaded, a little loss like this never even shows up on the books…"

Thompson's face went black as the bottom of a pot.

The other supervisors wore expressions that were, each one, more spectacular than the last—some already had their knees shaking.

The recording ended.

Elizabeth's stare pinned Thompson like a blade. "Mr. Thompson. Faced with this complete confession, do you have anything left to say?"

Thompson clamped down hard on his back teeth and forced the words out through the cracks. "Correa, you useless piece of garbage. Screw everything up and fix nothing. Idiot!"

Correa shrank his neck down, stumbling back two steps, and screamed in a total breakdown. "Cousin! This isn't my fault! You're the one who told me on the phone, with your own damn mouth, that these two were big clients you'd sent over! You told me to shave five points off the price for them!"

The veins bulged on Thompson's forehead as he roared, "Shut up!"

Correa flinched all over and didn't dare make another sound.

Then it hit Thompson. His eyes locked onto Caesar, burning with sheer resentment and venom. "That call earlier… the whole thing was a setup. You used a voice changer to bait me into showing my hand!"

Caesar snapped his fingers. "Congratulations. Correct answer. Sorry, no prizes."

Thompson pulled in a deep breath, forcing himself to cool down. He knew the evidence was airtight now—denial was pointless.

"Fine. Elizabeth. You really want to burn every last bridge with us, is that it?"

Thompson gave a cold smirk and straightened his collar, playing his final card. "You'd better think this through. All of us walk out right now, and production stops dead on the spot. Tens of millions in orders go unfulfilled—the penalty fees alone will bury you. How are you going to explain that to the board back on Wall Street?"

"A mess this big, not even God himself could clean up!"

Caesar heard him out, then unhurriedly slid his phone from his pocket and dialed a number.

"Marlow. Bring your people in."

A short, hard reply came from the other end. "Yes, sir."

Caesar hung up and spread his hands toward Thompson, wearing a picture-perfect harmless smile.

"Sorry about this, Manager Thompson. See, I'm the kind of guy who likes to keep a Plan B."

"I already arranged for Blackwater's logistics takeover team, plus a batch of top-tier outsourced senior engineers. You can all get lost right now. Tomorrow, this plant's lines will still be running twenty-four hours a day, no interruptions."

Thompson's face drained straight to a dead gray.

He knew it was over. With one last vicious glare at Elizabeth and Caesar, he said nothing—just turned on his heel and walked out.

Correa scrambled after him, tripping and stumbling. "Cousin! Cousin, wait for me!"

The dozen or so corrupt supervisors left in the room traded looks, cold sweat pouring down.

Caesar's eyes swept over all of them, ice-cold, and with a flick of his wrist the tactical karambit—the very blade that had taken Correa's fingers—spun once around his fingertip.

"Ladies and gentlemen. Do I need to have security wheel you out in chairs?"

Under a minute.

The conference room emptied out clean.

At almost the exact same moment.

Outside the factory gates.

Two unmarked white buses rolled to a smooth stop.

Dozens of men and women in dark workwear filed out one after another, moving fast and orderly, seizing every core entrance, exit, and control room in the plant. At their head was Marlow, who threw a crisp, clean salute up toward the top floor where Caesar stood.

Meanwhile.

Thompson and his crew of corrupt lieutenants had gathered, tails between their legs, in the open-air parking lot on the outer edge of the factory.

"Cousin, are we really just gonna let this go?" Correa clutched his ruined hand, hissing through the pain.

Thompson glanced back at the office tower that had, until minutes ago, belonged to him. He let out a cold snort, a flash of pure malice in his eyes.

"They think they can just kick me out of Nevada? Not a chance in hell."

Correa leaned in. "Cousin, so what do we do now?"

Thompson's expression turned dark. "I've got one last card to play. But this one takes all of us, pulling together."

The lieutenants around him fell over themselves to swear in:

"Boss, just say the word! We're with you!"

"That's right! Whatever you say, we follow!"

A cruel curve pulled at the corner of Thompson's mouth. "She won't leave us a way out—so we fight her to the bitter end."

Correa looked worried. "But Cousin, the recording of us moving that raw material—it's still in their hands. If they go to the cops…"

Thompson closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath of dry Nevada air.

"Go the legal route and we lose, guaranteed. But there's one place the law can't touch them. And that's the labor union."

The others snapped out of it, eyes lighting up in an instant.

"Right! The Truckers and Heavy Industry Combined Union!"

"We file a complaint against the Williams Group—say they fired blue-collar workers without cause, illegally terminated employment contracts. Blow the whole thing wide open!"

"One word from the union bosses and every logistics operation in the state goes on strike! There's so many of us—why the hell should we be scared of one Wall Street bitch?"

Thompson stood at the factory gate, staring at those neat rows of buildings.

Silently, he told himself: Elizabeth. Just you wait.

"Correa." Thompson pulled open the door of a Lincoln Navigator. "You're coming with me to union headquarters. The rest of you, head home for now. Wait for my call, and be ready to organize the workers for a strike at a moment's notice."

"Yes, Boss! We'll wait to hear from you!"

Thompson ducked into the back seat. Correa gritted his teeth against the pain in his hand, dropped into the driver's seat, and fired up the engine.

The car ran the interstate for about twenty minutes, cutting through a few bustling commercial districts before turning onto a wide, tree-lined boulevard.

A colossal, oppressive building came slowly into view.

Correa eased off the gas. Through the windshield, he stared at the fortress-like structure ahead and couldn't help letting out a low whistle.

"Cousin… this is union headquarters?"

It was a thirty-story slab of brutalist concrete—far grander than their own factory office building. The exterior was clad in thick slabs of granite, with barely any full-length windows, giving the whole thing the look of a modern military fortress rising straight out of the ground.

Flanking the main entrance stood two massive bronze lions, each easily over two meters tall, radiating the heavy air of an underworld syndicate.

In the plaza out front rose a towering bronze statue—a legendary boss from the great union strikes of the '70s, hammer raised high, glaring furiously into the distance.

Carved into the heavy base of the statue was a union motto that was impossible to miss:

SOLIDARITY FOREVER

Thompson leaned back into the leather seat, looked at the slogan, and let out a cold, dripping-with-irony laugh.

"You think the union's some kind of good place?"

"These guys are a blue-collar Mafia—they'll eat you alive and won't spit out the bones. Worse than any Wall Street capitalist. Every brick in this building was laid with the blood and sweat of the working man's dues."

Thompson pushed open the door and straightened his suit.

"Come on. Let's go meet the real vampires."