Stepping Stone
"E-explode?! What?! Who?! H-how...!?"
Kevin poured out questions as if half in a panic. Donovan, by contrast, spoke with a perfectly calm face.
"I only see the results. I don't know the reasons."
"Ah.... Th-then what about me...."
Donovan drew a calm but cold line.
"This is as far as I can advise you."
"N-no. Just a little more...."
"I'm sorry."
It was human nature to regret answers never heard and things never possessed. When Donovan stepped back cleanly without a shred of lingering attachment, Kevin only grew more frantic.
It seems real.
In that uneasy state, when he went back to work, everything inside the camp looked different.
People's reactions, the way they treated him, even answers to ordinary questions. Everything got under his skin, feeling subtly off from usual.
Even the way Vance looked at him felt as cold as a noose tightening around his neck.
Unable to endure it any longer, the moment work ended he headed straight back to the poker gathering.
But Donovan didn't even glance at Kevin. Instead, he casually tossed advice to the people around him.
People who received that advice and beamed with bright smiles.
And advice that he alone was never given.
Kevin tried hard to dismiss it as nothing more than a face-reader's wordplay, but every time he returned to the poker gathering, the sounds he heard gnawed away at his reason.
"Oh! It was just as you said!"
"Thanks to you, I avoided that investment. I really almost got into big trouble!"
"How do you know all that just from looking at a face? Haha!"
Every time he confirmed with his own eyes that Donovan's words were one hundred percent correct, Kevin grew more impatient and desperately anxious.
The "danger" Donovan had warned about felt like it could explode as early as tomorrow.
Doubt and fear filled his head.
As each day passed.
"Cancel that contract immediately."
As Donovan's indifferent advice continued.
"Thank you so much! You're my savior!"
As he watched people perfectly dodge danger thanks to that advice.
"Aaaah······!"
Crushed by a terror that felt like his blood drying up and his bones being scraped raw, Kevin finally had no choice but to cling to Donovan's collar with trembling hands.
"I've thought carefully about what you said. What exactly is going to explode, and why is that a problem for me."
He poured out words before Donovan could even answer.
"There's only one thing that would be a problem if it exploded. If this blows, I'm the one who takes the fall for everything! P-please! Save me! Please tell me how I can survive!"
Looking down at Kevin, who was practically prostrate on the floor, Donovan finally lazily lifted the corner of his mouth.
It was the moment a perfectly ripe fruit fell of its own accord.
"They say the enemy of an enemy is a friend. Go to the person who'll pay the highest price for that bomb. That should be better than taking the fall yourself."
"Aaaah, yes! That's it! Thank you! Thank you!!"
A few days later, a massive bomb exploded in New York politics.
It started with a single file uploaded online.
A file containing the Richard Vance camp's slush fund ledger and money-laundering records.
Richard Vance had spent hundreds of millions to control the media and manipulate public opinion, but when internal ledgers were exposed so blatantly, even the major news outlets could not stay silent.
If they failed to report this, the media companies themselves would be branded as accomplices and forced to shut down.
As a result, articles began pouring out.
Exactly where that slush fund had been used was never revealed, but the mere fact that an illegal slush fund existed was enough to shake the entire board.
Thanks to that, fatal cracks began to form in Vance's fake idol image—the one that had been packaged as a perfect, clean aristocrat.
The overwhelming twenty-percent gap began to tremble.
Sterling's election campaign headquarters.
Among the staff cheering as if victory were already sealed, Sterling looked at Donovan—who was leaning deep into the sofa with a blank expression—utterly dumbfounded.
"Just how did you do it?"
Donovan took a sip of the coffee on the table and smirked.
"I just played some cards with him."
"······Played some cards?"
"And gave him a little advice."
"Huh. Heh heh. Right. Gave him advice. To become an internal whistleblower."
It was something he'd said just to brush it off because he couldn't understand. But Donovan nodded far too casually.
"That's it. You grasped the core exactly."
A playful tone.
But it wasn't annoying.
No—it couldn't be annoying.
He had already proven it with results.
"······Ha."
A breathless laugh of sheer disbelief escaped Sterling's lips.
Now he understood why Vincent had made such a fuss.
This was practically magic.
He'd been out of sight for just a few days, and the opposing camp's key fund manager had crawled over on his own, begging to be saved.
It wasn't merely lucky timing that made it explode either.
Before the bomb went off in the media, Donovan had contacted Sterling in advance.
That soon the Vance camp's treasurer would reach out wanting to become an internal whistleblower.
That he was ready to offer anything to survive, so use your former prosecutor connections to arrange a plea deal and squeeze everything he had dry.
Indeed, the moment Kevin signed the plea-deal terms Sterling's side presented, he spilled the entire slush fund ledger and paper-company records.
The "anonymous tip" that turned the media upside down was a strategic signal flare fired by the Sterling camp—now holding perfect physical evidence—to cut off Vance's lifeline.
The slush fund incident exploding at the end of the election was a fatal blow to the opponent.
Richard Vance's side was certain to take a massive hit to their approval ratings.
He couldn't even begin to guess how it had been done.
No—he couldn't possibly guess.
If he'd known the method, he would have tried it long ago.
Thanks to that, even the campaign command staff who knew this fact now looked at Donovan completely differently.
When he'd first opened the waiting-room door and walked in, he'd been nothing more than a suspicious young Asian man.
Sterling had taken a liking to him, but the staff couldn't understand that strange recruitment.
Yet he had casually accomplished what no one in the election campaign could.
"Could he be······ a kingmaker?"
"So he was deliberately hiding his identity?"
"Haa. The candidate didn't call him for nothing. He's a real monster."
They never even imagined Donovan might be a fortune-teller or physiognomist.
Rather, they thought he was a kingmaker who thoroughly hid his identity while designing the political landscape.
Thanks to that, Donovan's treatment inside the election camp changed one hundred eighty degrees, but even under the flood of gazes, Donovan's own reaction was utterly indifferent.
"This is just the beginning. Why is everyone making such a fuss?"
"······Just the beginning?"
Sterling's eyes flashed sharply.
"Yeah. Shaking the opposing camp's mid-level manager was just a stepping stone to shake someone higher up."
"Wait. Explain a little more slowly. You're saying······ this slush fund internal whistleblowing that dealt a fatal blow to the opponent was just a stepping stone?"
Donovan nodded as if it were obvious.
"Of course. It's not like this completely secured our victory, right?"
He wasn't wrong. The internal whistleblower Kevin Miller was only a mid-level manager who raised and laundered funds.
He had created the massive slush fund vault, but he didn't know exactly where that money flowed or how it was used.
Of course, the ledgers he brought out were enough to deal a fatal blow to Vance's morality, but without Vance's own signature, it wasn't enough to completely cut off his lifeline.
The other side just needed to cut off the tail.
"My real target was someone else from the start."
"Someone else?"
"The real power and number two of the Vance camp. Overall Election Campaign Headquarters Director, Marcus Wright."
The true executor who planned all of Richard's campaign rallies and flung open the doors of that filthy slush fund vault to scatter money freely.
That man was the real target.
Sterling gazed at Donovan with cold eyes, then soon lifted the corner of his mouth with brilliant light in his eyes.
Donovan smiled back and opened his mouth.
"I need help this time. Make it so they don't even dare to use that slush fund."
"Hahaha! You don't need to worry about that. The only point of attack right now is that place anyway."
The bulldozer former prosecutor, Sterling.
His counterattack, after being on the defensive, had begun.
The Richard Vance camp was literally a house of mourning.
"Candidate Richard Vance's election fund flows must be thoroughly revealed. We all must become watchdogs over where New York citizens' blind money is flowing!"
On the TV screen, the bulldozer-like former prosecutor Sterling was gripping the microphone and launching fierce attacks day after day.
He was clever. Not content with the slush fund scandal itself, he perfectly fixed the public and media's attention on the Vance camp's fund flows.
Thanks to that, the Vance camp found itself unable to spend even a single dollar despite having massive slush funds piled in their vault.
There were too many eyes watching.
If they spent money of unclear origin in the current situation, a prosecutor's search-and-seizure warrant would fly in immediately.
The problem was, they couldn't not spend money either.
At the end of the election. To defend plummeting approval ratings, astronomical advertising costs and organization management fees were needed.
In the first place, Vance's overwhelming approval ratings themselves were a sandcastle built with money.
And the problems didn't end there. That money made from the slush fund was dangerous people's money.
If things went wrong, it wouldn't just be losing the election—they could actually die.
Those devilish people had invested in Richard who would become mayor, not Richard who might lose.
"Damn it! Somehow bring in legitimate donations! Right now!"
Richard Vance roughly loosened his tie and shouted.
He even made calls to political and business figures he would never have contacted out of pride under normal circumstances.
He even clung to those who had already refused sponsorship.
I just need to become mayor! Once I'm mayor, I can pay this debt back dozens of times over!
It was the mindset of a gambler who had completely lost his reason at the gambling table.
But New York's big shots, who were experts at smelling power, couldn't possibly not know that.
The very fact that Vance was going around so vulgarly begging for money was, paradoxically, advertising to the whole neighborhood that the Vance camp's money pipeline had completely dried up.
Consecutive rejections and cold snubs.
As his blood was drying up like that, an unexpected place proposed a meeting first.
A big shot who owned several top-tier hotel chains right in the middle of New York.
The man currently able to mobilize the fastest and most massive cash in Manhattan—Christian Kingsley.
"You're the only one who can change the current situation. I'm a media target right now, so I can't move carelessly."
In a crisis at the edge of a cliff like this, the person who could be sent was predetermined. The most capable and tight-lipped number two who knew all the camp's secrets.
"So Marcus! You have to go. Go and somehow bring in Kingsley's money!"
"Yes, Candidate. I will definitely secure the sponsorship funds."
At Richard's desperate command, Marcus nodded solemnly.
"Our fate depends on Kingsley!"
At that same time. On Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York, the top-floor Owner's Penthouse of The Grand Astoria Hotel.
Kingsley, who held the fate of Richard's election camp in his hands, was getting scolded.
"Seriously. How do you always manage to pick only these kinds of girls no matter who you date?"
Donovan pressed his forehead in disbelief and snapped. He had just met the new girlfriend Kingsley had ambitiously shown him.
Kingsley didn't back down and grinned as he spoke.
"······But she was pretty, right?"
"No! Just stop!!"
At Donovan's fact-bomb-laced scolding, Kingsley buried himself deep into the top-grade leather sofa and exaggeratedly sighed.
"Hoo. Well, it's a shame, but it can't be helped. Since I weeded out the fakes, I can meet new people, so it's actually a gain, right?"
"Please don't meet anyone for a while."
At the ultra-positive billionaire's attitude that was as natural as breathing, Donovan shook his head as if fed up.
In the penthouse where such empty banter had been flying back and forth, Kingsley gazed at Donovan with a serious face that had completely wiped away the playfulness.
"So what exactly are you planning to do today?"
"······."
"I did make appointments with those girls because you said you'd read their faces for free."
At Kingsley's sharp question, Donovan grinned and leaned comfortably against the sofa backrest.
"Just to have a conversation. A constructive conversation."