Corporate Truth Read online

  Vol 01: Corporate Truth

  Karl William Fleet

  Karl has a unique story

  From being the most awarded advertising creative in Australasia, to professional wrestling heavyweight champion of New Zealand, to completing a Masters in Creative Writing, to writing the first three books in his thriller series, The Truth Files.

  * * *

  Karl is ‘the body-slamming adman-turned-author.’

  Become a Truth Seeker

  Become a Truth Seeker today and discover more of the Truth.

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  Sign up to become a Truth Seeker and receive bonus short stories set within the world of Justin Truth, as well as behind the scenes snippets, audiobook chapters (complete with author’s commentary), plus loads more exciting stuff—all exclusive to Truth Seekers.

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  Truth Seekers are the first to hear about Karl’s new books, scripts, and publications. And you never know, your name could appear within the pages of the Truth Files one day.

  Truth File enthusiasts have been known to make appearances within the pages of his books...

  * * *

  See the back of the book for details on how to sign up today.

  For Cathy. You make me a better person.

  Contents

  File One:

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  File Two:

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  File three:

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Epilogue

  Reviews

  More of the Truth…

  Want a little more of the Truth?

  02:Criminal Truth - Chapter 1

  02:Criminal Truth - Chapter 2

  02:Criminal Truth - Chapter 3

  02:Criminal Truth - Chapter 4

  02:Criminal Truth - Chapter 5

  Keep going…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Karl William Fleet

  File One:

  Climbing the ladder

  Chapter One

  The sun forced its waves of sticky heat between the mighty buildings of New York City. The air was alive with clanking construction, blaring horns, and the swirl of voices. The masses escaped their skyscraper catacombs and flooded the labyrinth-like streets. Feet walking, bouncing, dodging, stepping, running, in all directions. Kelly Elliott’s were among them.

  For this lunchtime trek, she’d traded her work heels for a trusty pair of Adidas trainers. To give her legs slightly longer strides, she’d hitched up her black hemline skirt. She had thirty minutes to get from work to the bank and back.

  “Babe, I’m leaving now,” she said, cupping her phone to her ear, fending off oncoming commuters with one shoulder.

  “You sure you don’t want me to do it?” Derrick asked.

  “I’ll be fine.” Kelly rolled her eyes.

  “I heard your eyes,” he teased.

  She laughed. “Babe, it’ll only take me twenty minutes, tops.” Last night she'd canceled their joint credit card after seeing extravagant purchases made in Germany on their statement. Neither she nor Derrick had been to Germany, ever.

  “Are you sure? I don’t mind.”

  “It’s closer for me. I got this. Look, babe, coming to the subway now. My phone will cut out—call me later?”

  “You know it!” Derrick slipped in his new catchphrase.

  “Love you ... you know it,” she replied.

  “Love you more than you know it!” The phone cut out.

  She hated to ride the subway, that’s why he’d phoned her, to take her mind off it. He was always thinking about her. It was one of the things she loved about him.

  For the last five years, she’d worked in reception at the Benjamin Hotel. She loved the job, the people, and the company. Her only problem: the wandering eyes of married men. Part of her job was to be cute, bubbly, and inviting to all guests. She was good at it. Maybe too good. At least once a day, a transient Romeo would flash her a smile with a hopeful glint in his eye. They would flirt, and tell her how cute she was, and invite her to join them for a drink once she finished work. Some were more direct and would ask if she wanted to fuck. She’d learned to act a little timid, excited, and flattered, as if they were the first to have ever propositioned her. Then with a quirky smile and a subtle tap on her wedding ring, she would send them on their way with their egos still intact. Derrick was the man in her life, and all the man she needed.

  Kelly put in her earphones to drown out the surrounding noise, cranking up the music to relax. She bounded down the subway entrance stairs with her Metrocard at the ready and checked her watch as she passed through the gate. She was making good time. The less time spent in the subway, the better.

  Ahead, she noticed an elderly lady chatting away at a black pug in her arms. The old dear was resting in the middle of the walkway, slightly hunched, and dolled up with what looked like a year’s worth of make-up. Another commuter looking at his phone, and not where he was going, knocked into th
e old woman, causing her to drop her precious pup. As soon as the pug’s paws touched the ground, it was off, its rainbow-colored lead trailing behind it. The dog whipped between Kelly’s legs, its slobbery tongue hanging out the side of its mouth. Kelly spun and leapt. Her foot stomped down on the lead. The pug grunted as it came to a sudden halt. She picked up the wayward dog and received a multitude of licks for her trouble.

  “Here you go,” she said to the old lady.

  “That’s not my dog,” the lady replied. “I did have a cat once, it was ginger. I have always wanted a dog. If I got one, I think I would get one like your dog. I’d call him Sparky.”

  Kelly checked the pug’s name tag. It read Sparky. She gave it back to the confused lady.

  As she descended down the downtown escalator, she could feel the air getting thicker, denser, and warmer. Soon she was engulfed by the New York subway’s unique sickly, stale smell of stagnant human sweat. It made her want to vomit. It wasn’t so much the smell as the idea that she was breathing in other people’s dirty secondhand air that freaked her out.

  As she reached the platform, she saw the back of her train pulling away—she had missed it by mere seconds. A man in tweed coughed as he bumped past her. She imagined that she could see his phlegmy bacteria particles float into the air, to be inhaled by those around him. She covered her mouth and stumbled away.

  A helpful LED sign informed her that the next train was six minutes away. Six very long minutes. The crowd grew thicker, like the air. Knowing she couldn’t miss this train, she was determined to get to the front of the platform, thinking the air would be better there. Any vacant spot she saw, she slipped into. Any space that opened, she squeezed through, skillfully making it to the front. She stood tall, defending her spot, like an Amazonian warrior.

  A whoosh of air signaled the imminent arrival of the next train, prompting people to jam closer together. Kelly held her prime position, using her elbows to keep people from closing in on her. She leaned ahead and looked down the track, willing the train to appear. A light emerged from the mouth of the tunnel, causing the corners of her mouth to curl up. Not long now.

  She felt two hands on her lower back. Not gentle, not tender, not timid, not friendly, and definitely not welcomed. She shimmied to lose them. The hands remained. She pulled away from them. The hands found her again. She swiped at them. The hands held on.

  Kelly had had enough. This creep picked the wrong girl, on the wrong day, at the wrong time, to fuck with. She applied her patented angry-bitch face, the one Derrick had nicknamed Medusa. In full Medusa mode, she spun to verbally assault Mr. Creepy Hands. She didn’t see him at first, as he was squatting, making himself lower than the crowd around him. He looked up at her from beneath his trucker cap, grinning like a naughty schoolboy. Then he winked and shoved her. Hard. She reached out to grab at anything to save herself. She felt nothing but the incoming thundering train. The force of the impact exploded Kelly’s body like an iron anvil dropping on a balloon full of red paint.

  The train’s brakes hissed as the screeching steel rumbled to a halt. The cabin doors slid open automatically. A disembarking businessman stopped in his tracks—a screaming woman covered in Kelly’s blood was blocking his way.

  Chapter Two

  Justin Truth had arrived.

  He stood in his new office surrounded by his new toys, staring out over his new Manhattan view. On a clear day like today he could see as far as Liberty Island. He breathed it all in. It was exactly what he believed he deserved. He caught his reflection in the glass. His newly imported StrongFit shirt emphasized his gym-hardened physique. He tensed his bicep to stretch the fabric.

  He strolled around the expansive room. It was perfect, just as he had requested. He had worked with the designer personally to get it just right: the couch, the carpet, the lamps, even the pantone of tint on the panoramic windows.

  He now worked for Soda-Cola. An American icon, a soft drink company people had grown up with. Once the largest soda company in America, it had slipped over the last decade into the bottom of the top five. Justin was going to get Soda-Cola back to number one.

  Waiting for him on his custom-built KBH desk were fifty-two folders, one for every brand he was now responsible for. He would go through them one by one, line by line until he had a strategic plan on how to make each brand more profitable.

  He made himself comfortable in his De Sede chair, then removed the top file from the stack: OrangeFizz. He placed it in front of him, unopened. He stared at the ’80s-inspired orange logo and gently stroked the faded scar on the right side of his face. The scar ran from his temple to just above his cheekbone, a remnant of an incident from his late teens. A memory that had often returned to taunt him and remind him to think smarter. Massaging the blemish was an unconscious habit he’d acquired while deep in thought.

  Justin opened the OrangeFizz file. It was the biggest of his new brands and a good place to start. He spread out the paperwork and inserted the accompanying flash drive into his MacBook Pro. As he waited for it to open, he felt something wasn’t right. He lifted the laptop, checked it out from different angles. There was a faint fingerprint on the W button. In his contract, he had specified that his equipment was to be out-of-the-box new, without exception.

  He checked the preferences and found no obvious traces of activity. Yet that feeling of something being wrong persisted. He accessed the internal coding and discovered the laptop had been reformatted three days ago, at 4:56 p.m. That confirmed it for Justin. The only reason to strip the hard drive would have been to erase evidence of previous use. He stared at the W. Then it clicked. He knew why the laptop had been reformatted: William Munroe. Carlton had hired the contractor to cover while Soda-Cola waited for Justin to start. It would have been during that time that William’s grubby little fingers had desecrated Justin’s computer.

  Justin called Guy Chambers, the head of Soda-Cola IT.

  “Hello,” a voice greeted him. “We are really busy, so if you tell me your problem after the beep, I’ll get back to you as soon as humanly possible. . . Beep.”

  It wasn’t voicemail, just a monotone voice.

  “Hi, this is Justin Truth. I have a question about my computer.”

  “Turn it off and on again, and that should fix it. Next time, could you dial the IT helpline number.”

  “I haven’t even told you my problem!” Justin shot back.

  “I’m sorry, that is usually the answer. Let’s start from the beginning. Is your computer on?” the voice asked sarcastically.

  “Is this Guy Chambers?” Justin said.

  “This is Guy Chambers at your service, princess. What’s your problem? Is your computer not working, or can you not find the printer? Look, Justin. Can I call you Justin? You are new here, and all National Marketing and stuff, but I’m the head of Soda-Cola IT services. My team services thousands of computers. I’m not your personal IT man. So, it would be super nice of you if you could phone the helpline, log your problem, and we’ll process your request as soon as we can.”

  Justin took a deep breath.

  “Look, Guy. Part of my contract specified that all my computer equipment was to be brand-new. My computer is not.”

  “I’m sure it is. Look, I have other problems at the moment, like trying to stop the server from crashing. I’ll look into it soon-ish.” With that, Guy hung up.

  Justin held the phone for a few seconds, listening to the dead dial tone. He rubbed his scar, then made another call.

  Debbie, his PA, answered. “Hi, Mr. Truth, how can I help?”

  “Debbie,” Justin instructed, “Go down to IT, and get Guy Chambers for me. Bring him to my office right away.”

  “So, you have spoken to Guy, yeah? He doesn’t leave his office, Mr. Truth. Can I get someone else?”

  “No, it has to be Guy. And if you can’t convince him, you’re fired.”

  Debbie giggled. “Nice one.”

  “That wasn’t a joke. If you don’t get him into my
office in ten minutes, the very first thing I’ll do as national marketing manager for Soda-Cola North America will be to fire you. Hope that is clear.” Justin hung up. He was going to sort out this IT prick, then OrangeFizz, and then the entire company.