Baron's Vault

Harmony House: Episode 25

“Harmony House” is a serial novel with episodes released every Tuesday morning. You can read the setup for the story or start from the beginning. Each episode comes with high-quality audio narration for you to enjoy on the go with the Substack mobile app.

Previously…

In the last episode, Jessie was returned to their makeshift cell in the basement room after performing the script the eco-terrorists had made him read on camera. Deepu, already emotionally fragile was pistol-whipped by Hawk, the muscle of their trio of captors when he asked to use the restroom. Back in Houze, Jayden was sick of the seeming complacency of her housemates and was determined to help Jessie and Deepu somehow. She was also horrified by the death of the Tanzanian villagers and made her feelings known to the world when it was her turn to live broadcast.

Scott was surprised to get the text from Evangeline when he was driving home after their marathon meeting in the war room. It was almost eight o’clock. He was exhausted and he was starving. She wanted to meet with just him, not Chris. He had tried to push her off until the morning, but she was insistent.

So, here he was sitting on a couch across from her in the garden courtyard of the luxurious house she had rented for herself. It was a sprawling adobe-style place set in the foothills with a pool and a fruit orchard. Scott guessed it was probably featured in Architectural Digest at some point. No doubt it probably cost her more than $25,000 a month.

“Are you sure I can’t get you a drink?” she asked again. She was cradling a glass of red wine that was the size of a fishbowl.

“No, I’m good right now. Ask me again after you tell me whatever it is you brought me all the way out here for.”

She nodded, took a generous drink from the fishbowl, and set it down.

“Look, I know you don’t like me. I know you don’t respect me. That’s fine. I’m a big girl.”

“Well, you did almost kill me with some glassware,” he said, unable to help himself.

“And I’m sorry for that. I’m working with my therapist on more productive ways of managing my emotions.” She took another drink, sat the glass back down, and leaned back into the couch cushions. “But never mind. I brought you here to talk because I’m scared. Before you say anything, before you start judging me, please, just hear me out.”

Scott leaned back, opening his posture, and crossing his legs. Whatever this was, it was going to take a while. He nodded for her to proceed.

“I realize people’s lives are at stake here. I know you and your brother’s business is on the line so I’m not thinking what I have to lose is a priority. But I want you to know, it’s not about the money. I loved my dad more than anyone in the whole world. He was a good man. I would give up all this if it would have kept him alive just a couple more years. Whatever all this is that’s coming out… whether it’s true or not will destroy more than his legacy…”

She was beginning to cry. Scott waited, consciously making an effort not to look at his watch or his phone. She sniffled, wiped her nose with the sleeve of her shirt, and continued.

“I can’t lose who he was to me. I’m afraid to find out that what we heard today is true. I’m afraid there will be more I didn’t know about him and his businesses.”

Scott had no personal attachment to Cliff Baron, but he had admired him from a distance for over two decades so he could understand some of what Evangeline was feeling. The man had singularly done more to raise awareness of the climate crisis and more to combat it in material ways than any other person and more than most countries including the United States. When he responded, Scott tried to sound sympathetic.

“You need to stop saying ‘if this is true.’ We know it is. You were there in the room today when we did the research. It’s not a conspiracy as much as we’d like it to be. We can’t know everything. We can’t know what your father was thinking, what he did or didn’t try to do. All we know is the facts. Forty-seven innocent people died drinking from his water filtration system that had not been properly tested. He paid their remaining relatives to keep it out of the news. That’s what happened.”

“Why did he do that?” she pleaded. “It’s so horrible. I know him. He couldn’t live with that…”

“Well, he didn’t, did he?” Scott said. “Look, I know this is terrible for you, but why am I here? Why did you need to talk to me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have anyone else I can talk to about this, and I’m worried there’s more that will come out. As much as I can’t bear it, I want to know. Can you help me?”

“I’m not sure what you want me to do. I mean, we’re all in this together already.”

“I have access to everything. My father left it all to me. I’ve just let other people run things because I didn’t really care about the businesses, but now I do. I need to know if there’s more. If it’s worse. I need to know how big a liar he was.”

Scott studied her for a moment in the soft ambient glow from the pool and the small footlights that lined the landscaped garden path. Without the war paint and headdress, she seemed more like a person. Like a vulnerable human. Like someone’s little girl. He took a deep breath through his nose, laced his fingers behind his head, and exhaled.

“Okay. I’ll take that drink now. Then you can lay out what you’ve got to work with.”

Three hours later they were sitting side by side at the large farmhouse table in the dining room peering into her laptop. There were printouts of documents scattered across the table amidst a clutter of takeout containers and a couple of empty bottles of wine. Scott’s head was buzzing not from the alcohol but from everything he had learned so far. It was surreal to have this private window into a public figure’s life, to see how the extraordinarily brilliant and wealthy lived. There was an entire cottage industry built around managing these people’s lives and their deaths. Systems and protocols for retaining, securing, and sharing information that could move billions of dollars and change the lives of millions of people for better or worse. It was dizzying. He was dumbfounded that all this had been at this woman’s fingertips, and she hadn’t touched any of it until now.

Her genuine surprise at each discovery made it clear that Evangeline truly had no idea how much power her father had and how much she had inherited. Her CMO role at FutureAbode was a token position, the wish of a dying father who knew his little girl needed some small, safe place to start. He knew she might never be ready to take the helm of his empire but true to his wildly optimistic, risk-taking personality, he had left her a key that would unlock any door she chose to open. “The Key” was one man. An attorney whose only job was to pick up the phone anytime Evangeline wanted to go deeper down the rabbit hole of her father’s legacy. Up to this point, she had only ever called him when she wanted to make a large purchase or to donate some money to someone who had cornered her at an event and won her sympathy. The man, Mr. Fitzpatrick had picked up the phone on the first ring when Evangeline had dialed him earlier in the evening. He was pleasant but wary. Upon hearing Evangeline’s request, he insisted that she switch her camera on so he could ensure she was safe and not being coerced. He had taken Scott’s social security number and run a background check while Evangeline explained that she would like access to what had been called “the vault.”

While the vault did have a physical manifestation – a safe deposit box in a bank in Zurich, it also referred to a store of digital records both personal and professional that Cliff Baron had willed to his daughter. Evangeline had never requested access to the vault. Scott found this hard to believe but was beginning to understand. She really did love her dad and she wanted to protect that love. Maybe she instinctually knew there would be things in the vault that would change that. Halfway through the second bottle of wine, while they were waiting on Mr. Fitzpatrick to retrieve the encrypted digital keys, Evangeline had told Scott about the last days with her father.

He had been in an excruciating amount of pain but had refused the morphine. He wanted to die completely conscious at home with his daughter. Evangeline had stayed by his side for almost three months before he finally passed.

“I could tell he had a lot on his chest,” she said. “He wanted to confess something, maybe a lot of things but he couldn’t do it. He just kept telling me he loved me and that he was sorry. He wanted more time to make things right, he said. He kept saying he wished there was someone else to leave the burden of his legacy to. ‘It’s not a gift, sweetheart. It’s a ten-ton anchor.’ That’s what he told me the week before he died when he introduced me to Mr. Fitzpatrick and the idea of the vault.”

A few minutes later the attorney had called them back ready to transmit the encryption keys to her. To do this required her to answer three specific questions exactly right. He would not allow her to answer them in front of Scott but asked that she go into another room. When she had returned with her laptop a custom application had been installed that was the only access point to the vault. It required both a facial recognition scan and a fingerprint scan from Evangeline.

Scott had seen and built a lot of software in his life, but he had never encountered anything quite like this. He couldn’t help but ask Mr. Fitzpatrick a few questions before the attorney signed off. While pleasant enough, the guy’s voice was oddly formal and yet goofy and eager to explain everything in the way brilliant shut-in adolescent boys who spend all their time playing D&D are. He told Scott the app was developed by some brilliant programmer who was sequestered in a clean room for six months to do the job. This was to ensure they couldn’t make a copy of it or build in some type of backdoor. The programmer was never given access to the actual content. Their job was just to build an application where all of it could be stored securely.

The interface was unusual in that it defied any expectations a normal user might have for this kind of application, but it was exquisite in its simple design. Fitzpatrick had said the programmer worked from a sketch Baron did on a sheet from one of the notebooks he famously carried everywhere. He was designing it for a single user, his daughter. The home screen was laid out like a map of some kind of futuristic theme park. Baron’s four primary businesses sprawled out in four quadrants, their size and density representational of the actual corporate entities. To Scott, they looked like the different “lands” that made up Disney World except more boring. Instead of Frontier Land, there was GreenerTech Corporation. At the center of the map was a hub labeled Two Rocks Ranch. Scott knew this was Baron’s primary residence. Ever the contrarian and disrupter of expectations, it was his only residence. It’s where he raised Evangeline after her mother died.

Scott felt uncomfortable witnessing such a private moment as Evangeline navigated into Two Rocks and was greeted by a library of memories her father had curated. But she seemed to forget Scott was there as tears flowed down her cheeks. When he had tried to get up and allow her some privacy, she reached out and clutched his hand, not letting go. So, he stayed and watched. He was secretly hoping there might be some big reveal, like a deathbed video where the old man confessed all his sins. That would have saved them a lot of time. There was a goodbye video, and it was hard to watch. The old man looked so frail, an echo of his former self. He mostly cried and asked for forgiveness. Forgiveness for missing so much of her childhood. Forgiveness for leaving her with so many strangers as a child. Toward the end, after all the emotion had drained from him, Baron leveled his still formidable gaze at the camera and spoke.

“Eve honey, I’ve tried to do a lot of good things in my life, but you break a lot of eggs to make an omelet. There’s a lot I regret professionally. Mostly I regret what will, I’m sure come down on you my sweet girl. I know everybody thinks you’ve enjoyed the life of a princess. I know it’s not like that. You never asked for any of this, but you’ve had to find a way to make it work.”

He had paused at that point and taken a sip of water. He put the cup down and brought the camera in tight on his face before he delivered the last part of the message.

“When you watch this, I’ll be long gone. Things will come out about my life that won’t be pretty. You may be tempted to defend me. Don’t. I lived my life and made my choices. It’s your time. They may come for you, but you have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. I kept you out of the business for a reason. Protect yourself. Take no shit from anybody. Sell the whole shooting match if you want to. You’re all that matters to me now. I love you.”

Evangeline had broken down after this and Scott held her, awkwardly at first, but then he softened. When the wave of emotion passed, he got her a drink of water and offered to leave so she could get some rest, but she didn’t want him to. She wanted to dig in further. That’s what they had done for the next couple of hours.

They started by exploring Greener Tech. Inside the “headquarters” building there was an array of folders with expected labels like Financials and Leadership Team but there were intriguing ones too like Enemies & Allies. Scott would have liked to spend hours spelunking through the folder labeled Patents & Secrets, but this was not on the agenda. The one folder that got both of their attention had the ominous title of Fallout. They had spent the last hour going through its contents. Any doubts about the validity of the tragedy in the Tanzanian village were put permanently to rest. There were records cataloging not just the deaths, but the extensive effort to cover them up. It was horrifying but at some deep, reptilian brain level, Scott understood the calculus. Baron had created a world-changing technology that could do an unlimited amount of good. If the tragedy had been allowed to take center stage, that good would have evaporated as surely as the promise of nuclear power had in the wake of Chornobyl.

Evangeline slumped back in her chair and stared blankly out the window. “Jesus,” she said, her voice, little more than a whisper.

Scott kept staring at the screen, his jaw slack. He had moved out of the Mbeyo folder, closing the montage of heartbreaking photos that were far more extensive than the collection the terrorists had come by. His focus was on the three other folders contained in Fallout they had skipped over earlier. There was more. How could there possibly be more? He turned to Evangeline.

“How could you not know about all this.” It was not really a question and he didn’t wait for an answer. “It doesn’t stop with the water filter. You know that, right? The other technologies we’ve incorporated from your father’s company, the ones he threw in to sweeten the deal of our partnership, they’re covered in blood too.”

“You don’t know that,” she said, turning away from the window to meet his gaze.

“Yeah? Well, I don’t think these additional folders contain vegan recipes. There’s one here labeled ‘Cobalt Mining.’ You know what Cobalt’s used for? Batteries. The same Greener Tech batteries we use in Harmony House…”

“It’s fucking Houze, Scott! That’s the fucking name. How naïve are you? How can someone so fucking brilliant not know anything about how the world works?” She was standing over him now. “You and your brother wanted to play in the big leagues. Now you are. You think people get rich and no one gets hurt? Did you really think you guys would just manufacture a million little houses out of thin air and save the world? That there wouldn’t be a cost?”

Scott had no answer to her questions. He pushed away from the table, stood, and walked past her to the window with a view of 20,000 gallons of Caribbean blue water illuminated from within like a precious jewel there in a place that saw less than fourteen inches of rainfall a year.

“So, you did know,” he said. “You knew about all this, and you didn’t say a damned thing.”

“No, I didn’t. I mean, I suspected. Daddy was always putting out fires. It was how he spent most of his time. But I never knew how much… how many people were hurt.”

“You didn’t want to know,” Scott said.

“Yeah, well that makes two of us. I didn’t see you asking a lot of questions. If you asked too many questions, you might have to get off that tall white horse.” She picked up her glass and drained the last of the wine. After, when she spoke, her tone was languid. “We’re not so different.”

Scott felt like he might throw up. He had never in his life had the urge to run away. But right now, it’s all he wanted to do. His phone buzzed in his pocket. Alyssa again, no doubt. He had been ignoring her texts all night. He was done there. They had run their course. The last thing he needed at this point was her criticism. She gave him enough of that when things were going well. Why did he seek out women who were such bitter pills?

“Hey,” Evangeline said, her voice soft. She was right behind him. “We’re in this together now. Whether you like it or not, you need me.”

He turned to face her. She was tall, her eyes almost level with his. He saw something in her eyes, something like a funhouse reflection of himself. When she stepped closer, he could smell the wine on her breath mingled with the verbena fragrance of her hair which was void of all the product that made it voluminous. She looked less like an Instagram filter and more like a woman he might know or at least understand.

“I think it would help if you stopped trying to hate me so much,” she said.

“I don’t hate you. I don’t really know you enough to hate you. We’re in real trouble here. People could die. I’m not like your dad. I can’t carry this kind of thing. I don’t want it.”

“I know you don’t. That’s why I like you. You’re a man of principles. I was raised to think Daddy was but as I got older that changed. I pretended because he needed me too.”

She placed her hands on his chest and frowned. She was crying again, the tears pooling in her eyes. The churning knot in Scott’s stomach relaxed. He sighed before pulling her to him. He closed his eyes as he held her. After a moment, their breathing synchronized. There was an inevitability he could not shake. It had been gathering momentum the moment his brother had come back from that visit with Cliff Baron in a sweat lodge. He was not used to this kind of speed. His life had been one of methodical plodding. When you fall at such a pace, it’s easy to get back up and start again.

But this rocket he was strapped to now, this was a different thing.

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Who’s Who in Harmony House?

Having trouble keeping track of who’s who from one week to the next? It’s tough when you only get to visit once a week. I made a little cheat sheet just for you: