When Katie arrived home from Heathrow everyone was out, which was a relief as it was 10AM. She’d have been worried if her husband and two teenage children had been sitting in the lounge on a Wednesday morning.
She dumped her bags in the hall and wandered into the kitchen to see a huge bouquet of exotic flowers sitting in the middle of the wooden breakfast table. The multicoloured blooms stood in all their morning glory alongside a Fortnum & Mason wicker hamper. The modern-day cornucopia was already open and overflowing with fancy goodies.
A carefully handwritten note simply read: ‘We are halfway home.’
She scrutinised the note, looking for deeper meanings, but could not find any other than that Sara Keating at least understood the art of the grand gesture.
Katie was just kicking off her shoes and dreaming of a shower when she heard a mobile chirp. It was inside the hamper. Under some aged Cheddar and a selection of marzipan delicacies was as an old-fashioned mobile, ‘a burner’ she guessed, having watched enough cop shows to know.
With some uncertainty she picked it up and saw the text on the simple grey-tone screen: ‘Welcome home!’
For a moment Katie considered throwing the burner in the bin. Hampers were one thing, but the phone felt intrusive. Then she had another thought.
‘Are you watching me?’ she texted back.
‘Look outside,’ came the reply.
‘Unbelievable,’ Katie muttered and dragged herself to the hall window to see Sara waving at her from the rolled down window of a huge, black SUV.
–
‘You know, I haven’t really slept since….I can’t remember when…..and I desperately need to wash my hair…..I can barely think straight,’ Katie told Sara as she climbed into the back seat of the luxurious Mercedes. ‘This is not a good time.’
Sara just smiled back magnanimously.
‘I mean, this is really not a good time,’ Katie stressed.
Sara nodded nonchalantly, but her calm demeanour didn’t change. She looked immaculate, almost as if she’d had a wonderful sleep on the way back from California, then an early visit to a spa, and had then been chauffeur-driven to Katie’s front door in time for her arrival. Which is exactly what had happened.
‘Yes, well, momentous occasions require we go the extra mile,’ she murmured, almost to herself.
Katie noted that Sara was making her so angry it was helping to wake her up. She was just considering telling this surprise visitor to go and take a running jump, when the partner rested a perfectly manicured hand on her tracksuited arm.
‘The Americans really want to do the deal. They told me last night. They were very impressed with you, by the way.’
Katie had so many conflicting things she wanted to say all at once that they cancelled each other out. Sara leaned closer. Her perfume – a rare scent – was overpowering.
‘This is it now. We confront Timothy on Friday. I’ve already called for an Extraordinary ExCom Meeting. I have counted the votes, we’ll win by a landslide. He’ll have to resign and then we take over.’
‘We?’ Katie replied, ‘you mean you?’
They both looked each other in surprise. Both Katie and Sara were taken aback by the annoyance in her tone.
‘Well, yes,’ Sara responded and blushed a little.
She eyed Katie curiously for a moment, as if looking at someone new, then she removed her hand from her arm.
‘But, you’re going to be instrumental in all of this. You’re doing the closing speech at the ExCom – the coup de grace – the whole ‘if we don’t fully embrace AI’ thing. Get the doubters over the top,’ she enthused.
For a moment Katie had an image of World War One soldiers dutifully clambering out of a muddy trench to get mown down by a hail of machine gun bullets and the detonations of terrible munitions – and with Sara standing there in a British Army officer’s uniform, brandishing a pistol.
–
Sleep, or rather the lack of it, was becoming a problem. Katie’s bodyclock had slipped into West Coast time just as she had been sent hurtling back to Old Blighty. Too much caffeine and realising she had to give another do-or-die speech, that if successful would destroy the managing partner of her firm, were not helping either.
The Extra-ExComm meeting, or as Sara had come to call it, ‘DoubleX’ – which Katie grimaced painfully at when she realised could also be articulated as ‘double-cross’ – arrived regardless of whether she was prepared or not.
Mercifully it was to be early in the morning, so Katie arrived at the office before her staff. She’d worked from home since returning from San Francisco. She didn’t want to see their faces until this war was over.
—
It was the day of the big meeting with the firm’s most senior partners and Katie was standing in a cubicle in the bathroom closest to the main conference room. She wanted to throw up and only managed to steady her nerves with the stoic thought that ‘it will all be over soon’.
Walk into room. Wait for the cue from Sara. Don’t look at Tim. Yes. Don’t look at Tim at all. Say prepared lines. Focus on a spot on the wall above the heads of everyone. End speech. Turn and walk out.
She was rehearsing a few key lines in her head when she heard the bathroom door slam open and stiletto heels hammer on the tiled floor. Then came the voice of an incandescently angry Sara, who hissed into her phone: ‘Today, Sunil? Today of all days!’
Katie didn’t hear the replies from Sara’s main conspirator, who was also one of the leading corporate partners at the firm. Whatever it was he had done, it was bad.
‘How many others are going with you?’
‘Five? Five other equity partners! Jesus. You…..you…..you resign today and take half the bloody M&A group with you! What is this? Sabotage? Are you doing this to deliberately humiliate me? Have you been planning this all along? No, don’t tell me, of course you have.’
‘You’re sorry? Sorry? We …. I have been working towards this day for years and now on this very day you resign and take all of your little gang off to some bloody AI-native….whatever they’re called!’
‘No. No. I can’t see things from your perspective. I’m not you, Sunil! You’ve left me high and dry. Undermined me at the worst possible moment. I need allies here in that room. Right now!’
‘What? Her? Katie? Are you kidding? She’s room-filler. Bodycount. She’s served her purpose. But, she’s not you. She’s not a bloody Practice Head. She doesn’t have bloody BlackRock as a client!’
‘Look, we can be co-managing partners. Yes. We can share leadership.’
‘What? Too late? Right. Fine. Goodbye to you as well!’
The call ended and there was a stifled cry, then a loud clatter. A phone bounced off the bathroom wall and ricocheted right under the door of the cubicle Katie was standing in.
‘And who the bloody hell is in there?’ Sara demanded, finally noticing that one of the doors was firmly closed.
Katie picked up the now broken phone, opened the door and felt the conflicting emotions of anger and fear fight inside her. Sara grabbed the shattered iPhone from her outstretched hand and processed the new reality.
‘I apologise. I have been surprised. Let down. Please don’t take things said in anger to heart.’
Without waiting for Katie to respond, Sara turned on her heels and hurried out to the ExCom meeting.
For a moment Katie considered her next steps. Then she pulled out the burner and called Harry Harmer – his was the only other number in the phone – and the last remaining key conspirator.
‘No,’ she stated very calmly after some initial explanation. ‘It won’t work. Not without Sunil. He brought the core M&A team with him.’
‘And I don’t believe the American firm knows what they’re doing either. The whole thing could easily collapse. Yes, they sold a good story. But, there’s no guarantee they’d even go for a deal with us. It’s all a big ‘if’.’
There was a long pause on the end of the line as Harry did some rapid, but serious thinking.
‘A little bit overconfident? Sara? Yes. That’s a good way of putting things. I’d say she’s walked us down the gangplank. A mutiny that fails is the worst possible scenario.’
There was another long wait for a response. She could hear Harry’s laboured breathing as he weighed up the odds, his future, and his reputation. Katie decided to deliver an outcome.
‘Look, Harry, I don’t know you well at all, and I don’t pretend to be an expert in such things, but do you really want your final act at this firm to be…..’ she paused for a moment, ‘this? A coup gone wrong? And then to be ignominiously ejected and put out to pasture?’
There was a long silence. Finally he spoke.
‘Yes. I agree. It will be as if nothing ever happened.’
The call ended and there was a silence all of a sudden that was deafening.
For a moment she could feel the urge to resign welling up in her, the desire to just leave all this madness behind and go and find a nice, regular day-job helping lawyers to use software again.
But then Katie felt the sensation she’d had on the plane coming back from California. There was something really quite exciting about all of this. For a moment she saw what her aunt Glenda had perhaps experienced: being right at centre of things.
She fully opened up the clamshell phone and snapped it in half, just like she’d seen in the movies. With a feeling of great satisfaction she chucked the broken parts of the phone into the waste bin.
‘Goodbye Sara,’ she whispered over the remnants.
As she walked back to her office, she passed some of Smyth & Marmalade’s most senior partners coming in the other direction, on their way to the conference room for the Exceptional ExCom meeting. Katie could only imagine what would happen next.
—
Previous Chapters of ‘The Innovators’
- Part 6 – ‘Memories’
- Part 5 – The Conference
- Part 4 – ‘Civil War’
- Part 3 – ‘Press Conference’
- Part 2 – ‘Project Rubicon’
- Part 1 – Introduction
[ Copyright © 2026, Richard Tromans, Published by Artificial Lawyer Limited in the U.K. All rights reserved. This work of fiction may not be republished or reproduced without permission. The moral right of the author has been asserted. All characters are fictitious and any resemblance to any persons living, dead, or virtual, is purely coincidental. ]
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