Chapter 7 — Whitmore Holdings

At eight the following morning, ten senior executives sat around a long conference table on the fifty-first floor of a glass tower overlooking Midtown Manhattan.

At the head of the table sat Robert Whitmore — the same man Victoria had dismissed, the night before, as a small-time distributor not worth her courtesy.

In reality, Robert was the founder and chairman of Whitmore Holdings, a massive American conglomerate with interests in logistics, industrial real estate, infrastructure, hotels, supply-chain financing, and commercial development.

For years he had stayed deliberately away from the celebrity magazines and the society pages; he preferred, he often said, for his companies to be famous rather than himself.