Learned your lesson

As Maria had scurried away to the kitchen, Laila turned Noah's angry face to look at her own. "What is wrong honey?" Even though he was speaking to Laila now, he was still filled with the anger from the confession of his employees and couldn't hide it in his words or tone. "What do you think!? Those three idiots might ruin the whole thing by making stupid decisions they aren't capable of making." Laila's face turned from hearing Noah speak in such a harsh matter for the second time in a row and this while speaking to her no less.

With a hurt expression, not for her own but for the feelings of the men on the other side of the phone, she said, "Don't be this way Noah. Talking like this isn't you. Why are you this angry over one mistake? From what I heard of your conversation it was clear they were only trying to help. Sure they should have consulted you or Steve before doing something like installing a jammer but maybe they didn't want to bother you or they thought that by doing this they might make up for their past mistake. With your reaction from just now I am impressed they had the courage to confess while they did instead of running when they had the chance. They even stopped themselves from making a potential second mistake and called you right away before doing something else that could make matters worse. They thought of how to solve matters and realized they couldn't fix it themselves and they reached out to you only to be chewed out like that when they must have already felt so bad and were so nervous to admit their wrong."

Hearing all of this, Noah felt that Laila might be right. Normally he would have never reacted the way he did. He had just been angered so much by them acting on their own and doing something they shouldn't have. Now he was given a problem he did not need on top of the problems they already had. Steve, though shocked as well, shared Noah's anger a bit more as it had only been a few days since they had caught these three and it had been Noah who was kind enough to offer them a second chance. Now they had caused new problems less than a week after this chance had been given to them.

These reasons were also why Steve's surprise didn't last long when he first heard Noah's reaction to their confession of their mistakes. Depending on the content of their message it could even affect the rest of their plans that had just started to come together a bit today. Who knows what Olivia would do after receiving a message with false information like that would reach her. Especially since it would be clear that it was false from the moment she receives it as Noah had been home for quite some time now and she had seen him arrive home. Their plan was to have her miss her moment by feeding her some real information and some fake. Hoping that she would conclude that her current way of getting information about him was no longer reliable enough and waste time on finding a new way or get frustrated enough to give up after a while.

But now all of it would sound like they were misleading her on purpose, which they were in a way, and cause her to become more alert and suspicious. She might even tip off the other two. This could potentially even cause the person they had hired to track Andrew and James, to get noticed during his tracking and then they would really no longer be able to keep things covered up. Meaning that Olivia would be tipped off on them being aware of who she really is causing the whole house of cards to fall down on them.

With a stern voice, almost equal to that of Noah's, he talked to the men on the other side of the phone. "You have really messed things up. You should not be surprised that Mr. Stephens responded to your mistake in the way he did. It is really something that could have huge consequences. But I won't reprimand you any more than you already have been as that will do no good for either of us. I think you have learned your lesson and you won't ever act on your own like that in the future after your talk with Mr. Stephens. That is if you will get another chance to prove yourselves worthy or if you will have to take your learned lessons and bring them to use elsewhere. Because I can tell you right now that if we aren't able to retrieve that message, even I won't be able to help you."

With frightened and worried voices the men on the other side of the call responded by saying, "Oh please Mr. Branson. We know we have messed up but you have to help us. We only meant to help. We didn't think that the reach of that jammer was so far. Can't we get at least a bit of credit for calling before doing anything else? Please put in a good word for us with Mr. Stephens. The idea of letting him down a second time is really hard to bear."

Steve sighed before he said in a more friendly voice, "Don't worry. I think that Mrs. Stephens is doing that as we speak. She will be a bigger help to you than me. If she can't get him to feel differently about your actions, then no one will. Instead of worrying about something outside of your reach, we should focus on getting that message back. For that I need to know everything you did and I need to access the phone that was used to send the message."