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Chapter 120: Slowly
"I'm going to tell you what I think," the general counsel said. "You may not like it."She had taken off her glasses and let them hang on their chain, and without them her face looked older and a little more tired. The silver pen lay on the blotter between her hands. I noticed that she'd stopped turning it. I had come to understand that it was a sign."I'd rather hear it than not," I said."Good. Because I am about to advise you to do almost nothing."I felt Bishop shift in the chair beside me, a small movement, as of a man who'd expected it."Nothing?" I said."Very little. And very slowly." She laid one finger on the stack of papers. "I don't say it lightly. I've read what you've brought, and I find it deeply disturbing, and I believe a good deal of it. If this were a matter between friends over a dinner table, I'd say you'd made your case.""But it isn't.""No. It's a matter between a firm and a man who has held its confidence for nineteen years." She folded her hands. "I want you
Chapter 119: Counsel
I took it to the firm's lawyer on Friday morning.I had thought about that decision for most of the previous night, and in the end it came down to a simple fact. Everything I had against Marcus had been built in rooms I'd chosen. I'd built it with Bishop, and Sophia, and a stranger with a machine, and a voice on a telephone that wouldn't say its name. It had all been done quietly, and carefully, and it was real. But it was not yet the kind of real that could be put before anyone who didn't already believe me.A man like Marcus would have lawyers. He'd have the weight of twenty years behind him, and every door in the building would open to his hand. If I wanted to stand against that, I needed someone on my side who could read a document the way a court would.So I put the folder in a case, and Bishop carried the case, and we went down two floors to an office whose door I'd opened perhaps four times in my life.---The general counsel was a spare, careful woman in her sixties, with iron
Chapter 118: The Carton
I had done it once, and it had told me what I feared.That was the trouble with a second test. The first had been a clean, cold piece of work, a lie told in a quiet office and a column of buying at twenty-two minutes past seven. It had proved that Marcus Hale carried what I told him across the city. It hadn't proved anything about what he'd do with his own hands.I laid it out to Bishop on Wednesday afternoon, in the room by the long table, with the door shut and the strip of dates at my back."He knows I tested him," I said. "The texter says so. He's moved the archive and deleted the thread and he's told Victor he's been thorough. He thinks he's cleaned the house.""He has cleaned the part of it he knows about," Bishop said."Exactly. So I want to give him something he doesn't know about. Something he'll go to fetch."Bishop folded his hands. "A bait.""A carton."I told him. It wasn't elaborate. It was the kind of idea that had come to me in the early hours, on the sofa, between the
Chapter 117: Handled, Again
It was ten past eleven when the number lit again.I'd spent the morning the way a man spends a morning when he's waiting for something he can't hasten. I'd read the Hartwell summary Marcus had left on my desk. I'd taken a call from the property side and listened to a lawyer explain a clause. I'd stood at the window for some time, looking at nothing, with my hands in my pockets and the folded letter heavy against my side. Nakamura had come in at ten with a report on the week's positions, and I'd read it without taking in a figure.The phone buzzed on the blotter. I took it up and read.*He called back at a quarter to eleven. Before noon, as he'd said.**Where?**The east stair. The window on the half landing. He used the phone he keeps for Victor.*I thought of Nakamura, standing in the corridor, watching a man look out of a window he never looked out of. I thought of how little the building had to hide.*What did he say?*The dots came and went. It was a longer pause than usual, and w
Chapter 116: The Call
The silent number came back on Wednesday morning, at ten past seven.I was in my office already. I'd slept four hours, perhaps five, on the sofa in the room beside the long table, with the letter in my coat and the deleted thread printed in three copies on the desk. I'd woken with the same cold clarity I'd carried out of the room the night before. It didn't feel like anger now. It felt like standing on a floor I'd tested and found sound.The phone lit against the blotter.*He called him at six.*I read it, and put down the coffee I'd been holding, and picked up the phone.*Who?**Victor called Marcus. From the same phone as before, the one that doesn't exist. He hasn't slept. He rang from the car outside the house, before the driver had even pulled away.**What did he say?*The dots came and went. I watched them. I'd learned to wait for this, the pause, the care, the sense of a person choosing words as one chooses stones to cross a stream.*He didn't greet him. He said, "Margaret has
Chapter 115: Deleted
The younger man found it on Tuesday evening, and he found it by accident.That was how he put it afterward, in a flat, apologetic voice, as though he'd been caught trespassing. He had been working through the firm's mail since the previous Friday, in the room by the long table, with his machine open on its cable and a thermos beside him that he never seemed to drink from. Bishop had given him a narrow brief. Look for what had been moved or removed since the retention schedule changed. Look for anything that had been there once and wasn't now.I'd stopped checking on him by Monday. I'd learned not to hover.At ten to seven, he knocked on the frame of my office door and said, "Mr. Cole, I think you ought to come."---Bishop was already there. So was the accountant, standing at the back of the room with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, looking, for once, entirely without expression. The young man's screen glowed against the wall. He'd turned it so that I could read it from the doo
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