The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 11: The Man on the Roof

The wind was the first thing I noticed, and then the height.

I was standing with my heels on a ledge about eight inches wide, and thirty-one floors of nothing were waiting past the toes of my shoes. They were good shoes, hand-stitched leather, the kind that cost more than my last six months of rent. The wind pushed at a suit that fit me the way a coat fits a man who’s been sleeping in it, loose across the chest now where it had once been cut tight.

I didn’t move. I’ve never been good with heights, and I was fairly sure the body I was wearing had already made up its mind about this ledge.

Victor Lang, the puddle said, cold and slow, the way it always did at the start. Forty-seven. Chief Financial Officer, Meridian Industrial Group. Columbus, Ohio.

Then the rest of it came in, and it wasn’t a puddle anymore. It was a flood.

Three years. That’s how long it had been going. Victor had started small, moving a little money out of the retirees’ pension fund into a bridge loan for a company that needed it to survive, which he’d told himself was temporary. The loan went bad. He moved more to cover it. Then more to cover that. By the end it was $41 million that belonged to 3,100 retired machinists and their widows, spread across accounts in three states, and a spreadsheet in his head that he checked every night at 3 a.m. the way other men check a sore tooth.

Nobody had caught it. Nobody had even come close.

Then, six weeks ago, an audit. And by the time anyone looked at the paper trail, it had gotten rearranged, very neatly, so that every transfer carried the login of a junior analyst named Priya Nair.

I felt that one land in my stomach.

I’d like to say I felt something righteous, but what I mostly felt was tired. Victor’s tiredness, and mine. The grain of it was the same. He was a man who’d spent three years running up a staircase that kept going down.

“You came up here to do it,” I said, out loud, to nobody.

Nobody answered. Victor himself was a long way back, fainter than Rian had ever been. The boy had been scared and tangled up in the wires. This man was quiet. I felt for him in the dark of his own head and found only a gray room with the lights off, and somewhere in it, a figure sitting on the floor with his hands hanging between his knees.

“He isn’t listening,” the Intercessor said.

He was at my elbow, standing on the ledge like it was a sidewalk, and he made no sound at all. The wind didn’t catch his coat. I stopped trying to look at his face somewhere around the second week of knowing him.

“Is he going to jump?”

“He’s decided to. That’s different from wanting to.” He studied the drop. “Half past eight. He leaves a note in his office. A good one, he thinks. No names. A man who made some mistakes and can’t live with them.”

“And Priya takes the fall.”

“Priya takes it regardless. If he goes off this roof, she goes down for all of it. Everybody agrees she did it, and nobody’s left to say otherwise.”

I shifted my weight, and something crinkled in my breast pocket. I reached in and pulled out a folded sheet of Meridian letterhead, and I read it standing on the ledge with the wind trying to take it out of my hands.

To whom it may concern. I have made terrible decisions and I take full responsibility for my actions. No one else knew. I’m sorry.

No one else knew.

My thumb found the line and rubbed it, like it was something that might come off.

“That’s not true,” I said.

“No.”

“He’s saying nobody else was involved. Which is true. And he’s letting everybody read it the other way.”

“He’s very good at that.” The Intercessor’s voice had gone dry. “It’s most of how he got here.”

I should have been angry. I think I wanted to be. A man had taken money from people who spent forty years on a shop floor, and he’d let a twenty-six-year-old with a student loan stand in front of the bullet. If I’d met him at the warehouse I’d have wanted to put him through a wall.

But I couldn’t separate the anger from what I’d found in that gray room. A man sitting on the floor with his hands hanging. A man who’d gone to the roof because it was the only place the lie didn’t follow him.

“What’s the job?” I said.

“The Unfinished Business.” He pointed with his chin at the paper in my hand. “He’s never told anyone. Not Priya, not the board, not his wife. Not once in three years has he said out loud what he did. You find the words and you give them to the people who need them before eight-thirty. That’s all.”

“That’s all.”

“That’s the whole job.” A pause. “You may find it harder than it sounds.”

I looked at my watch. Platinum, thin as a coin. 8:04.

Twenty-six minutes.

I turned, very carefully, until my back was to the drop, and stepped down off the ledge onto the gravel. My knees nearly went. The relief was so strong that for a second I had to bend over with my hands on my thighs. That was Victor’s reaction, I realized, a body that had been braced for the fall and couldn’t believe it hadn’t happened yet.

Then I straightened up, and the roof door opened.

It was a heavy steel door, and it banged back against its stop, and a woman in a gray cardigan came through it half running. She was young, with her hair coming out of its clip and a laptop bag banging against her hip. She stopped dead ten feet from me, chest heaving, and stared.

I knew her from the memories. Priya Nair. A tiny, fierce person who’d once stayed three hours late to fix a mistake that wasn’t hers and then thanked him for the chance to learn.

“Mr. Lang,” she said. Her voice shook. “I saw you on the stairs camera. I figured. I mean. I hoped I was wrong.”

“Priya.”

“They’re coming for me at nine.” It all came out in a single rush. “Two men from the state, and a lawyer. HR told me not to bring anything. I’ve been through the logs, every night, and the logins are mine, but I didn’t do this. I never did any of this.” She took a step toward me, and her face crumpled. “I came up here to ask you. Just ask. You’re the only one who’d know.”

The wind went through the roof like a held breath.

“Please,” she said. “Tell me it wasn’t me.”