The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 13: The Longer Road

I backspaced over the o, and then the G, and watched the cursor blink in an empty field.

Then I closed the admin panel, locked the phone, and put it back in Victor’s pocket. My hand wasn’t steady. It took two tries to get it into the pocket at all.

“You’re sure,” the Intercessor said. It wasn’t quite a question.

“No.”

“It’s the same fifty either way. I want you to know that.” He was watching the gravel. “The long road pays the same, and it doesn’t promise you a clean finish. Priya might not thank you. The board might not care. Nobody has to like what comes out.”

“That’s the problem with the short one.” I started toward the roof door. “It makes the clean version the only version. Victor never has to say it. That’s the whole point of it.”

He didn’t answer. When I glanced back, he was standing at the ledge with his hands in his sleeves, and he looked like a man who’d just heard a note he hadn’t heard in a long time.

“Most of them take the short one,” he said, to the wind. “Not all.”

I didn’t ask who them was. The door was heavy, and I had twenty-four minutes.

The elevator was glass on three sides, and it dropped so fast my stomach stayed upstairs. Around the twentieth floor the tightness started.

It came on slowly, a fist closing behind my breastbone, and by the fifteenth it had spread into my left arm. I put my hand flat on the rail. Sweat had come up on Victor’s forehead, and when I looked at my reflection in the glass, I almost didn’t know him. Gray at the mouth. Eyes sunk back in the sockets. The man I’d seen in the photographs in his office had been fifty-five at least in the face, and he was only forty-seven.

My fingers found the inside pocket of the jacket before I knew what I was reaching for. A small brown bottle. I read the label with my head tilted, the way a man reads a menu without his glasses. Nitroglycerin, 0.4 mg. Victor R. Lang. Dr. A. Aziz. The date on it was three weeks old.

He hadn’t told Leanne. I knew that the way I knew his passwords, from the inside. Three weeks, and he’d put the bottle in the lining of a coat she never touched.

I slid a tablet under my tongue. It tasted like chalk and pennies. The fist loosened, a little.

“How long,” I said, around it.

“Hurry,” the Intercessor said. He was in the corner of the elevator, though I’d never seen him step in. His outline looked thinner than it had on the roof. “That’s all I’ll say.”

The numbers dropped. Twelve. Nine. Four.

I thought about Victor’s spreadsheet, the 3,100 names, and the nights he’d spent reading down the column. I thought about a man who’d been dying for three weeks and had still gone to the roof to do it on his own terms. Not out of cowardice. Out of control. It was the one thing in the whole mess he thought he could still steer.

The doors opened at 8:38.

The lobby was white marble and brass, built to make people feel small, and it was nearly empty. The security desk stood on my left with a bored guard at it. Priya’s chair beside it was vacant.

My heart gave a hard, wrong thump.

“She was there ten minutes ago,” the guard said, when he saw me looking. “Two gentlemen came in. Said they had an appointment. Mr. Marsh walked them back to the glass room.”

Marsh. Dennis Marsh, general counsel, a tall man in a very good suit who had a gift for making everything sound like procedure. The state men weren’t due until nine.

I crossed the marble at something close to a run. Victor’s lungs didn’t like it. Through the glass wall of the conference room, I saw them in profile: Marsh at the head of the table, two men in dark windbreakers on one side, and Priya on the other, very small in a chair that was too big for her.

There was a single sheet of paper in front of her and a pen in her hand.

“It’s only a statement,” Marsh was saying, as I pulled open the door. His voice was warm. “A formality. Cooperation goes a long way, Ms. Nair. If you simply confirm that the access logs are accurate, we can all go home.”

“I don’t think I—” Priya started.

I took the pen out of her fingers.

It was gentle. She let me. She looked up at me with her mouth slightly open, and I saw how much sleep she hadn’t had, the way her whole face was held together by effort.

I set the pen down on the table and put my hand flat on the paper.

“Don’t sign that,” I said.

Marsh half rose. “Victor. We understood you weren’t in the building.”

“I’m in the building.”

“This isn’t the moment—”

“It’s the only moment.” The words came out steady. I didn’t know where from. Somewhere in the back of my head, so far down I could barely hear it, a boy was saying I’ve got it in the dark. “Gentlemen. My name is Victor Lang. I’m the chief financial officer of Meridian. And I’d like to make a statement of my own.”

Nobody moved.

I looked at Priya. She didn’t look away. She was gripping the edge of the table, and her knuckles had gone pale.

“Priya Nair didn’t touch a dollar,” I said. “Her login is on those transfers because I put it there. Every one. I took forty-one million dollars out of the retirees’ pension fund over three years, and when the audit started, I moved her credentials onto the paper trail so it would land on somebody who couldn’t fight it. I did that. Nobody else. I want that in writing before anyone in this room leaves.”

The silence went on for what felt like a long time. A radiator knocked somewhere under the floor. Outside the glass, the guard had stopped pretending not to watch.

Then the older of the two men in windbreakers reached across the table, without any hurry, and pressed a button on a small black recorder.

“Mr. Lang,” he said. “Would you say that again, for the record?”

I opened my mouth.

Under my ribs, something small and tight turned over, like a key in a lock.