Part 15:
He turned and looked at her. She was facing him now. The light from the sodium lamp at the end of the path was barely reaching them. Her face was half in shadow. Her eyes were steady on his. “What happens to me if this goes wrong?” he said. “If it goes wrong, nothing happens to you legally, because you will not have committed a crime.
You will have taken a meeting with a senior executive of the company that fired you, and you will have floated a suggestion. You did not execute anything. You did not take money. The only thing that will happen if this goes wrong is that he will not say what we need him to say, and we will walk out, and we will try again through the courts.
” “What if he does more than refuse to say it?” “Meaning what?” “Meaning what if he decides I’m a threat and calls someone?” “He will call someone. He will call Carl. Carl is already watching you. Carl will be in the meeting listening on a phone from the parking lot, almost certainly. That is fine. That is in fact better, because if Sharp implicates Carl in the conversation, we catch both of them at once.
So, you’re putting me in a room with two men who have already spent months trying to destroy me. Yes. With a wire. With a wire. In a building I don’t control. You will not be alone in the building. Marcus will be outside. My My team will be in position. You will have a panic word.
If you say the word, we come through the doors. What’s the word? You pick it. I don’t know. Pick something unusual. Pick something you would not say in normal conversation in that room. Ryan thought about it. Burlington, he said. Why Burlington? Because I’ve never had any reason to say Burlington in a sentence with those men. And because that’s where she lives.
Who? Emma’s grandmother, Rosa. She was born in Burlington. All right. If you say Burlington, we come in. Okay? Okay. You’re agreeing or okay, you’ve heard me? I’m agreeing. She breathed out. It was the first sign that she had been holding her breath. He noticed it. He noticed him noticing it. Thank you, Ryan. Don’t thank me yet.
I’m thanking you for being willing. Whatever happens. Okay? They stood there on the gravel path for another second without saying anything. The wind moved through the pines. Somewhere, far off, a dog was barking. And somewhere, a little less far off, a train was going by. The long, low horn of it carried across the hills. Celeste.
Yes. Why do you do this? Do what? This. Any of it. The bus stop, the four SUVs, the windowless room. You could hand this off. You could let Delia run the whole thing. You could sit in a boardroom. You don’t. She was quiet for a long time. My father owned this company before me, she said finally. Okay.
He was, I think you would say, a corner-cutting man. Not evil, but not honorable, either. He built things quickly, and he did not ask too many questions about how the people under him built things. When he died, I inherited a company that had a reputation for results, and a reputation for being a little dirty. And I spent the first 5 years of my time here trying to clean it.
I thought because I am stubborn, that by the time I was 30, I would have made it a clean company. How old are you? 30. Ah. Yes. Ah. I am 30, and my company is not clean, and I realized 2 years ago that part of the reason it is not clean is because every generation of executives under me has learned to tell me what I want to hear, the way they learned to tell my father what he wanted to hear.
I cannot trust the reports. I cannot trust the briefings. I cannot trust the dashboards. The only thing I can trust is what I see with my own eyes in places where they do not know I am looking. So, I go to bus stops, Ryan. I go to bus stops and I watch. And sometimes I’m wrong. And sometimes I’m right.
And sometimes a man pulls over and gives me $40, and I find out something about my company I could not have found any other way. What did you find out? I found out that there are still honest men in the field, and I found out that I had stopped believing there were. Ryan didn’t know what to say to that. He looked at her, and he saw her, the whole of her, for a second.
Not as a billionaire in a charcoal coat, not as the woman who ran his life for the moment, but as a person who was tired in a particular way, and who had been carrying a particular thing alone for a long time. He wanted to say something that would help her. He didn’t know what it would be. Celeste. Yes. If I do this, the wire, the meeting.
Yes. After. When it’s all over, the whole thing. Yes. Will you stop sitting at bus stops for a while? She looked at him. She almost smiled. For a while, she said. Yes, I think I could stop for a while. Good. Ryan. Yeah. It’s cold out here. Yeah, it is. We should go inside. Okay. They walked back down the gravel path toward the building.
The windows of the main floor were lit from inside in a warm yellow that spilled out onto the lot. Marcus Pell was standing in the parking lot, as Marcus Pell tended to do, watching the road. He nodded at them as they approached. He did not ask where they had been. He never asked where they had been. At the door, she stopped.
