Part 10:
You have a security team. You could have surveilled the facility from anywhere. Why did you sit at the bus stop in the cold alone at 7:00 in the morning? She was quiet. Celeste. I don’t know. You don’t know? I do not give you an answer when I do not know. I am telling you I do not know. Sometimes in this job I do not know why I do the things I do.
I just do them. And afterwards when they work, I write them up as strategy. And when they don’t work, I write them up as lessons. That’s not an answer. It is the best I have today, Ryan. He leaned back in the seat. The SUV had gotten onto the highway. The hills were rolling past the window, brown and gray with the last of the October leaves clinging to the trees like people who hadn’t been told the party was over.
The sky was the color of a pigeon’s back. “I hope you find it,” he said quietly. Find what? Whatever you were looking for at the bus stop. She didn’t answer. She looked out her window, not at him, but he saw in the reflection on the glass that she was almost smiling in a way that was not about anything good, exactly.
It was the smile of a person who had just recognized something in themselves they had been trying not to recognize. They drove the rest of the way in silence. The building outside Montpelier didn’t have a sign. It was a long, low brick structure set back from the road behind a line of pine trees with a gravel drive and a small guard hut at the entrance.
The guard waved them through without looking. Inside, the lot was full of unmarked cars. Not SUVs, regular cars. Hondas and Subarus and an old Volvo with a dented fender. Ryan had expected it to look like a spy movie. It looked like a dental office that had seen better years. “What is this place?” he said as Marcus opened the door for him.
“It used to be a printing plant,” Celeste said. “My grandfather owned it. We refitted it about 20 years ago. It is where I send projects I do not want discussed at the main office.” You own your grandfather’s printing plant? “I own everything of my grandfather’s. He was not a very generous man in life. It turned out he was very generous after.
” Inside the building was bright, clean, and quiet. There were maybe 30 people in the main open space sitting at desks, looking at monitors, talking in low voices. They did not look up when Celeste walked in. They were not pretending not to look up. They simply did not look up. Ryan got the impression that they had long ago established that when she came in, nobody stopped working because if they stopped working, she would find them something to do, and it would be harder than what they had been doing.
A woman came toward them. She was tall, black, mid-40s, wearing a gray suit and reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She had the kind of presence that took up more room than her body did. Celeste. Delia, this is Ryan Hale. Ryan, this is Delia Whitmer. She runs my internal compliance team.
She is the person you will report to. Mr. Hale? Mr. Hale is my father, Ryan said. Ryan’s fine. Ryan, welcome aboard. I understand we have you on a rather short fuse, so let’s get you sorted. She turned on her heel. Ryan followed. He glanced back at Celeste who was already 3 ft away from him and moving in a different direction. Her head turned toward a man who had materialized from somewhere with a tablet in his hand and was talking to her in a low urgent tone.
She won’t be at your orientation, Delia said without looking back. She has 21 things to do today before 11. You will mostly work with me. Is that going to be a problem? No, ma’am. Don’t call me, ma’am. I’m not your mother. Yes, ma- uh Stop talking. Yes. Better. She let him into a conference room. On the table was a thick folder, a pen, and a laptop.
You will sign the paperwork first, then you will read it. Don’t you usually do that the other way? Usually people do. You’re on a clock. You can read after. If there is something in there you object to after you read it, you can come to me and we will discuss it and I will probably tell you no. Sit down. He sat.
He signed the paperwork where she pointed. He signed an NDA that was 14 pages long. He signed a contract. He signed a settlement agreement that had a check attached to it with a paperclip, a real physical check, already printed for $60,000, made out to Ryan Hale. He stared at it for a second. It’ll clear by Friday, Delia said. Deposit it today. Don’t carry it around.
Right. Now, come here. She walked him to another room, a smaller one, windowless, with three monitors on a desk and a whiteboard on one wall. On the whiteboard was a chart in blue marker with dates and times and names and arrows. Ryan saw his own name on it in the bottom corner with an arrow pointing to it that said, “Framed October 14th.
This is where you will work for the next 6 weeks.” Delia said. “This is the room where we pull it apart. You will sit at that desk. You will have a bad chair. I apologize for the chair. We’ve had trouble getting a new one through procurement. Okay. We know most of what happened. We do not yet know all of it. We know it is not one man.
We believe it is three. We believe one of them is above Carl Voss in the org chart, which is the part we have not yet nailed down. Your job is going to be to help us nail it down because you know that org chart and you know those people and some of them you have been inside a break room with for 2 years. Who do you think it is? The one above Carl.
