Part 26:
They are not coming up yet. They will come up at my signal. You have until my signal to do exactly one thing. You are going to stand up from that desk. You are going to walk out from behind it. You are going to hand me the fountain pen I gave you 3 years ago, which is in the top drawer on the left. You’re going to walk out of this office, out into that hallway, and you’re going to stand there while Ryan Hale closes the door behind you.
And then you’ll sit in the reception area, and you will wait for the federal team to come up. You will not take anything off your desk. You will not touch your computer. You will not use your phone. Are we clear? Celeste? Are we clear, Douglas? He did not answer for a long time. Finally, slowly, he stood up. He walked out from behind his desk.
He paused. Then he pulled open the top left drawer. He took out the fountain pen. It was a handsome pen, black with a gold nib. He looked at it for a second. Then he held it out to her. She took it. “Thank you,” she said. He walked to the door. At the door he turned. He looked at Ryan. “Mr. Reinicke?” “Yes.” “You understand this was not personal.
” Ryan looked at him. He thought about Delia 3 weeks ago saying he will tell you it was not personal. “Do you understand?” “Mr. Reinicke?” “Yes. That’s the thing. It was personal. It was personal to me. It was personal to my daughter. It was personal to my wife’s mother. It was personal to everybody who was going to hire me and now isn’t.
It was personal to the kids in the hospitals who didn’t get their insulin pumps. You just didn’t have to make it personal because you weren’t the one who was going to pay for it. That’s what you thought, anyway. You were wrong about that part. Rinehart looked at him. He did not answer. He walked out into the reception area. Ryan closed the door behind him.
He stood there for a second with his hand on the doorknob. Through the frosted glass, he could see the blurred shape of Rinehart sitting down in one of the reception chairs. His head was down. His hands were in his lap. Ryan turned around. Celeste was looking at him. “You did that well,” she said. “I’ve had practice lately.
” She nodded. Delia opened her folio and took out a phone. She made a call. “Send them up,” she said. She hung up. Somewhere below them in the lobby, six federal agents began walking toward the elevators. Ryan stood in the middle of Douglas Rinehart’s office in a suit that fit him a little too well on a Tuesday morning in the middle of November.
And he understood, in a way that was too big to speak, that the month of his life, which had started with a termination notice in Martin Delaney’s office, had just ended. Celeste walked over to him. She did not hug him. She did not touch him. She just stood next to him looking at the empty desk. “Ryan.” “Yeah.” “You said you wanted to think about the job.
” “Yeah.” “Have you?” “Yeah.” “And” He looked at the chair Rinehart had just stood up from. He looked at the window behind the desk, which had the same view of the mountains Sharp’s office had two floors down, only a little higher up. He looked at Celeste, who was standing next to him with her hands at her sides and the fountain pen held between two fingers.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll take it.” “Good.” “On one condition.” “What?” “I want to be able to bring Emma here sometimes. On days when school is out. I don’t want her to think my job is a secret. I want her to see where I work.” Celeste looked at him. Her face did the small private thing again.
The thing she did not let other people see. “Yes, Ryan,” she said. “Yes. Of course. Of um of course.” She looked away. She looked at the chair. Then she looked back at him and her voice was very steady and a little lower than before. “Bring her whenever you want,” she said. “We will make her a badge. Delia will pretend to hate it. She will love it.” Ryan laughed softly.
And outside in the reception area, Douglas Rhineck sat with his head in his hands. And down on the ground floor, six agents were stepping into an elevator. And somewhere across town, a 7-year-old girl in brown boots was sitting in a classroom with a yarn bracelet around her wrist drawing a picture of her father.
She didn’t know yet where he was standing. She didn’t know yet that he had, in the space of 4 weeks, walked through a door he was never coming back out of. She was just drawing him. She drew him tall. The federal agents took Douglas Rhineck out through the lobby, not the garage. That had been Celeste’s request.
She wanted it seen. She wanted the people in the building, the accountants on four and the schedulers on five and the young analysts on six who had gotten jobs at Regis Hollister because it was a good name on a resume, to see their COO walk out between two men in dark jackets with federal IDs on lanyards. She wanted them to know, with their own eyes, without a press release and without a rumor chain, that the man who signed their performance reviews had been arrested in his office on a Tuesday at 11:42 a.m. Ryan stood at the window
of Rhineck’s office and watched them lead him out to the curb. Rhineck was not in cuffs. That In exchange for not being cuffed in his own building, Rhinoc had agreed through his lawyer to full and voluntary cooperation with the federal team. He got into the back of a black Crown Victoria. The agent closed the door.
