CHAPTER 8 #2
I waited until his breathing had gone back to whatever it does, and asked the same question again in the same words. Nobody has ever talked me out of a question by telling me it was the wrong one.
He got up and came back from the rack by the door with a bottle of water, the cap already broken. He put it into my hand, sat down again, and said nothing, and that was how I learned he had meant it.
The medal had come out of his collar and lay on his chest. It was a flat steel oval on a black boot cord, knotted rather than clasped.
The archangel on the face of it had been rubbed down to a suggestion of a wing and the line of a spear.
One edge was worn thin and bright, thinner than all the rest, where a thumb has kept finding it in the dark.
He caught me looking. He did not put it away and he did not tell me one word about it.
I looked past him at the door instead. He had come in ahead of me and taken the wall on the hinge side.
“You have not once sat with your back to that door, and I have been watching you not do it.”
“That is a different conversation and we are not having it on a mat.”
So I set it beside the color he had gone in the fire stair on Sunday, and left the two of them lying there together.
The keyed service elevator down to fifty-nine takes ninety seconds and gives you nothing to look at.
Rian rode it with his back to the wall beside the panel.
Wednesday had been bright all day, and the night had come in with an edge on it.
The only window on that level is in the elevator lobby, outside the operations floor, and it gave the cold straight through.
Inside, nothing had changed since the last time I stood in it: the squelch, the solder flux over the sweet burnt smell of the printer, four of the twelve desks still empty.
Owen Bell came in off the street with his hands the color of raw meat. He announced the weather to the whole room before his jacket was off.
“That is the first night of the year with an actual opinion about you,” he said. “I went out in this like an optimist.”
He was twenty-six, sandy, sunburnt across the nose in September. He plainly knew about it and plainly enjoyed it. He set a paper cup down beside my elbow without looking at me. Then he grinned at a monitor as though the monitor had done it.
“You are the lawyer. I have been told not to talk to you, so this is me not talking to you.”
“That is elaborate compliance.” I took the cup. “It is the best I have seen all year.”
“If anybody asks, I gave you the coffee and you took it, and neither of us said one word.”
He turned to Matteo and gave the perimeter report standing up, without notes. He gave it in the order a man uses when he has done a thing five hundred times and still does it properly.
“North side is clean. The gray van on the hydrant belongs to the florist on the corner.” He shrugged out of the jacket while he talked. “It has been there three evenings running, and I asked the man twice on separate days, and he told me the same thing twice, which is what an honest man does.”
“The service door on the west side was propped again with that same extinguisher. I found the porter and stood there while he unpropped it, and he has agreed to be embarrassed about it going forward.”
“Two cyclists came round the block more times than I enjoyed.” He rubbed his hands together hard. “Then they went into the place with the green awning and came out carrying food, so I have decided to forgive them.”
Matteo asked him one short thing about the west door. Owen answered it exactly and did not decorate it. Then he went back to being twenty-six.
“Mind the mat at the screen wall, by the way. It is split at the corner and it has had three grown adults over.” He held his red hands over the desk lamp. “I have put in for a new one twice. One day I will be a legend in this building.”
“You have a jacket problem rather more than you have a mat problem.”
“I burn in September,” he said. “My sister calls that a defect of personality and not of complexion, and she says it in a way that means I am supposed to argue.”
Matteo was at the end desk with two screens angled so that nobody behind him could read them, working something small between his fingers while he listened. The crooked one on his left hand did the same work as the straight ones.
“You watch the perimeter model and you are never on the floor with the rest of them,” I said. “I have been trying to decide whether that is a preference or an instruction.”
“I was late once.”
He added nothing to it, and Owen did not fill it and Rian did not fill it. After a moment Matteo turned back to his screen, and I understood that the three of them had an agreement about that sentence, and that I had been let inside its edge.
“Show me the layer you were building this morning,” I said. “Cassian told me you had it, in the way that means you did not.”
“I have it now. Sixty-one shells, and the order they were opened in.”
The chain came up the screen in a column and kept coming, and the total sat in the corner where nobody had ever argued with it, $4.1 billion across nine quarters. I read the column twice.
“This is Wesley Pike’s list,” I said. “He had the first eleven of these written out on a legal pad, in a box on my floor, and nobody has opened that box since he drowned.”
Rian put his cup down on the desk beside mine and went out through the elevator lobby. Matteo went on scrolling, and Owen carried the perimeter log to the empty desk and started keying it in.
“These three do not route where the others route,” Matteo said. “The money goes in clean and the counterparties are not clean. Two of those jurisdictions nobody is permitted to touch at all.”
I stayed on my feet at the screen, which is what I do instead of sitting down.
“Then this was never a laundering case. Laundering is a fine, a consent decree, a bad quarter, one paragraph in the annual report.” My voice had gone quiet. “Sanctions evasion is a criminal referral with individual names on it, and the names go up to the board.”
“That is why nobody has offered me anything,” I said. “I have been waiting up there to be bought. Thorne cannot buy me, because there is nothing here he is allowed to settle.”
“He has known that longer than you have.”
“And it means this only ever becomes real one way.” I put a finger on the glass. “My thumb, their basement.”
“Yes. Your thumb, and nothing else.”
I turned to look at him. “How long until the window closes on the quarter?”
“Nineteen days.”
He was already moving past it. He put one fingertip against the last name in the chain, turned the screen flat on, and waited while I read a name that was not a bank.
“This one does not move money. This one moves rifles, and your firm has paid him nine times.”