Chapter Two
Leo sat down in his chair without taking off his coat. He lifted his brass letter opener, slit the top edge of the envelope in one clean stroke, set it down, and tilted the mailer over the desk.
Three things slid out. First was a black flip phone sold off pegboards at gas stations, its screen scratched, the plastic casing cheap beneath his fingers. Next was a generic thumb drive, no logo, no label, the silver shell smudged. And last, a single sheet of folded hotel stationery.
Leo picked up the note first.
He recognized Vic’s handwriting before he’d fully unfolded it.
He’d seen it on a dozen contract drafts over the years, scrawled in margins and looped through the signature line of more than one agreement Leo had personally negotiated against him.
The hand on the page in front of him was Vic’s, but shakier than Leo remembered.
He’d written this in a hurry, in fear, or both.
Leo flattened the page on the blotter and read.
Leo — If you’re reading this, I’m already dead and they made it look clean. Don’t believe the story. I didn’t do it to myself.
You’re the only agent in this town I’d trust with this, and that’s saying something because I don’t even like you. You never liked me either, so we’re square. But you’re clean. I watched for years to make sure. You’re the only one I’m sure of.
Don’t take this to the cops or the feds. Don’t take it to your own people. They have assets everywhere. I mean everywhere, Leo. They have people inside places you would never guess. I thought I had been careful. Look at me now.
Get this flash drive to someone outside the industry who knows what they’re doing. Someone who owes you nothing, and someone you owe nothing to. Someone who can’t be reached through leverage.
Watch your clients. They’re coming for yours next. They may already have started.
I’m sorry for every shitty thing I ever said about you in my head and in print. — V
Leo read it through. Then he read it a second time, slower and lawyer-eyed, treating it as a contract whose other party he didn’t trust. On the third pass, he started looking at the language rather than the meaning because language was something Leo knew how to inspect.
Six years of contract law had taught him how people lied on paper.
He recognized the markers and what evasion looked like when it was trying to dress up as candor.
He understood the difference between a man building a story versus telling one.
This was definitely the latter.
The phrasing was too specific to be a performance.
They have people inside places you would never guess.
That wasn’t the line of a guy spinning a paranoid fantasy.
A paranoid fantasy named names, accused everybody, and spilled into the margins.
Vic’s note named nobody. He knew exactly which doors he couldn’t trust and was leaving Leo a map drawn in the only ink he had left.
The instructions were precise. The omissions were disciplined.
Don’t take it to your own people. No reasoning offered.
No evidence cited. Just the flat command of a man who didn’t have time to walk Leo through the math because the math had already killed him.
And then the apology at the bottom. I’m sorry for every shitty thing I ever said about you in my head and in print.
That was the line that locked it for Leo.
A person fabricating a suicide note for some other purpose wouldn’t waste their last paragraph on an embarrassing apology to a colleague he’d feuded with over a point guard.
The man who penned this had realized the next forty-eight hours were going to kill him and wanted to leave the world a little cleaner than he’d kept it.
Vic had written this expecting to die.
Leo placed the note on the blotter and flattened it against the leather with the heel of his hand. The tremor had left his fingers. His body had moved past shaking and into the part where it understood there was work to do.
He regarded the thumb drive.
His air-gapped laptop lived in the firm’s safe behind the bookshelf in the corner, a slim Lenovo Leo had bought with cash three years ago for the sole purpose of opening files he didn’t want anywhere near a network.
He kept it for the same reason he had a fireproof cabinet and the crosscut shredder in the closet that could turn a phonebook into confetti.
Lawyers acquired specific habits whether they wanted to or not.
Leo retrieved the laptop from the safe and powered it up.
While the machine started, he picked up the flash drive and turned it over between his thumb and forefinger. Generic. Unbranded. The kind sold ten to a clamshell at any office supply store in America. Vic had been thinking about traceability when he bought it.
The Lenovo finished booting. Leo plugged the drive into the side port. The machine recognized it after a beat. A single folder appeared on the screen, and inside was an encrypted archive.
A password field blinked at him.
Leo tried Vic’s last name. The field shook its head at him with the annoying red animation of a wrong guess.
He tried Vic’s full name, his birthday, which he found on social media, in three different formats, and the name of the hotel printed at the top of the stationery.
The date of the postmark plus the hotel name didn’t work.
He tried trust no one as a single string with no spaces.
The field rejected each attempt with the same patient red shudder, and on the sixth or seventh wrong guess, Leo realized he was doing exactly what Vic had warned him not to do: trying to handle this alone.
He pulled the drive out of the laptop.
The burner phone was sitting on the blotter. Leo picked it up and turned it on. It chimed once, a tinny default startup sound, then displayed a stripped-down menu screen with nothing on it. He thumbed through to the contacts.
One entry: Answer.
There were no names, notes, call history, or even any outgoing or incoming texts or voicemails. The battery sat at eighty-three percent. The signal bars were full.
Vic had charged the phone, programmed one contact into it, mailed it to Leo, and expected it to ring.
Leo studied the phone, and a lawyerly voice in the back of his head told him very clearly not to touch the call button under any circumstance until he had someone next to him who understood what answering it might mean. He laid the phone down on the desk next to the note.
Outside the window, the lights of Forest Park were starting to come up in scattered dots beyond the treetops. Forty-two stories below, a Friday night was beginning in restaurants and bars Leo couldn’t see from this height.
Inside the building, the hush had thickened. The HVAC ticked through its cycle in the ceiling above him. An elevator chimed faintly, and the doors opened on a level Leo couldn’t identify. He waited for the chime to come again and tell him the doors had closed. A second later, it did.
Leo had worked late in this office a hundred times, had stayed past midnight closing contracts.
He’d slept on the leather sofa against the wall during the worst week of the Andy Bane trade.
None of those nights had ever felt how this one did, with the sensation of being completely alone in a space that was much larger than one person and much easier to enter than he had ever bothered to notice.
Leo started moving.
Gathering the items Vic sent him, he shoved them back into the padded mailer.
He folded the top over twice and tucked it under his arm.
After powering down the Lenovo, he closed the lid and slid it into his briefcase along with its charger.
He walked to the door, killed the lights, and stood at the threshold for a single breath, looking back at his office.
Then he pulled the door shut behind him and heard the lock catch.
#
The Range Rover handled Friday night traffic on Forest Park Parkway easily, justifying the indulgence of paying extra for the suspension package.
Leo drove with both hands on the wheel, the radio off, and the briefcase on the passenger seat where he could see it.
He let his brain do what it did when a problem was too big to attack head-on.
He started making lists.
First were colleagues at Pinnacle he would call in any normal crisis, ranked by proximity.
Curtis Lennox, the managing partner, had recruited Leo out of his injury rehab six years ago and given him a new life direction.
He’d sent flowers when Leo’s grandmother died.
Jasmine Ortega, the firm’s general counsel, was sharp as a paring knife and Leo’s closest work friend.
She’d once spent a weekend at Leo’s kitchen table helping him prep a contract without charging the firm for the hours.
Brad Hatton, another senior agent, had repped a couple of Leo’s teammates back when Leo was still playing. Marcy Bell, his loyal assistant.
Leo didn’t believe any of those four were compromised.
He also could not prove that any of them weren’t.
That was the part that sat in his stomach like a lead weight.
Leo had built a career on reading people, and he was good at it.
His gut told him everyone on that list was clean.
But Vic was presumably also good at reading people, and he was dead in a hotel room in Kansas City.
I thought I had been careful. Look at me now.
The whole point of Vic’s warning was that the machinery Vic had stumbled into could reach inside rooms Vic had thought were sealed.
Believing his coworkers were uncompromised didn’t mean as much as it had this morning, because he hadn’t accounted for the possibility that they’d spent years showing him the version of themselves they wanted him to see.
He moved to the next list.