24. Evan #2
Reyes was a stranger with a bad line in his file, but I couldn't find a reason to keep him on the list. Kira had fallen asleep on my chest with her hand over my heart.
The clean part of me knew I had wanted it to be Reyes because that's who the sane part of me feared less.
The part of me that Adrian had left feared the other one, the one already inside the walls.
That was the only kind of loss that had ever actually cost me.
I sat in the cold glass box and felt it come up through years of scar. It had been under there the whole time, waiting for a reason to surface.
This is happening again. I heard it clearly, and in Adrian's voice.
And under it, quieter, something I couldn't make sense of. You know her.
I did know her. That was what I couldn't hold in the same thought as what I saw on the tablet. I knew the woman who had told me, days ago and unprompted, that someone was reading our playbook, who had named the leak before another living soul knew there was one to name.
"She's the one who flagged it," I said. "She came to me. Why would she do that if it was her?"
"Cover," Ian said, so low it barely moved the air. "Or she is exactly what she looks like, and this is a nightmare we owe her an apology for. I don't know, Evan. That's all of it. Neither of us knows."
Halloran didn't take either side. "You are not being asked to decide whether she's guilty," she said.
"You're being asked to decide your exposure.
The committee officially has the materials as of noon.
If there is an open line out of your team, and there is because those pages cannot exist without one, then every private call you make between here and Singapore reaches Hudson while it's still warm.
Singapore is your last leg. You cannot walk into it with the line still open. "
"What are you recommending?"
She gave it to me plainly; that was what I'd hired her for.
"Suspend Ms. Ashford's access. All of it.
Systems, files, the places where the decisions get made, today, before you form a single position for Singapore.
If you're wrong, you apologize inside a week, she's furious, it heals.
If you're right and you did nothing, you lose the mandate, and you take the Straits name down with it, and Knox's. "
She knew where the soft place was and she pushed on it on purpose. Knox's.
I did not say it was insane. I did not say I had been inside this woman's days for two months and the arithmetic of who she was had no room in it for this.
I did not stand up and defend her the way I'd have defended the one thing I was sure of.
That was what I should have said, all of it, and I said none of it.
What I did was hesitate. One beat. Long enough to feel the warm morning still sitting in my mind, and to know I was about to do something I couldn't take back.
Then I said, "Do it. Restrict all of it. Quietly. Nothing that touches the committee's desk."
My shoulders came up and set, the old lock, the one my body did before everything I hadn't wanted to do. There was no one across the room this time to read the pattern and tell me gently what it meant. I knew what it meant. I did it anyway.
Ian was already moving. "I'll run it through building security as a general tightening," he said.
"It won't put her name on anything." He'd done it this way once before, and so had I, restrict-and-call-it-procedure, a wall with a reasonable name on it, and we both knew it was the same move at a worse scale, and neither of us said so.
"You're sure?" Halloran verified.
It was the second time in twelve hours someone had asked me that. Last night the same two words had been an open door, and I had walked through it into the best thing I had. This morning, my answer was worse.
"I'm sure about the exposure," I said. "I'm not sure about her. Those are two different things, and I'm choosing the one I can defend."
It had the cadence of wisdom. I had spent years learning to hear the difference between wisdom and what fear says in wisdom's voice, and sitting in that chair I could not, for the life of me, tell which one had just come out of my mouth.
The suspension went live at 11:52. The confirmation showed on Ian's screen, a single green line, clean and procedural, the quiet electronic sound of a door I kept telling myself I was only closing partway.
"One more thing," Halloran said, before the screen went dark.
"I'm running the post-mortem on the access history myself.
Reyes does the technical work and now reports only to me, I'll check every line of it, and none of it comes back through this room.
That isn't a comment on anyone in it. It's the only way a finding is worth anything after the fact.
" She didn't wait for me to agree. She rarely did when she was right.
I did not go back over to the villa.
I told myself it was the noon deadline, and the deadline was real.
I told myself I'd talk to her tonight, once I'd thought it through, once I could do it without the wound sitting between us.
Any responsible manager protects the deal first and sorts the people out after.
I'd have said it to a client without a flicker.
She was in the villa with her laptop open, and sometime in the next hour she was going to try to open a file that had been hers at breakfast and find a wall where it used to be.
She would know that wall on sight. She would immediately recognize when a place she trusted put one up between her and what she'd earned.
I had signed it with a steady hand. That was the part I kept turning over, standing there.
Not that I'd done it afraid, I had done hard things afraid before, but that my hand had not shaken at all.
She had been the one to warn me somebody was reading our playbook, and I had just made her the only person alive locked out of it.
While I did it, my hands had been the steadiest they'd been in years.