CHAPTER 6
Ana
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“You have struck two clauses, added one, initialed every change, and I am going to have this framed.”
Luca said it to the paper and not to me. He held the instrument up at eye level in both hands. Then he laughed out loud, a real one, out of the chest, his head going back. Nobody had laughed inside these eleven rooms since I arrived.
“You’re enjoying this more than anybody has ever enjoyed a redline, and I’ve worked with people who framed redlines.”
“Then they framed the wrong ones.” He turned to the second page and laughed again, lower. “I’ve watched a great many people sign things and never one like this.”
The desk was ash, and the grain stood up under both my palms where the oil had worn off the top.
My right index nail was torn to the quick and it caught on the paper at every page turn.
The split in my lip had gone yellow, and the bruise on my left cheekbone with it.
Behind the wall, the relay in the utility closet clacked over on its self-test, one dry knock, at the same hour it had knocked the day before.
Cassian stood at the far end with his hands behind his back and hadn’t moved since I took the cap off the pen.
“I want to be precise about what I’m marking,” I said. “The card in my pocket has seven lines on it and I have not touched a word of them.”
“The card is the card. What you are marking is the instrument.” His voice went down the half-register it went down whenever he wanted a thing finished. “They are different documents and they are going to stay different.”
“Good. Then look at page two, paragraph four.” I kept my voice low, which is what I have always done instead of raising it.
“You take custody of everything that leaves this house. Every page, every call, every keystroke I make. That clause reaches my privileged communications with my own counsel, and you cannot have those.”
“Tell me why I cannot.”
“Because the day you hold my privileged material it stops being privileged, and the first competent lawyer Thorne hires will say so out loud in a courtroom. You’d be handing him my whole file with a ribbon on it.”
Cassian didn’t argue and didn’t take the pause a man takes to look thoughtful about losing. “Then it is struck, and I should have found it myself.”
I drew the line through it and initialed the margin. Luca made a noise into his knuckles that he tried to pass off as a cough.
“Page six, paragraph eleven,” I said. “This arrangement is terminable by Kestrel Group and by nobody else. That’s not an arrangement. That’s a door with the handle on one side, and I’m not signing a door.”
“Write me what goes in instead.”
“Either party may terminate on written notice, and the notice does not have to be reasonable, and it does not have to explain itself.” I struck it and initialed it.
“If I end it, you have a duty to put me somewhere safer than this and no authority over me at all after that, and you may hate that in writing.”
Rian was leaning on the door frame with his arms crossed. “And if you end it because you’re sick of the four of us in your kitchen?”
“Then I’m sick of you and it’s still valid, and that’s the point of the clause.”
“Fair enough.” He looked at Cassian with something I couldn’t read. “She’s going to run us ragged.”
“She is going to run us correctly,” Cassian said. “Those are not the same thing and I prefer the second.”
I turned the page and let the room go quiet, because what came next was mine.
“There’s one clause going in,” I said. “You don’t get to negotiate the wording of it and I’m not going to soften it for anybody’s comfort. Nothing about me gets decided in a room I am not in. That is the clause, and it is not negotiable.”
Luca stopped smiling. That was more interesting than the laugh had been.
“Written in,” Cassian said. “Word for word, in your hand, and initialed by all four of us before it is typed.”
“All four. Including the one who is not in this room.”
“Matteo signs everything he is asked to sign and reads it first. You will get on with him.”
Then I asked for the other one. Luca got it from a folder already on the sideboard, which told me they had expected the request, and I didn’t enjoy being that predictable.
The August pages were a photocopy. My own signature was at the bottom of the last one, and it was my ordinary signature, the fast one, the one I use on things that do not matter.
“Extraction consent, paragraph nine,” I said, and read it aloud, and heard my own voice do it.
It ran nine lines. It authorized the removal of the enrolled person from any place of work or residence, without further notice, by any means short of injury, on a determination of imminent risk made by the protective firm alone.
“I signed that,” I said. “I signed it and I didn’t read it twice, and I have never done that in my life.”
I could tell them the exact afternoon: the Tier One enrolment pack, a stack of onboarding paper Wesley Pike’s assistant left on my chair, a meeting on forty-one I was already late for, and my hand moving through the tabs the way you move through furniture.
Nobody said anything for a while. Luca opened his mouth. Cassian lifted one finger off his own forearm and Luca closed it again.
“For what it’s worth,” Luca said eventually, “I don’t sign anything I haven’t read twice. I learned that the expensive way and I didn’t learn it from a document.”
“It’s worth nothing at all to me this morning, and I imagine you knew that when you said it.”
“I did.” The dimple came and went. “I said it anyway.”
Cassian let the whole thing sit on the desk between us. He didn’t tell me it was a standard clause. He let it be exactly the size it was, which was worse, and the only thing anybody could have done that I would not have hated.
Then I asked for a telephone and made the call I had been building since I woke.
They put Kestrel’s outside counsel on speaker, and outside counsel put the state bar’s ethics line on after that, and I stood the whole time because standing is a position I take rather than a rest.
“This is Ana Verdugo, bar number on file,” I said. “I am making a voluntary self-report and I would like it docketed today.”
“Go ahead, Ms. Verdugo. Facts only, please.”
The voice on the line belonged to somebody’s ordinary Monday, and I was glad of it.
“Facts only is all you are getting. On Friday evening I was removed from my place of work by four licensed protective agents holding a Protective Authority and Extraction Consent that I executed in August. I am presently at a private address and I am not free to leave it. I continue to hold the confidences of Bridgewell Sterling. I am not in a position to perform my duties to that client, and I have not attempted to.”
Behind me a page turned and did not turn again.
“Anything further?”
“Two things further. I have retained separate counsel of my own choosing, and no protective agent has access to those communications. And I intend to make a submission to federal authorities concerning a client matter, on my own initiative, and I want that stated on the record before I make it rather than after.”
I put two fingers flat on the ash and waited.
“You understand this cannot be unsaid once it is docketed.”
“That is the entire reason I am making the call. Docket it with today’s date and send the receipt to my counsel and to me.”
It was the most boring conversation of my professional life, and when I put the receiver down my hands were fine and my mouth was not. That report is a wall. After it I’m a lawyer working in the open with a record behind her. Before it I was a woman who disappeared.
Luca was watching me the way you watch a card trick you’ve already worked out.
“You should know what you’ve just bought yourself with that docket, because you have bought something,” he said. “Kestrel Group isn’t a firm with a payroll problem, we sold the platform, we take four clients a year. Being rich has not once made me a better man.”
“Congratulations. I’m still in a room I can’t leave, so let’s go back to page two.”
He laughed again, and that time there was something underneath it that was not delight.
The service car was keyed and the panel had one button lit, and the number on it read 59. Twelve floors down. Cassian stood on my left and Rian on my right, and the door opened onto solder flux over the sweet burnt smell of a laser fuser, and radio squelch opening and closing at no rhythm at all.
Twelve desks, in three banks of four. Four of them empty. A wall of screens along the north side, and at the far end of the plate a range behind a door I did not go near. It was the first room I had stood in here that was doing actual work.
The tall woman at the second bank stood up and put her hand out. “Sasha Ilves. I run the intelligence side. You’ll hear my voice on the comms more than you’ll see my face.”
“Ana Verdugo. Tell me one thing you already know that I do not.”
“Bridgewell’s building manager has been signing in a maintenance vendor with no maintenance contract, and I have the sign-in sheets.” She sat back down without making a production of it. “That’s not the answer to your problem, but it’s the beginning of one.”
Matteo was at the screen wall with his hands in his pockets. He was the palest of them, near see-through at the wrists, and he hadn’t said a word to me until now.
“Show her the cage,” Cassian said.
Matteo brought a floor plan up on the screen. Sub-level two, two mantraps, a cage inside the second one. “Tier One is air-gapped,” he said. “Your thumb is on the access list and mine is not, so it has to be your body in that room.”
“Then say the other half of it, because I already know the shape and I’d rather hear you say the words.”
“There’s no external route. There was never meant to be one. The cage reads a token off a person the reader recognises. There’s no second way to do it from anywhere on earth.”
“So you can’t do this without me, and you’ve known that since before you took me.”
“Yes.” He looked at the plan and not at me. “Twenty-one days to build it.”