Chapter 16
ELIAS
Elias went back to the office. He didn't know why.
There was nothing at the office he needed to do that couldn't be done from the apartment, and the apartment was, by any honest measure, closer to where his body wanted to be after the meeting on Madison.
He went to the office anyway because the office was the room in which he'd, for his entire adult life, done his thinking, and the thinking he was about to do wasn't thinking he could afford to do badly.
His assistant looked up when he came in, then looked down again. She'd worked for him long enough to read the second half of his face and decline to comment on it. He closed the door and sat at his desk.
You chose to hurt me instead.
The sentence sat in him where she'd put it.
He'd been arranging answers for the first half of what she'd said — you don't get to know, Elias, you had every chance to ask, I am not going to give you the answers you didn't trust me enough to ask for — those sentences he'd been preparing counter-answers to even as she'd delivered them.
The last one had come in underneath the others.
You chose to hurt me instead. Her voice had broken on the last word, and the breaking had been the first and only moment in a marriage of unbroken composure when his wife had allowed him to hear what something had cost her.
He'd heard it, and he'd done what he'd been doing, since the dossier, with every piece of information about her that didn't fit the model: he'd set it aside to be processed later.
It was later. He was processing it now.
Elias opened the drawer. The dossier was where he'd left it, beneath the addendum, inside the plain manila folder his senior counsel used for matters that weren't to be filed in the firm's usual system.
He took it out and set it on the blotter, and he didn't open it immediately.
He sat with the folder closed under his hand, because the man who'd read the dossier on the night of the living-room kiss was a man he'd believed without qualification, and the man who was about to read it now was a man who'd just heard his wife's voice break on the word instead.
He didn't yet know whether the two men were going to read the same document.
He opened the folder and read the summary sheet.
The pattern, on the sheet, was as it had been.
Vanders had moved through a sequence of rooms that had all, at their edges, touched Elias's interests.
Vanders had been in New York on the afternoon he'd come to the penthouse.
Vanders had met with a lawyer from Michael Warren's firm at a sidewalk cafe on Madison Avenue.
The sheet listed the dates, and the dates were accurate.
He turned to the photographs. He'd looked at them the way one looked at photographs in a dossier: as confirmations.
He'd gone through them in a span that might have been ninety seconds.
The ninety seconds had been enough, because the photographs had said what the summary sheet had said.
Confirming information didn't require a second look.
He gave them a second look now. He gave them more than a second look.
The photographs were timestamped, and he'd registered the timestamps before, had registered them as proof that the New York meeting had taken place on the same day as the penthouse meeting.
That proof had been the piece that had shut the door on every other reading of the situation.
He registered them again now with a different attention.
Vanders on Madison Avenue at two-fifteen in the afternoon. Vanders at the sidewalk cafe, at the table, across the table from the lawyer, standing to leave, walking north. Two-fifteen.
He sat with the number. The meeting in his living room had been at five: Vanders had arrived at a little after five, because Elias had come home early and stepped out of the elevator at almost exactly five-past and had heard the voices in the living room already in progress.
The dossier had presented the New York afternoon and the Chicago afternoon as the same afternoon, which, technically, they'd been; same calendar day.
But the flight from LaGuardia to O'Hare was two hours in the air, plus taxi, plus the trip from the airport into the city.
Vanders hadn't taken a private plane, the dossier would've noted it.
Vanders had taken a commercial flight, and the earliest commercial flight that could've had him at a Madison Avenue cafe at two-fifteen and in Elias's living room by five was, when he did the arithmetic, not a flight that existed.
Vanders hadn't made that sequence.
He looked at the photograph again, at the angle, at the background.
The photograph was of Madison Avenue, he could see that.
But it wasn't a photograph he'd, on a second look, stake a reading on.
The shot was from across the street, the angle oblique.
The man at the table was, yes, Vanders, and the man across the table was, by the best read available, the lawyer the team had identified.
But the shot was the shot a surveillance photographer would've taken if the photographer were being paid to confirm a thing already known.
A photographer building a case from the ground up would've taken the shot from a better angle.
He closed the folder and sat for a long moment.
Elias wasn't a man who second-guessed his senior counsel, and hadn't been in thirty years.
He'd hired the man now in charge of the team that had produced the dossier because the man had been reliable at the beginning of Elias's career and had continued to be reliable across every subsequent decade.
A man who'd given Elias years of reliable work didn't suddenly, in the matter of Elias's own wife, produce a shoddy product.
Unless the product wasn't what Elias had thought it was.
He picked up the phone.
"James."
"Elias."
"The Vanders file." A silence; his senior counsel didn't fill silences. "I need you to walk me through how it came to you."
"In what sense?"
"In the sense of the original intake. Who flagged Vanders to the team, whose desk the name first came across, whose concern initiated the surveillance."
Another silence, longer this time. "You initiated the surveillance," James said.
"Before that."
"Before that, the Vanders name came up in the Laurent file. As I recall, you flagged it. The instruction was to monitor."
"I flagged it because it was in the Laurent file. Who put it in the Laurent file?"
"The Laurent file came to us from Holloway Partners," James said. "They'd done the original due diligence on the Laurent family before you engaged. The section on outside counsel was theirs."
"Holloway Partners."
"Yes."
"Who at Holloway Partners?"
A pause. "Their senior partner on our retainer matters is Lionel Holloway. The due diligence packet would've been assembled by an associate and signed off by a partner. I can pull the signature page."
"Pull it."
He waited, hearing James move through his office, a drawer opening, the rustle of paper, and then James, on the other end, going still.
"Elias."
"Yes?”
"The signature page is Lionel Holloway’s.”
"And who at Holloway Partners has Michael Warren on retainer in New York?"
The silence this time was the longest of them. "Warren represents Holloway Partners's New York clients," James said.
"So the firm that produced the due diligence packet that first flagged Gordon Vanders to me shares a retainer relationship with Michael Warren's firm."
"Yes."
"And the surveillance team that produced the dossier on Vanders — "
"Works out of Holloway Partners's building when the work's of a sensitive nature. They use a private contractor on the third floor."
Elias set the phone down flat on his desk. He picked it back up.
"James, I need you to do one more thing before the end of the day.
I need you to pull the timestamps on every piece of surveillance in the Vanders dossier.
I want to know who assigned the contractor, I want to know when the first shot was taken, and I want to know whether the contractor's assignment came in as a result of my flag on Vanders or whether the surveillance was already running when my flag arrived. "
James understood what was being asked. "Give me an hour."
Elias sat at his desk for most of that hour without moving. He didn't open the folder again; he didn't need to. He'd, in the course of a phone call, arranged the facts of his marriage in a different order, and the facts in the different order were producing a different story.
The different story was this: Michael Warren's firm had a long-standing relationship with Holloway Partners.
Holloway Partners had produced the Laurent due diligence, and Holloway Partners had flagged Gordon Vanders in the due diligence because Vanders had been the Laurents' outside counsel for many years and was a neutral fact.
Elias had read the flag. The flag had, by itself, produced no concern: a family lawyer was a family lawyer.
What had produced concern, in the months after the wedding, was Vanders appearing in rooms adjacent to Elias's deals, and those appearances had been the thing that had caused Elias to authorize the surveillance.
The surveillance had been contracted through Holloway Partners's private contractor, which meant the people watching Vanders had been, at one remove, the same people with a relationship to Michael Warren, which meant the dossier that had come across Elias's desk had come across it from a channel that wasn't, in the matter of Gordon Vanders, neutral.