Chapter 85: Twelfth Floor

Victoria texted at eight fifteen, before Reed had a chance to call.

Board notice just went out. A director has taken a voluntary leave of absence "to attend to personal matters." Effective immediately. No vote needed. The chair is very pleased with how calm everyone is being.

A minute later: I’m allowed to tell you that because it’s going to be in a filing by noon. I’m not allowed to tell you how I feel about it, so I’ll tell you tonight in a way that doesn’t count.

Lucas read it standing at the window with his tie half done. Across the street a man was trying to fit a mattress into the back of a hatchback and losing.

[Subject: Philip Danner.]

[Status Update: Leave of absence from board, effective immediately. No-contact undertaking in force.]

[Advisory: Board-level pressure on Target Victoria Sterling reduced. External pressure unresolved.]

Reed called at eight thirty.

"You saw," Reed said.

"Victoria texted."

"Kessler took the high road on Tuesday night and walked her client down it this morning. Good lawyer." Reed sounded like he was eating. "Forget all of it. You’re not going to Market Street as a man who knows a director’s on leave. You’re going as a former analyst who changed a document and has to explain why. That’s the whole job today."

"Two rooms."

"Two rooms. I’ll meet you in the lobby at nine forty-five. Wear the blue tie. The other one makes you look like you’re about to apologize."

He changed the tie.

Pellman and Hoyt had the whole twelfth floor and most of the eleventh. The reception desk was a slab of pale stone with nothing on it except a phone and a bowl of green apples that no one ever seemed to eat. A young man in a gray suit walked them past a long glass wall into a conference room with a view of City Hall’s tower and a court reporter already set up at the end of the table.

Two lawyers came in at ten exactly. The older one was a woman in her sixties with short silver hair and reading glasses on a cord. She introduced herself as Margaret Hoyt. The younger was a man about Lucas’s age named David Oyelaran, who carried three binders and set them down in a row, squared at the edges.

"Mr. Vintage," Hoyt said. "We represent the special committee of the Vertex board in its review of the Halcyon close documents. We don’t represent you. Anything you tell us may be shared with the board and, if the board chooses, with regulators or law enforcement. Mr. Reed has explained that to you?"

"He has."

"Then let’s do the boring part properly. It’s the part that matters."

It was boring, and it mattered, and it took four hours with one break.

They started two years back, with his hire date and his first manager and the reporting lines in the finance group. Oyelaran had an org chart from that year and asked him to mark where he sat on it, and Lucas did, and Oyelaran wrote the time next to his mark. They walked through how the Halcyon close binder was assembled, who owned which schedules, who had edit access to the shared drive, what time the final version locked.

Then they got to page forty-seven.

"Tell us in your own words what you did," Hoyt said. "Take your time. If you don’t remember something, say so. We’d much rather have ’I don’t know’ than a guess."

Lucas told them.

He told them about the expansion penalty clause and how he’d found it late, and how it would have triggered a payment that Cole would have routed somewhere Lucas couldn’t follow. He told them he had moved the penalty into a dormant account in Camilla Verman’s name because it was an account no one was watching and he knew she would never touch it. He told them he had reprinted the page with the new figure and slipped it into the binder. He told them it was wrong, and that at the time he had thought it was the least wrong thing available, and that he no longer thought that.

He did not tell them about the voice in his head that issued quests. He had decided a long time ago that there were truths that would only make a room stop listening.

Hoyt let him finish without interrupting. Then she took off her reading glasses.

"Why Ms. Verman’s account?"

"Because it was dormant and it was hers, and I trusted her. I thought if anyone ever looked at it, she’d ask questions instead of spending it."

"Did she know?"

"No. Not until I told her. That was later."

"Did anyone else know at the time?"

"No."

Oyelaran opened the second binder and turned it so Lucas could see. It was a printout of the shared drive’s access log for the night before the close.

"There’s an edit to the page forty-seven file at eleven fifty-two p.m.," Oyelaran said. "Logged to your credentials. Then a second edit at twelve nineteen a.m. Also yours. Can you tell us what the second one was?"

Lucas looked at it for a long time.

"I don’t remember a second edit," he said. "I remember printing. I remember the printer on the fourth floor jamming and having to clear it. I don’t remember going back into the file."

"Could you have saved it twice without noticing?"

"I could have. I don’t know."

"Okay." Oyelaran wrote it down. He did not seem disappointed. "That’s helpful."

[Notice: Host’s account diverges from the access log on one point.]

[Assessment: Divergence is honest. Host did not fill the gap.]

Reed shifted slightly in his chair, the first movement he’d made in an hour.

They asked about Cole. Lucas answered. They asked whether anyone from outside Vertex had ever contacted him about the close. He said that after the arrest, a lawyer for a man named Richard Sterling had called him, and that his own counsel had handled it. Hoyt nodded as if she’d expected exactly that sentence and nothing more. She did not ask about directors. She did not ask about envelopes. Twice Oyelaran started down a path that edged toward the board, and twice Reed said, "That’s outside what my client can speak to today," and both times Hoyt said, "Fair," and moved on.

At two ten Hoyt closed her binder.

"Mr. Vintage, I’ve done a lot of these," she said. "Most people come in with a version they’ve practiced. You came in with a version you remember, and you told us where it has holes. I want you to know we noticed the difference."

"Thank you."

"It’s not a compliment. It’s a note for the file." She smiled slightly. "We may ask for a second session once we’ve spoken to IT about that twelve nineteen entry."

[Quest Completed: Two Rooms.]

[Objective Met: Complete, truthful account on page 47. No cross-contamination.]

[Reward: 400 AP.]

[Current AP Balance: 6900.]

In the elevator, Reed waited until the doors closed.

"The twelve nineteen edit," he said.

"I really don’t remember it."

"I believe you. Which is what worries me." Reed watched the floor numbers. "Either you saved it twice without noticing, which happens, or somebody else had your login at twelve nineteen on the night of the close. And if it’s the second one, that’s not your problem anymore. That’s theirs."

Lucas walked home instead of taking the bus. It was thirty blocks and the wind was still coming off the river, and he wanted the cold on his face more than he wanted to be warm.

He tried to see the fourth floor at midnight. The printer jamming. Pulling the tray, the crumpled sheet, the smell of hot toner. Walking back to his desk. Sitting down. Had he sat down? He could see his hands on the keyboard, but he couldn’t tell if that was the night of the close or any of the four hundred other nights he’d sat at that desk. Memory, he was learning, was not a recording. It was a story you told yourself so often that it wore smooth, and the smooth parts were the ones you couldn’t trust.

[Query logged: Host requests recall of 00:19 on the night of the Halcyon close.]

[Response: Unavailable. The System does not store Host memories.]

[Advisory: Do not reconstruct. A guess offered as memory is a lie with good intentions.]

"Thanks," he said out loud, to nobody, and a woman walking a beagle looked at him and crossed the street.

At four his phone buzzed. Camilla.

Survived yesterday. Denise says you can come back for leftovers any time as long as you bring more bread. Hope today went okay.

He couldn’t tell her where he’d been. He wrote three versions and deleted them.

It went okay. Tell Denise the bread was too thick and I’m bringing a knife.

She says you’re banned. Then, a minute later: She says you’re unbanned if it’s sourdough.

He laughed on the sidewalk, alone, and the sound surprised him.

Victoria arrived at seven with two bags from the Lebanese place on South Street and a bottle of wine she said was "allowed." The detail parked the Suburban across the street. Lucas put the chain on behind her and she watched him do it.

"Good," she said. "Now take the food. My arms are dying."

They ate at the small table by the window. She told him about the tulips again because it had made her furious and she wanted to laugh about it. She told him the chair had sent her a handwritten note on cream paper that said only Steady. She did not say Danner’s name. Neither did he. It sat in the room like a third chair nobody used.

"You had a long day," she said eventually. "I can tell. You eat faster when you’ve been talking for hours."

"I can’t tell you about it."

"I know. I’m not asking." She tore a piece of bread in half and gave him the bigger piece. "Did it go the way it should have?"

He thought about Hoyt’s note for the file.

"I think I told the truth well," he said.

Victoria put her bread down.

"That’s the best thing anyone’s said to me in a week," she said quietly. "Don’t ruin it by explaining."

After dinner she sat sideways on the couch with her feet in his lap and her eyes closed. He thought she’d fallen asleep. At ten she said, without opening her eyes, "I’m not doing anything tonight but sleeping next to you. I hope that’s alright."

"It’s more than alright."

"Good. I’m forty-four, I spent today recused from tulips, and I’m tired in places I didn’t know I had."

[Target: Victoria Sterling.]

[Relationship Status: Intimate Partner (Probationary).]

[Target State: Exhausted, safe. Seeking presence, not intimacy. Recommendation: honor it.]

He didn’t need the recommendation. He walked her to the bedroom, found her an old T-shirt, and lay on top of the covers beside her until her breathing slowed.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand at eleven forty. He took it into the hallway.

"Sorry for the hour," Reed said. "I wanted you to hear it from me before Morgan calls you for something in the morning. Helen Ward drove up from Baltimore this evening with her Towson lawyer. Handed the envelope to Morgan in the annex lobby at nine. Sealed. Signed the chain of custody herself."

"And?"

"Morgan opened it in the lab an hour ago with Miller on the phone." Reed paused. "Elena packed six prints in the first envelope. This one has seven."

Lucas leaned against the wall.

"The seventh one isn’t Victoria’s building," Reed said. "It’s a rowhouse in Roxborough. It’s you, at Camilla’s front door."