Chapter 95: Badge Photo

He wore the good tie.

It was the blue one his mother had bought him when he got the job at Vertex, the one he’d worn to his first day and to his grandfather’s funeral and, for some reason he still didn’t understand, to his last dentist appointment. Reed looked at it in the lobby of the Market Street tower and nodded once, which from Reed was a paragraph.

"Rules," Reed said, while they waited by the security desk. "You don’t speak about the investigation to anyone in this building except Hoyt and whoever she brings. If someone from your old team says hello, you say hello. If they ask how you are, you say fine. If they ask anything else, you say you can’t talk about it, and you smile, and you walk."

"I know."

"I know you know. I’m saying it because I’m nervous, and saying rules out loud is how I stop being nervous." Reed straightened his own tie, which was not good. "Twenty-two years and I still hate lobbies."

The guard at the desk was a man named Theo who had waved Lucas through every morning for three years. He looked up, saw Lucas, and his face did a quick complicated thing before it settled.

"Mr. Vintage," Theo said. "They told me you were coming. I’ve got a visitor pass for you. Sorry. It’s what they printed."

"That’s fine, Theo."

"It’s not fine, but it’s what they printed." Theo handed it over. VISITOR in red letters across the top. "Good to see you."

"Good to see you too."

[Notice: Subject has re-entered Vertex premises. Status: Visitor.]

The elevator stopped on nine on the way up.

The doors opened on the floor where he’d worked for three years, the gray carpet and the low partitions and the window at the end that looked at the river if you leaned. Kevin Doyle from accounts payable was standing there with a coffee in each hand, waiting to go down. He looked at Lucas, and at the visitor pass, and at Reed.

"Hey," Kevin said.

"Hey, Kevin."

"You look good." Kevin glanced at the open doors, at the up arrow lit above them, and didn’t get on. "We, uh. People have been saying a lot of things. I didn’t say any of them."

"Thanks."

"Are you coming back?"

Lucas felt Reed not moving beside him.

"I can’t really talk about it," Lucas said, and smiled, the way Reed had told him to.

Kevin nodded slowly, as if that were an answer, which in a way it was. "Okay. Well. Your plant’s still alive. Priya waters it. She’ll want to know you asked."

"Tell her thank you."

The doors closed. Reed let out a breath through his nose.

"That," he said, "was textbook."

"He was being nice."

"Yes. That’s the hardest kind." Reed watched the floor numbers climb. "People being horrible to you is easy. You just stop talking. People being nice to you is where everyone slips."

The meeting was on the twelfth floor, in the small conference room with the bad painting of a sailboat. Margaret Hoyt was there with her reading glasses pushed up into her gray hair, and David Oyelaran with a laptop, and a woman from Human Resources named Patrice Lowe who Lucas had met once, at his onboarding, when she’d given him a lanyard and a binder.

Hoyt didn’t waste time.

"Our report went to the Special Committee at ten this morning," she said. "I’m not able to share the report itself. I can share the conclusions that concern you, because the committee has authorized me to, and because I think you’re owed them in person."

Reed took out a pen and didn’t write anything.

"First," Hoyt said. "We find that you altered the page-47 schedule on the night of the close, at the direction of your then-supervisor, in the manner you described to us. We find that your account was consistent across both sessions and with the documentary record. We find that you reported it, voluntarily, before it was discovered."

She turned a page.

"Second. We find that the 12:19 AM edit to the same file was not made by you. It was made from terminal LIB-04 in the fourth-floor library, using your credentials, five minutes after a contractor access card assigned to Brandywine Ridge Advisory entered that room. Your own badge records you on the ninth floor at that time. The edit changed two cells. It moved the expansion penalty from one line to another in a way that would have made your original alteration look larger and more deliberate than it was."

Lucas sat very still.

[Alert: Information recontextualizes prior event.]

"Someone," Oyelaran said quietly, "wanted the file to look worse than what you’d done."

"Yes," Hoyt said. "That is a fair summary and not a phrase that appears in the report."

"Third," she went on. "On the strength of those findings, the committee has recommended that your suspension be lifted, subject to two conditions. You’ll return in a different role, outside the close process, while the investigation continues. And your credentials will be reissued with new authentication, which Mr. Oyelaran will explain in more detail than anyone wants."

"Two-factor," Oyelaran said. "A key on your phone. And you can’t log in from a shared terminal at all. Nobody can, now. We closed that last Friday."

Patrice Lowe slid a form across the table. "Reinstatement acknowledgment. Your role, your conditions, your start date. Monday, if you’re willing. Mr. Reed’s had a copy since nine."

Reed nodded at him. "I read it. It’s fair. It’s not generous. It’s fair."

Lucas read it anyway, every line, the way his grandfather had read bird guides. Analyst, Treasury Operations. Same pay grade. Reports to a woman named Joan Mercer he’d never met. No access to the close file or any document under the committee’s hold. He signed it.

[Quest Issued: Badge Photo.]

[Objective: Complete reinstatement. Answer only what is asked. Do not ask Hoyt who sponsored the contractor card.]

[Reward: 300 AP.]

He looked at the last line of that for a long second.

"Is there anything you want to ask us?" Hoyt said.

He did. He wanted very badly to ask who had requested a contractor card for a shell company two years ago and never had it switched off. It sat in his mouth like a coin.

"No," he said. "Thank you for telling me in person."

Hoyt took her glasses down and looked at him over them.

"Mr. Vintage," she said. "In thirty years I have interviewed perhaps four hundred people who did something wrong at work. Most of them spent the second interview improving the first one. You spent yours telling us what you didn’t know." She folded the glasses. "I’m not allowed to tell you anything else. But I’ll tell you that the person who asked for that card is no longer employed by Vertex, that she is alive and well, and that she has agreed to talk to us. That’s all."

"Thank you."

"Don’t thank me. Go and get your picture taken. Patrice’s people are waiting."

The badge office was in the basement next to the loading dock, a windowless room with a blue backdrop and a camera on a tripod and a young man in a cardigan who said "Chin down a bit" to everyone, regardless of where their chin was.

"Chin down a bit," he said.

Lucas put his chin down a bit.

"Great. Don’t smile. Actually, you can smile. Most people don’t."

He didn’t smile. Then, at the last second, thinking of Victoria in his sweatshirt pressing the middle switch on a nine-dollar coffee maker, he did, a little. The flash went off.

"Oh, that’s a good one," the young man said, surprised. "Usually they look like mugshots."

The printer behind the desk whirred. The new badge came out warm, with his face on it and the word STAFF in green. The young man clipped it to a new lanyard and handed it over, and Lucas stood holding it in the basement next to the loading dock, the same loading dock someone had walked out of at 12:41 on the night of the close with a card that belonged to nobody.

He put it on.

[Status Update: Vertex Holdings. Visitor to Staff (Restricted).]

[Quest Complete: Badge Photo.]

[Reward: 300 AP. Total: 8,700.]

Outside on Market Street, Reed lit a cigarette, which Lucas had never seen him do.

"I quit in 2009," Reed said. "I keep one in my coat for occasions. This is an occasion." He smoked it badly, like someone who’d forgotten how. "You did well in there."

"I didn’t ask."

"I noticed. So did she. That’s why she told you." He looked up at the tower. "A woman. No longer employed. Alive and well. Hoyt gave you more than she was supposed to, and she did it on purpose, and she did it so you’d stop wondering whether it was you."

"Do you know who?"

"No. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you on a sidewalk." Reed dropped the cigarette half-finished and put it out with his heel and then, embarrassed, picked up the butt and put it in his pocket. "Go home. Call your mother. Tell her you’re employed."

He called his mother on the walk. She cried a little and then told him to get a haircut before Monday. He told Camilla in a text, only Badge back Monday. Different role. She sent back a row of exclamation points and, a minute later, Andre says now you can afford to lose at spades.

He texted Victoria last.

Observation: I have a new badge photo. I’m smiling in it.

The reply came quickly. Observation: that’s going to annoy a lot of people who wanted you to look guilty.

Is that allowed?

It’s encouraged. Then: Observation: the chair called me at three. The committee meets Monday about my status too. He said he’d tell me first.

He stopped on the corner of Eleventh and read it twice. Nobody was following him. He’d checked without meaning to, the way he checked plates now. A bus went by. A man sold pretzels from a cart.

Observation, he wrote. Monday’s going to be a big day.

For both of us, she wrote back. Come over Saturday. Frank says your building is boring now and he misses it.

He was still smiling at that when his phone rang. It was Reed again, ten minutes after they’d parted on the sidewalk, and Reed didn’t call twice in ten minutes for anything small.

"Miller just called me," Reed said. "The registered agent folded faster than I thought. Brandywine Ridge Advisory has one authorized signatory on its formation documents." He paused. "It’s a woman named Ruth Abernathy. Retired last spring from Vertex. For eleven years, she was the executive assistant to the board."