Chapter 99: Forty Feet

The bus pulled away without him. He watched its back window go up Market Street with a man asleep against the glass, and he stayed where he was, on the corner, with the phone against his ear.

"Forty feet," he said.

"About that. I’m going off a floor plan Miller showed me for ten seconds." Reed’s voice was tired in a way Lucas hadn’t heard before, flat at the edges. "I’m not going to tell you who. I don’t know if I’m allowed to know who. Miller said the name out loud once, in front of me, by accident, and then she looked at me like I’d stolen her wallet."

"Do you know?"

"I’m not answering that, and you’re not asking it again."

Lucas looked down at the green STAFF badge clipped to his coat. Nine hours ago it had felt like the best thing that had happened to him in a month. He thought about the room. Fifteen desks. Two monitors each. The blue carpet. Joan with her oatmeal. Rafael with his neat handwriting. A man who’d said so you’re the one and meant it pleasantly, or seemed to.

He stopped himself there. He made himself stop.

"Here’s the problem," Reed said. "Tomorrow is Tuesday. Miller doesn’t want anything on that floor to change before she’s ready. Not one thing. If the new guy, the one everybody already knows about, calls in sick the morning after Mrs. Abernathy sits down with the police, that’s a signal. Anybody who’s paying attention will read it."

"So I go in."

"I told her I didn’t like it. I told her my client had been followed by a man with a thermos for three weeks and I’d like him to work from his kitchen table for a while." Reed exhaled. "She said Oyelaran has two people in the building who don’t look like security, and the floor has cameras, and the man has no reason in the world to think anyone knows anything yet. She said the safest thing for you is to be boring at your desk. I hate that she’s right."

"Okay."

"You don’t have to say okay to me. It’s your call. If you want to stay home, I’ll call Miller and I’ll make it happen, and she’ll be annoyed, and it won’t hurt you."

Lucas thought about his kitchen table. He thought about sitting at it all day with the phone face down and the canal book open to the same page, imagining the room on seven without him in it.

"I’ll go in," he said.

"Then here’s how you go in." Reed’s voice picked up a little, the way it did when there was procedure to hold on to. "You do the job they gave you. You check the balances. You eat your sandwich. You don’t look at anyone longer than you’d look at them anyway. You don’t try to work out who it is. You don’t count desks."

Lucas had been about to count desks. He closed his eyes for a second.

"And if somebody talks to me?"

"Then you talk back like a person who’s had a long first day and is mostly thinking about the bus." Reed paused. "You’re not a detective, Lucas. You’re an analyst. That’s your cover, and it has the advantage of being true."

[Quest Issued: Same Desk.]

[Objective: Report to Treasury Operations on Tuesday and perform assigned duties. Do not attempt to identify the individual named by Ruth Abernathy.]

[Reward: 250 AP.]

[Note: The objective is not to know. Knowing is someone else’s job.]

The next bus came. He got on it.

At home he made rice and ate it standing up, the way he had in the bad weeks, and then caught himself doing it and sat down. He took the notebook out of the drawer by the stove and opened it to the page with Ruth’s name. Under Brought me tea once he wrote the date, and then Forty feet, and then he looked at the two words for a while and crossed them out with a single straight line, the way his mother had taught him to cross out a mistake on a check. It wasn’t a fact he was allowed to have. It was a distance.

Victoria called at eight. She didn’t text first.

"I’m still CEO," she said, instead of hello. "I’ve said it to four people now and it hasn’t started to sound real."

"It sounded real when you texted it."

"Texting doesn’t count. I can text anything." He heard her moving around, the clink of something in a sink. "I’m not going to ask you about your day. I’m not allowed to know about your day. I want you to know that I’m not asking, so you don’t have to spend the call making sure I don’t."

"Thank you."

"I’ll tell you about mine instead. I was on the phone with the general counsel for two hours, and she used the phrase abundance of caution nine times. I counted. Frank made me eat a sandwich at four because he said I looked like a hostage." She paused. "Observation. You sound like a man standing very still."

"I’m sitting down."

"Inside, I mean." She let it go before he had to answer it. "Okay. I’m going to bed early, which I’ve never done in my life. Is your guy on the corner?"

He went to the window. Sam’s bench was empty, but a different man was in a parked car halfway down the block, reading something on his phone with the dome light off.

"Someone’s there."

"Good. Don’t wave."

"I’ve learned."

She laughed, a short real one, and he held on to the sound of it after she hung up.

He slept badly. At two-fifteen he woke up and lay looking at the ceiling, and his head started laying out the room on seven without asking him. Joan’s office at the end. Rafael two desks down. Carol’s horse. Owen’s headphones. Nick standing up to shake his hand. Hadley’s chair, on the far side. He got as far as the windows on the wrong side for the river and made himself get up and drink a glass of water at the sink, and when he lay back down he recited the bus route instead, every stop from his corner to Market Street, and fell asleep somewhere around Twentieth.

Tuesday morning Sam was back on his bench with a fresh newspaper. Theo said, "Day two, Mr. Vintage," and the badge reader went green on the first try again.

Seven was exactly as quiet as it had been. Someone had turned the heat up overnight and the room smelled faintly of radiator dust and coffee. The pothos had dropped one yellow leaf onto his keyboard, as if it were making a point. He put the leaf in the trash, logged in, pressed his thumb against the key on his phone when it asked him to, and opened the cash position report.

The thing about the work, he found, was that it was a place to put his eyes. Balances came in from the banks at seven. He laid them next to yesterday’s forecast, account by account, line by line, and wrote down anything off by more than fifty thousand. Most mornings, Rafael had told him, nothing was. The operating account. The payroll account. Two concentration accounts with names that sounded like boats. A money market sweep that Nick ran. A small account in Delaware for a subsidiary that didn’t seem to do anything except exist.

Rafael came by at eight-fifteen with two coffees and set one on Lucas’s desk without asking.

"Black, right? You looked like a black coffee person."

"I am. Thanks."

"Joan says you found the eighteen-forty." Rafael leaned against the partition. "That fee’s been uncoded since August. I knew it was there. I just didn’t want to call the bank about eighteen dollars."

"I didn’t call the bank. I just looked at the statement."

"See, that’s worse. That means it was on the statement the whole time." He grinned into his own cup. "Welcome to seven. We’re very good at not looking at statements."

Lucas laughed because it was funny, and because laughing was what a person did when they’d had one long first day and were mostly thinking about the bus. He didn’t look past Rafael’s shoulder. He didn’t look at the far side of the room.

[Observation: Subject’s attention drifted toward the east wall four times between 8:00 and 8:20. Recommend task focus.]

He hadn’t noticed it was four. He put his eyes back on the screen and kept them there.

At nine-thirty Joan walked the length of the room with a mug of tea and a stack of printouts, saying good morning to every desk in the same voice. When she got to his, she stopped.

"Day two," she said. "How’s my report?"

"Nothing over fifty so far. I’m on the operating account."

"Good. Nothing over fifty is my favorite kind of morning." She tapped the partition twice with one finger, a small dry knock, and moved on. It was the first time he realized she did that to everyone. He watched her not looking at anyone in particular either, and wondered, briefly, what she knew. Then he stopped wondering that too.

At eleven Owen took off his headphones for the first time Lucas had seen and asked if he knew how to make the printer do double-sided, because it had stopped. Lucas didn’t. They went over together and stood in front of it, two grown men reading a laminated card taped to the side. It turned out the tray was empty. Owen said "Huh," exactly the way Rafael said it, and Lucas started to suspect the whole floor had learned the word from one person.

At lunch he went down to the cart and bought the same sandwich as yesterday and ate it at his desk. Carol Pruitt walked past with her coat on and said, "If you’re going to eat here every day, the microwave on the left is the one that works," and kept going. Nick Sorensen asked him whether Penn had a football team, really, or whether it was just something they said. Glen Hadley was on the phone for most of the hour with his back to the room, and Lucas didn’t look at him for longer than he’d have looked at anyone else on the phone, which was not at all.

He was doing it. He was doing it right.

At one-forty he got to the operating account.

It came in short. Not by eighteen dollars. By seventy-five thousand, almost exactly. Yesterday’s forecast had the balance at one number, and the bank’s seven a.m. figure was a different number, and the difference was $75,000.00, with no cents, which Rafael had told him on his first morning was the first thing to notice. Real money had cents. Fees had cents. Round numbers were decisions.

He pulled the bank’s wire report for Monday the way Rafael had shown him. It was there, near the bottom, one line among forty.

Outgoing wire. Monday, 4:52 PM. $75,000.00. Beneficiary: Lantern Point Partners LLC. Beneficiary bank: a name he didn’t know, with a Wilmington address. Reference: HALCYON ADVISORY FINAL.

He sat back in his chair.

The word Halcyon sat on the screen with its edges very sharp. He read the line again. Wilmington. Advisory. Final. He thought about a card in a desk drawer with a hundred other things nobody had asked for back, and about a registered agent on a street in Wilmington who’d folded in a week, and then he stopped thinking about any of it, because none of it was his job.

His job was the variance. Anything off by more than fifty thousand, you wrote down why.

He couldn’t write down why. He didn’t know why. There was no matching invoice in the payables feed, no line in the forecast, no approval memo attached the way there was on every other wire on the report. He checked twice. Then he did what Joan had said was the whole job.

He typed the note exactly. Amount, time, beneficiary, bank, reference. No supporting invoice or approval memo located. Variance unexplained. He didn’t add an adjective. He printed it, walked it down the room to the glass office at the end, and knocked on the open door.

Joan looked up from her screen. "That face is not a nothing-over-fifty face."

"Operating account’s short seventy-five thousand," he said. "It’s a wire from yesterday afternoon. I can’t find what it’s for."

She held out her hand and he gave her the page. She put her glasses on from the chain and read it. He watched her get to the reference line, and he watched her stop.

She read the time again. Then she looked at the bottom of the bank’s report, where the system printed the user IDs of the person who’d prepared the wire and the person who’d released it. He hadn’t looked at that part. Rafael hadn’t shown him that part yet.

Joan took her glasses off very slowly.

"Close the door, Lucas," she said. "Sit down. And tell me who else you’ve shown this to."