Chapter 76: Not Rice

"You’re not going," Reed said, before Lucas could say hello.

"I wasn’t planning to."

"Good. Don’t reply to it. Don’t open it again on that phone. Don’t forward it to anyone but me, and you’ve already done that." Lucas could hear traffic behind him, and a car door. "I’m calling Miller now. She’s not going to like the timing any more than I do."

"He’s interviewing me the day after Elena named him."

"He’s interviewing you the day after Elena named him in a room he doesn’t know about," Reed said. "That’s what makes it interesting. He might just be doing his job. A committee chair interviewing a witness in an internal review is ordinary. It was ordinary on Monday. It stopped being ordinary at ten thirty this morning."

"So what do we say?"

"We say nothing tonight. Tomorrow, the GC says something. I’ll call you at eight."

He called at seven fifty-two.

Miller had made her decision overnight, Reed told him, and she had made it the way she made most of them, by picking the option that would look least bad in a transcript a year from now. She would call the Vertex GC herself. Vertex was the plaintiff in the civil action and the victim in the state case, and the GC was counsel to the company, not to any director. Miller would tell him that information had come to her office bearing on a member of the audit committee, that she needed the internal review interview of Mr. Vintage postponed, and that she was asking him under the strictest confidentiality not to share the reason with anyone at the company. Anyone, she would say. Including the board chair. Including the CEO.

"Will he do it?" Lucas asked.

"He’ll do it. He’ll hate it. He’ll write a memo to file about how much he hates it, and then he’ll do it." Reed paused. "He’s going to be keeping the same secret from her that you are. I thought you should know that before tonight."

"Does that make it better or worse?"

"It makes it shared," Reed said. "Whether that’s better is for you."

At ten fifteen a second email arrived at the contractor address. The interview had been postponed due to counsel availability. A new date would be set. It was signed by the GC’s assistant and said nothing else.

Lucas read it standing in the cereal aisle of the grocery store with a basket on his arm. Then he put the phone away and bought chicken thighs, a lemon, garlic, a bag of spinach, a block of parmesan he could not really afford, and, after looking at the shelf for longer than he wanted to admit, a bag of jasmine rice.

Camilla texted at noon.

Heard you were in an annex room yesterday. Not asking what for. Just tell me I don’t need to stay at my sister’s another week.

He thought about it carefully before answering. Richard was in custody and would be until at least Friday. Nothing Elena had said touched Camilla.

Nothing I know of says you do. If that changes, you’ll hear from Reed before you hear from anyone else.

That’s very lawyerly.

I’ve been around a lot of lawyers.

It shows. Dinner with her tonight?

He looked at that one and decided there was no reason to pretend.

Yes.

Be boring about work, Camilla wrote. Be interesting about everything else.

He started cooking at five thirty, because he did not trust himself to do it fast. The apartment was small enough that the smell of garlic reached the front door within a minute. He set the table, which meant moving the stack of mail off it and putting out two plates that matched and two that didn’t, then putting the ones that didn’t back.

He kept thinking about the six prints. He had stopped wondering what they looked like. Now he wondered where Danner kept them. A desk drawer. A safe. A folder with a tab on it. He made himself stop.

At five past seven there was a knock.

Victoria stood in the hallway in jeans and a dark coat with a bottle in one hand, her hair down. He could see the gray Suburban through the stairwell window, parked across the street with its lights off.

"You said seven," she said.

"It’s seven oh five."

"I sat in the car for five minutes so I wouldn’t be early. Don’t tell anyone." She held out the bottle. "Corner store."

He looked at the label. It was not from the corner store.

"Thank you."

She came in and took her coat off and stood in his kitchen doorway, the same place she had stood two mornings ago in his sweatshirt, and looked at the stove.

"Is that rice?"

"It’s jasmine rice. That’s different."

"It’s rice, Lucas."

"It’s going under chicken. It’s a supporting role."

She laughed, and he watched her shoulders drop half an inch, and he did not need the overlay to know she had come in tired.

He served it. She ate the way he had seen her eat at the Harbor Grand, carefully and without fuss, and then halfway through she put her fork down and said, "This is good," in a slightly surprised voice that he decided to take as the compliment it was.

They talked. Not about work. She told him about a disastrous dinner party in Lisbon fifteen years ago where the host’s dog had eaten an entire wheel of cheese off the counter and nobody had said anything until dessert. He told her about the apartment he’d had before this one, where the radiator made a noise like someone knocking, and how he’d answered the door to it twice in the first week. She asked if the brick wall outside his bedroom window ever got sun. He said for about forty minutes in June.

It was easy for a while. Then it wasn’t, because at a quarter past eight her phone buzzed on the table and she turned it over and read it and her face changed. Not much. Enough.

[Target: Victoria Sterling.]

[Target State: Mildly irritated. Not alarmed. The message is from someone she considers an ally.]

She turned the phone face down again.

"Board," she said. "It can wait."

He nodded and refilled her glass and said nothing, and that was the first time all evening that the effort of saying nothing felt like something he was doing rather than something that was happening.

She noticed. He saw her notice.

"You’re quiet," she said.

"I’m eating."

"You were eating ten minutes ago and you weren’t quiet." She looked at him across the table, not unkindly. "Is there something you can’t tell me?"

He had thought about this moment on the train, in the grocery store, while the rice boiled. He had considered lying, briefly, and decided he could not afford it. He had considered every version of the truth that would let her guess, and ruled those out too.

"Yes," he said. "There’s something I can’t talk about outside counsel. I’m not going to talk about it. That’s all I can say."

She held his eyes. He waited for her to be angry, or to push, or to ask whether it was about her.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"I asked you to keep to separate paper when it was inconvenient for me. This is what that looks like. I’m not going to make you choose between me and the instruction at your own dinner table." She picked up her fork again. "I don’t like it. I’m allowed not to like it."

"You are."

"Good. Then I’m not going to pretend I didn’t notice. That would be worse."

They finished eating. He washed, she dried, because she said she couldn’t sit still while someone else cleaned, and she put his plates away in the wrong cupboard and he didn’t correct her. At one point she reached past him for a glass and stopped there, close, with her hand flat on his back between his shoulder blades.

"I’m not staying tonight," she said quietly. "I have the chair at seven and a call with Singapore before that. If I stay, I won’t sleep."

"That’s fine."

"It’s not fine. It’s sensible." She turned him around by the shoulder and kissed him, slowly, in a way that was not a promise of anything in particular except that she meant it. When she pulled back she rested her forehead against his for a second.

"Next time I’m staying," she said. "Tell your rice."

He walked her to the door. She put her coat on and took her phone out of the pocket and looked at it again, and he saw her decide something.

"One thing," she said. "It’s not the case. It’s personnel. I’m saying it now because I don’t want to carry it into the weekend and have you think I was hiding it."

He waited.

"Philip Danner called me this afternoon. He chairs the audit committee. He’s been on the board longer than I’ve been CEO, and he’s one of the people who put me in the job." She said it as context, without warmth or coldness. "He told me the internal review interview with you was postponed and he didn’t know why. Then he said the cleanest way to end the review was for you to resign the contractor engagement before Friday. No findings. No record. He’d close the file. He thought it would protect me."

Lucas kept his face still. He had been keeping it still for nine hours, and he was suddenly very tired of it.

"He asked me to ask you," Victoria said. "So I’m asking. You don’t have to answer tonight."

"I’ll answer through Reed," Lucas said.

She looked at him for a long moment. He could see her filing it, the same way she filed everything, and he could see that she understood it was not the answer of a man who was simply cautious.

"Through Reed," she repeated. "All right."

She touched his face once, then went down the stairs. He heard the outer door and, a few seconds later, the Suburban’s engine.

He stood in the doorway for a while with the hall light buzzing.

[Priority Quest Completed!]

[Objective: Attend Elena Garrity’s proffer with counsel present, and share nothing about it with Victoria Sterling outside the presence of counsel.]

[Reward: 500 AP.]

[Current AP Balance: 5150.]

[Note: Objective 2 assessed at first private contact with the target following the proffer. Ongoing compliance remains required under the revised instruction.]

Fifty-one fifty. He did not feel like he had earned anything. He felt like he had watched a man use Victoria to deliver a message to him, the day after the man’s own interview had been taken away, and had thanked her for dinner.

He closed the door and called Reed.

Reed listened to the whole thing without interrupting. When Lucas was done there was a silence on the line long enough that he checked the screen.

"Resign before Friday," Reed said finally. "No findings, no record."

"That’s what she said he said."

"Do you know what a jury hears when the government’s fact witness resigned from the company in the middle of an internal review about an altered document?" Reed didn’t wait. "They hear that he left before they could fire him. Kaplan would put that on a slide."

"So it’s not about protecting her."

"It might be. People do the wrong thing for the right reason all the time. But a man who’s had pictures of you in his house for two weeks asking you to quietly disappear the week of a detention hearing is not something I’m going to interpret for Miller. I’m going to hand it to her." Reed exhaled. "Don’t sign anything. Don’t call him. Don’t call her about it. I’ll write to the GC in the morning."

"She shouldn’t have carried it to me either."

"She told you it was personnel, and she said it at the door instead of at the table. She knew exactly how close to the line it was." Reed was quiet for a moment. "She’s right that it isn’t the case. Barely. If Kaplan ever asks, she relayed an HR proposal from a director and you refused to discuss it. That’s the truth, and it’s a good truth. Keep it that way."

"Okay."

"And Lucas."

"Yes."

"You did that right. I know it doesn’t feel like it."

Lucas hung up. He was rinsing the last pan when his phone buzzed again. Reed. One line.

GC just called me at home. Danner phoned him at 8:10 tonight and asked who requested the postponement. By name.