The Drive

She got into the building forty minutes later, badge mysteriously fixed, which told her everything about how much rope they were willing to give her while they watched what she did with it. She did not go to her desk. She went to a diner six blocks away and used her own cell to call a number Priya had dug up the night before.

Foster Lindqvist showed up in a flannel shirt that had seen better decades, sliding into the booth across from her without preamble.

You said financial fraud and a merger closing in twenty-four hours, he said. You've got about four minutes before I start ordering pie, so talk fast.

She talked for six. He did not touch the pie.

At the end she pushed the drive across the table, the same one from the data room, copied twice more since. Everything's on there, she said. Original files, the edited versions, the metadata, the pension trust exhibit.

And if I run this and it's wrong?

Then you'll have wasted an afternoon. If I'm right and nobody runs it, six hundred people lose their retirement by tomorrow at nine.

He pocketed the drive. I'll need forty-eight hours to verify before anything goes to print.

I don't have forty-eight hours, she said. Neither do they.

Outside, walking back toward the office, she saw it before she fully processed what she was seeing, Raymond's car, the black one with the vanity plate, idling at the curb half a block from the diner, engine running, nobody visible behind the tinted glass.

She kept walking, heart hammering, and did not look back at it again until she was inside the lobby.

Her phone buzzed. A message forwarded from her own assistant.

Mr. Sokolov is waiting in your office. He said not to knock.