Page 85 of His Wall

An unidentified investor group has launched a hostile acquisition bid for the New York-based investment firm Vanguard Group, citing concerns about the firm's founding-era financial irregularities and unresolved questions regarding the source of its original capital. According to sources with detailed knowledge of the firm's founding structure, the investor group has assembled documentation suggesting that the firm's regulatory bond was secured under inducement, and that early acquisitions may have served as conduits for unauthorized capital flows.

I read it twice.

I turned the laptop toward Julian.

He read it.

I watched the man on the couch disappear.

His jaw set. His hazel eyes went somewhere I had not seen them go since the conference room two weeks ago when Declan had said Graham. The hand that had been on my ankle gripped the edge of the laptop.

He had built the Vanguard at twenty-six in a studio in Murray Hill when his mother died — a man sitting across from him with open hands and dirty money. He had built the architecture I had photographed at his desk. He had spent six months alone in a locked drawer trying to figure out what had happened in his own house.

The takeover was not a threat anymore.

The takeover was live.

He looked up at me.

"I need to talk to my partners."

SIXTEEN

JULIAN

Early the next morning, the secure landline rang twice before Declan picked up.

“Hey, it’s me. Julian.”

"Jules. Tell me you're alive."

"I'm alive."

"I'm putting you on speaker. Nolan's here."

"I figured."

The line clicked. The small change in the air on the other end told me they were in the conference room with the door closed. I heard a soft clank — It must be Nolan placing his cup of coffee down.

"Talk to us, Jules."

I talked.

I sat on the edge of the safehouse bed in the white shirt I had been wearing for two days and the pants I had pulled on at 6:00 a.m., and I told my partners every piece of it.

The shell-company architecture I had been mapping for six months. The judge. The fourteen matches between Conrad's payments and Whitlock's dismissals. The drug-trafficking case in March of 2021. The racketeering charge in June. The organized-crime defendant in October. I told them I was not sitting on a financial crime. I was sitting on a RICO case, and the people on the other end of those dismissed indictments did not hire lawyers when they found out who had built the paper trail.

Then I told them about the garage.

The shot. The pillar. The text on my phone forty-five seconds later.

Then I told them about Leah.

Her name. The Bureau. Five months. The monitoring software on my laptop. The photographs of my private archive. The fact that the woman I had hired in eleven minutes in March had been a federal agent for the entirety of those eleven minutes and every minute since.

I left out the personal.

That was for me.