Her voice hardened into something final. I'm not going to feel guilty anymore. We're close, Marcus said, but we're not there. Claire, I want to be straight with you about where we actually stand because I don't want you walking into your board thinking we've got more than we do.
What we've got is a workstation that ties Danny to the deleted log and a message chain that ties Danny to your brother and to a plan. It's real. It's damning. But a good lawyer and your brother can afford the best.
A good lawyer stands up and says the workstation was accessible to anyone. The messages are out of context. The burner device can't be conclusively tied to Alexander's hand on the keyboard. It's enough to blow him off your board.
It might not be enough to put him in prison. And a cornered Alexander who keeps his freedom is more dangerous than one who's already lost. So, what do you need? I need him to say it, Marcus said.
Out loud. On the record. Him, not Danny. I need Alexander Whitmore to admit in his own words that he did this because everything else can be argued around.
But a man confessing can't. He paused. And there's only one way I know to make a man like that confess. You have to make him think he's already won.
You have to make him think it's safe to gloat. Claire understood immediately. She'd been born understanding this. You want to give him the moment he's been waiting for.
The moment where he watches me break. I want him to think he's giving himself that moment, Marcus said. There's a difference and the difference is everything. He pulled a chair close and sat and laid it out the way he'd been building it in his head for 2 weeks.
Your board meets in 9 days. Full board in person, and the big quarterly. Alexander will be there. Danny handles the building systems for that meeting, the doors, the AV, the climate, all of it.
That's his job. Which means for the first time since Friday, we'll have both of them in the building in position on the same day. He looked at her. So, we give them Friday again.
We let Alexander believe he's about to get his moment. We let Danny put the pieces in place. And then when Alexander thinks he's finally watching you fall apart in front of your whole board, when he thinks he's won, when he can't help himself, when he steps up to twist the knife, that's when we're recording every word. He'll never confess in front of the board.
He's careful. You said so yourself. He won't confess to the board. Marcus agreed.
He'll confess to you, alone, because that's what men like him actually want. Claire, it's not really the company. If it was just the company, he'd have taken a buyout years ago. What he wants is the moment.
He wants to stand over you and watch you understand that he beat you. He's waited 11 years for it. He is not going to let a plan work perfectly and then deny himself the one thing the whole plan was for. Marcus leaned in.
So, we build him a moment. We make him think it's happening, that you're breaking, that the board's turning, that it's finally, finally his. And we make sure that when he steps into that room to gloat, the only two people there are him and you and about six microphones he doesn't know about. Claire was silent for a long moment.
Then slowly, You want to use me as the bait. Again. Except this time, I have to actually stand in front of my entire board and pretend to fall apart. Voluntarily.
The exact nightmare I've spent my life avoiding. Yeah, Marcus said quietly. I do. And I hate that I do.
And I want you to know I've thought about every other way to do this, and there isn't one that ends with him in a cell instead of coming back at you meaner next year. He held her eyes. But I also want you to hear the other half of it because it matters. You won't be alone in that room, not for 1 second.
I'll be in the building. I'll have eyes on you the whole time. The second the second it goes wrong, I'm through that door. You're not the woman on the floor anymore, Claire.
Friday night, you were alone and blindsided. This time, you'll know exactly what's coming, and you'll have a man in the walls whose entire job is making sure it stays a performance and never becomes real. There's a difference between being the bait and being the trap. Friday, you were the bait and didn't know it.
This time, you're the trap, and you'll know every inch of it. She looked at him for a long time. And Marcus watched her make the decision. He'd watched her make twice before.
Now, the decision to walk toward the thing she was most afraid of because the alternative was letting the fear keep winning. There's one problem with your plan. She said finally. Danny, he controls the building systems that day.
Which means the moment I start to break in front of the board, Danny knows it's the plan working, and Danny is watching, and Danny is smart enough to notice if anything's off. If he realizes we're recording, if he sees one thing out of place, he'll warn Alexander and it all falls apart, and then they both know we're hunting them. She shook her head. You can't run a trap that depends on the building systems when your enemy's hand is on the switch.
I know, Marcus said, which is why Danny's not going to be on the switch. Claire looked at him. The night before the board meeting, Marcus said, there's going to be a real emergency in this building, a genuine one. Something in the sub-basement, a water main, a transformer, something that absolutely legitimately requires the head of facilities operations to be down there in person all night, hands-on, because it's a code situation, and there's no one else senior enough to sign off.
A grim flicker of a smile. I've spent six years in the guts of this building, Claire. I know exactly which systems, if they failed, would pull Danny down into that basement and keep him there till morning. And I know exactly how to make one of them fail in a way that looks like bad luck and reads clean on every log.
He shrugged. He trained me, remember? He taught me every weak point in this building's body. I'm just going to press on one of them at the right time.
You're going to sabotage my building. I'm going to give my building a manageable, non-dangerous, fully repairable problem, Marcus corrected, that happens to require your enemy to spend the night of the board meeting elbow-deep in a flooded sub-basement instead of sitting at his workstation watching the trap close. Nobody gets hurt. Nothing gets damaged that I can't fix myself the next day.
But Danny Reyes will be exactly as far from that boardroom as I can put him with no cell signal and no access to the executive systems for the whole window that matters. He met her eyes. And with Danny in the basement, the building systems that day run through backup, through a workstation I control. Which means when Alexander steps into that room to gloat, I'm the one holding the switch, not him.
Claire studied him with an expression he couldn't quite read. You've become someone else in 3 weeks, she said quietly. The man who was shaking on my floor and the man sitting here planning a three-front operation against my brother. I'm not sure they're the same person.
They're exactly the same person, Marcus said. That's the thing you keep getting wrong about me, Claire, and it's the same thing Danny and your brother got wrong. He stood and gathered the pages and squared them. I was always this person.