So do you. She hung up. He sat in his bedroom for a while after the call ended. Phone in his hand. Lily's movie Audible through the wall.
Some animated thing with a lot of orchestral swells. And he thought about Gerald Penn and Thomas Caldwell and Raymond Voss and a project failure that had cost people jobs and cost Amelia standing and had apparently been engineered by someone who needed her vulnerable and found a way to make her look like the cause of her own problem. He thought about how long that must have been in motion, how patient someone had to be to put all of that in place, how many small decisions added up to one large betrayal. He thought about his envelope in the desk drawer. He thought about Wednesday.
Monday arrived the way Mondays do when you've been carrying something through the weekend all at once without warning, even though you saw it coming. Marcus was at his desk by 7:45. Coffee from the cart downstairs. His operational cost files pulled up in two windows. His team's Q3 summary open in a third.
Everything normal. Everything exactly the way it was supposed to look. At 8:17, Raymond Voss walked past his office. This was normal. Raymon's office was down the hall and slightly left past the copier bay, and he walked past Marcus' door every morning at roughly this time.
Marcus has never paid it particular attention. This morning, Raymond slowed just slightly, a fraction of a step. He glanced in through the glass of Marcus's office door, eyes moving across the room with a quick assessment of a man checking on something. And Marcus was looking directly at his screen and did not acknowledge him, but he tracked every microsecond of it in his peripheral vision. Raymond kept talking.
Marcus released a breath through his nose and typed a sentence that meant nothing and thought, "He's watching." Whether Raymond was watching because he suspected something had changed or simply because he was careful by nature. Marcus couldn't say, but the slight os was new. In 3 years, Raymond Voss had never slowed down at his door. Something had shifted in the air. At 10:30, Marcus' assistant, Briana, knocked and came in to tell him that Priya Anan's office had called to confirm a Q3 department review meeting for Wednesday at 2 p.
M. Should I put it on the calendar? Briana asked. "Yes," Marcus said. "Block the hour before, too.
I want prep time." Briana made a note and left. Marcus stared at his screen. "Wednesday, 2 days." At lunch, he ate at his desk habit on days when he needed to think. And at 12:43, his desk phone rang, not his cell, his desk phone, which almost nobody used anymore. He looked at the display.
Raymond Voss extension 2214. Marcus picked up. Hey Marcus, easy friendly. You got a second to come by my office? Sure, Marcus said.