Adrien said nothing. He was walked out of the conference room and into the hallway and into an elevator that went 42 floors Antantoa lobby where 3 days ago $300 bills had fallen to the marble floor in front of 200 witnesses. Victoria was standing in the hallway when Damian came out. She had been there. He understood for most of it.
She had asked to observe through the glass partition and he had agreed because whatever she had been in the lobby 3 days ago whatever armor and arrogance and certainty she had walked in wearing, she had earned the right to see this. 6 Years of every Monday morning. 6 Years of decisions made on the basis of intelligence she was receiving from a man who was poisoning the source. She watched Adrien Cole get into the elevator. She watched the doors close.
She stood very still for a long moment. Then she said to no one in particular or maybe to herself or maybe to the six years she was never going to get back. I recommended him for the promotion. I went to bat for him against 12 other candidates. Her voice was not shaking.
It was the voice of someone who is holding themselves very carefully together because they understand that this is not the moment for coming apart. But the effort of it is visible. I told the board he was the best I'd ever seen. Damian stood next to her. Not close enough to intrude.
Close enough to be present. He probably is, he said. She looked at him. The best you've ever seen at what he actually does, Damian said. Which is not what you hired him to do.
That's what made him dangerous. He paused. He found someone excellent and built a machine behind her. Victoria turned back toward the window. Outside the city did what it always did, continued indifferent, producing the low electrical hum of 10 million ordinary transactions.
He was going to let me take the fall. She said, "Yes, when it collapsed, when the technology was gone and the subsidiaries imploded, it would have looked like like your failure." Damian said, "Yes, that was the design." She absorbed this. The way a person absorbs something that simultaneously makes perfect sense and makes no sense at all because the logic of it is clear, but the human dimension of it that someone would do this to another person methodically over 6 years resists ordinary comprehension. Why are you telling me all of this? She said, you could have just you own the company.
You could have handled Adrien, handled the investigation, restructured the whole thing and told me as little as you needed to. Yes, he said. So why, he thought about Diane, about Edward Walsh in a coffee shop, about Maya asking him that morning before he left, are you going to be okay today, Dad? In the particular voice of a 10-year-old who has learned earlier than she should have. That okay is not always a given because you're going to need to lead this company through what comes next.