Him. The emergency meeting convened at 9 in the morning in a boardroom on the 41st floor with a view of the harbor that nobody looked at. 11 Directors, four in person on the far side of the table, general counsel at the corner, two representatives from the independent audit committee, and Viven at the head with a single folder in front of her. Conrad did not sit. He worked the room the way a good trial lawyer works a jury, moving, addressing people by their first names, pausing to let a phrase settle.
He had prepared for 6 weeks, and he was, I will say this once, extremely good at his job. He put the photographs on the screen. He walked them through the growth in my contract volume with a chart that had been built to be walked through. He described me without ever using an insult as a small operator of modest means who had encountered a rare opportunity and taken it. And he suggested with enormous delicacy that a woman under the pressures of the chief executive role had been susceptible in a way that was regrettable but human.
He asked the board whether they were prepared to explain that chart to the regulators, to the institutional holders, and to the press that had already run the photographs. Then he sat down. I came in at 9:40, not because Vivien invited me and not to make a scene. The independent audit committee had requested my attendance in writing at 11:00 the night before, and general counsel had confirmed it because the records they needed to authenticate were mine, and only I could speak to their chain of custody. I was wearing a gray suit that was 7 years old, and I was carrying a document box.
Vivien looked up when the door opened and I watched her face do something complicated and then stopped doing it. Conrad turned around, took me in slowly and said loudly enough for the far end of the table, "Do you really think you belong in this room?" I did not answer him. I have thought about that a great deal since, and I am still certain it was right. Men like Conrad Whitmore are undefeated in arguments about whether somebody belongs because the argument itself is the trap and the only winning move is to decline it. So I set the box on the table, took out the first binder and asked general counsel whether the committee wanted the gate records or the payment routing first.
He said gate records. I opened to the tab and began to read out timestamps and the room's attention slid off Conrad Whitmore like water off glass and he never got it back. It took 40 minutes. 416 Invoiced movements against 281 physical gate events reconciled facility by facility with weight tickets and driver logs and photographs of empty bays timestamped to the minute an invoice claimed a loaded departure. Then the money.