Chapter Five: The Screen
No one spoke while the recordings played.
There was Julian in his office, at his desk, leaning back in his chair with the ease of a man utterly confident in his own impunity, explaining to someone off-camera how the pension fund transfers worked and why “the regulators will never untangle it in time.” There were phone calls — Julian’s voice, unmistakable, instructing his lawyers on how to manufacture evidence against Maya specifically, including the phrase “make it airtight enough that even she can’t argue her way out.” There were the offshore account records, account numbers and transfer dates displayed with the clarity of a compliance report, because Maya had annotated them herself.
And then, last, the phone call with the regulatory official. Julian’s voice, relaxed and almost jovial, discussing the amount of the transfer that would ensure any incoming audit would result in a “favorable finding.” The official’s voice, after a long pause, agreeing.
The footage ended. The screen went dark.
Julian rose from his chair. The color in his face had gone through several transitions and arrived at something close to grey. “This is fabricated,” he said, but the conviction had left his voice. “This is — you can’t use recordings made without consent, this is inadmissible, this is —”
“A matter for the attorneys,” Maya agreed pleasantly. “Which you’ll have the opportunity to discuss with the federal agents who are, by my estimation, entering the building lobby right about now.”
As if the building itself had been waiting for its cue, the sound of sirens rose from the street outside. Blue and red light pulsed against the floor-to-ceiling windows of the executive floor.
What happened next happened very quickly. The executives who had sat in comfortable agreement with Julian thirty minutes earlier now scrambled to separate themselves from him with the urgency of people abandoning a sinking vessel. Phones appeared. Lawyers were called. Voices rose over each other, each trying to establish, loudly and on the record, that they had known nothing, suspected nothing, been told nothing.
Julian Thorne, who had spent the better part of twenty years commanding every room he entered, sat back down in his chair. He looked across the long mahogany table at Maya Vance — the woman whose signature he had forged, whose career he had tried to end, whose freedom he had tried to take — and for the first time in as long as she had known him, he had nothing to say.
Maya picked up her bag. She didn’t pick up the termination papers.
“Goodbye, Julian,” she said.
She walked out of the boardroom, past the security guard, into the elevator, and out of the building without stopping.
