A wall-wide window across from Edward afforded a gorgeous view of downtown Houston from this twenty-fourth-floor vantage. It was a clear day, the blue Texas sky as innocent as a virgin’s whisper, and the skyscrapers seemed to give each other breathing room rather than jostling together as they appeared from a distance. It looked like the Emerald City. Around the conference table of this international construction company were several executives, but the important one was the fortyish young woman to Edward’s left, the COO. In her two years with the company she had managed to extend its contacts into agreements with the heads of some Middle Eastern partner companies. This firm was now putting up their first office building in Dubai. Their security concerns had grown more complex, which was why Edward was here.
He had impressed Vivian Long with his seriousness and quiet attention to details in the proposal he’d shown her last time. Around the conference table now were five of their highest-level officers. They didn’t talk details of computer systems, intranet versus internet, or any of that techie minutiae. They hired people for that. At this meeting these people did most of the talking and Edward mostly nodded. They noticed that he didn’t take notes, and approved, especially after he quoted back from memory a sentence the COO had said five minutes earlier. Nothing in writing. Security.
What Edward had missed was this high level of negotiation, so high that no one treated it like a negotiation. The officers acted as if Edward were already working for them, and he in turn acted as if he were already their partner. While in fact they hadn’t told him one thing he could use against them if they booted him out the door in the next two minutes. And they all knew he understood that. They didn’t have to bullshit each other. Which meant they were all operating at a very refined level of bullshit.
‘Our people will never see anything inside your system,’ Edward said. ‘They will only build walls around them. Your secrets are safe with us because we won’t know them.’
‘Like the slaves who built the pyramids,’ one of the partners said, and Edward chuckled along with the rest of them.
‘Exactly. And every few months we kill them and hire new ones.’
That got an even bigger laugh. Buried bodies was an apt subject matter for a security consultant.
A few minutes later Vivian extended her hand. She had given him twenty-three minutes, a huge chunk of her day. After murmured exchanges of respect, Vivian said, ‘Do you feel up to meeting with our Mr Windsor, our attorney, to discuss details?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Good. Mr Windsor?’ Her hand was still in Edward’s, and she didn’t break their gaze as she spoke to one of the other men at the table. Neither did Edward, until Ms Long intensified the gaze one last time and abruptly turned away.
‘This way, please,’ said Bill Windsor, who looked as if he might actually be a member of the British royal family, at the grey-at-the-temple stage. As he led Edward to his office he glanced back over his shoulder and said, ‘We’re not going to talk details, just broad parameters, OK?’
A few minutes later they were Bill and Ed. None of the very few people who knew Edward well called him anything except Edward, but the world beyond those few was littered with his nicknames.
A few minutes later still, Bill leaned back, looked at him more closely, and said, ‘Your name sounds awfully familiar to me. Ed Hall. Are you a lawyer?’
A more complicated question than it might seem. ‘No. I was. I got bored with it.’
A lie. Sort of the secret handshake of the legal fraternity.
‘I know what you mean. So many of us do. Awfully high burnout rate.’
‘Awfully high.’
‘Want to know my theory on that?’
Less than anything. Hear this mid-six-figures sellout who hadn’t really practiced law in years explain why people got tired of it? As if this asshole even knew what practicing law really was? Less than anything.
‘Sure, Bill.’
So Edward sat and listened to the blowhard explain why lawyers got tired of solving other people’s problems, Edward sitting with a slight smile because he was imagining the silence of his team burrowing through the firm’s firewalls into all their secrets, the lies they’d told to judges, the clients they’d overbilled, the mistakes they’d covered up. He was going to keep his promise to Vivian the COO to stay out of this firm’s confidential information, with one exception. He was going to know this guy’s ugliest secrets. Edward was going to take whatever he could get, like a thief in a bank vault at midnight.
‘That’s interesting,’ he finally applauded the lawyer’s smug, quiet rant.
‘Right? That’s what happened to you, right? Just reached a point of saying, Look, solve your own problems, idiots. It’s not that tough. Right?’
Edward closed his briefcase. ‘That’s it exactly.’
At the same time, down there on the ground in a very different part of town, a SWAT team of police assembled around a little wooden house in the Third Ward, a building little more than a shack. The cops could shoot it full of holes and not change its essential appearance all that much.
But they wouldn’t do that, at least not yet. This wasn’t just an arrest, it was a rescue.
The negotiator, not part of the team, was closest to the house, unarmed, talking in an only slightly raised tone of voice. The negotiator, a thin African-American of middle height, dressed like a civilian, glanced back over his shoulder like he didn’t trust these mostly white cops either. ‘Listen, man,’ he said, back to the house, ‘you need to let her go. That’s your only good move now. That’ll show some good will on your part. That’ll help you in court. ’Cause unless you’re digging a tunnel in there, you got no escape route.’
Amazingly, in that cluster with all its potential for din, a silence began, at first a newborn absence of talk, then growing swiftly into a bubble engulfing the whole scene like tear gas. Then a voice emerged from the house. A deep voice but jagged with a high whine close under the surface. ‘She’s a free agent, man. I ain’t holding her. I don’t even know what all you assholes are doing here.’
‘If that’s true then let her go. You and me’ll talk.’
‘Yeah, and then your friends will shoot my ass up.’
‘No, man, no. Not if you let her go.’ The negotiator stepped closer to the house and lowered his voice. ‘There’s a camera crew here, Donald.’
That silence spawned again, groping for a character. Just before it would die of natural causes there was the scrape of a shoe from inside the house, and the door shot open. The negotiator, in the bravest act of his life, stood his ground and held a hand behind his back with the fingers spread, pushing down. Hold your fire.
A woman screamed, then came running out. Luckily, the SWAT team members had good reflexes, and the scream had alerted them this was probably a civilian. It was. It was the civilian they had come to rescue. Mrs Diana Greene, prominent Houston socialite, disheveled, frantic, her fashionable shift twisted at the shoulders.
Her husband Sterling threw off the two officers restraining him, broke through the ranks, and held his arms wide. His wife ran into them. They were the picture of a loving couple happily reunited.
Now the negotiator knew it was going to be OK. He’d talked the kidnapper out of the hostage, his main job. Now his armed colleagues could just shoot up the house.
Except for that camera crew.
‘Now you, man.’ The negotiator was surprised to hear more than indifference in his own voice. ‘No point in doing that unless you surrender … Donald?’
Slowly two large hands emerged from the doorway. They hung there for a minute. When nothing happened, arms started emerging too. This took longer than one would think, because they were very long arms. Finally, very hesitantly, a large brown shaven head followed the arms out.
‘Get down!’
Immediately the man threw himself face down on the ground, arms outstretched. He clearly knew the drill. Now the silence was dead forever, as the SWAT team screamed orders and ran and jostled equipment, while the news crew shouted questions.
The prostrate man on the ground risked death by raising his head slightly. He just stared at the happy couple, an enormously sad expression on his broad features.