Chapter 13: Big Leo, Big Trouble

The letter landed on Wei's desk on a Wednesday morning and Leo found out about it at 10:47am through a notification that appeared while he was mid-sentence on a video call with his Rotterdam logistics team.

He read it with half his attention and kept talking.

"The customs clearance amendment needs to be finalized before the port authority meeting," he said, "not after. After doesn't help anyone."

"Understood," the Rotterdam director said. "We'll have the revised framework to you by Friday."

"Thursday."

"Thursday."

He closed the call, sat back, and opened the Zhang file.

The regulatory letter had been formal and thorough in the way that regulatory letters were when they'd been filed correctly by someone who knew what they were doing. The green energy subsidiary's operating budget was frozen for a minimum of sixty days pending review. Sixty days minimum, which in regulatory language meant sixty days was the floor and the ceiling was wherever the review decided to put it.

Leo closed the file and picked up his coffee.

He let himself imagine it, briefly, the way the morning had probably felt normal up until the moment it wasn't — the coffee on Wei's desk, Eleanor's voice somewhere in the house, Ming probably still asleep at nine because Ming had never had a reason to be up at nine. The ordinary texture of a Wednesday. And then the letter, and then the particular silence of a man who has just understood that something is wrong without yet knowing how wrong, the kind of silence that has weight to it.

Leo drank his coffee.

Excellent, he thought, and opened his Rotterdam follow-up notes.

\---

Ming called the emergency meeting with the subsidiary's legal team at eleven and it ran until one-thirty and by the end of it he had a lot of language and none of the things language was supposed to produce.

The lawyers were good — Wei's lawyers were always good, that was one thing about the Zhang family, they'd never cut corners on legal — and they gave him frameworks and talking points and a response strategy with three tiers depending on how the review developed.

Ming used the language in the meeting and the language sounded right and still didn't make the frozen operating budget move.

"What's the realistic timeline on an appeal?" he asked.

"Six to eight weeks for initial review response," the lead lawyer said, "assuming no secondary flags are triggered during the process."

"And if secondary flags are triggered?"

A pause that told him what he needed to know before the answer did.

"Then the timeline extends."

He called Wei after, standing at his office window with the city doing its indifferent thing below him, and the call was short.

"Handle it," Wei said.

"I'm handling it. I'm telling you where it stands."

"Then keep handling it and tell me when there's a resolution."

The call ended and Ming stood at the window for another minute with his phone in his hand and the particular feeling of someone who has just been handed a thing they don't know how to hold.

He'd rehearsed for this job his whole life in the way you rehearse for the version of the job that gets photographed. Press releases. Acquisition announcements. The ribbon-cutting where the whole family stood together and the photographer got the shot and the Zhang name did what it always did, which was sit at the top of the frame and make everything below it look intentional.

He had not rehearsed for a frozen operating budget and a legal team giving him tiered timelines.

He put his phone on the desk and sat down and stared at his office wall for a moment, and the office wall had nothing useful to offer.

He handled it poorly.

\---

While this was happening, Leo was at a private gym in Tribeca, working on his footwork.

The gym was empty at this hour, which was why he used it at this hour, and the floor was the right kind of floor for the drills, and he'd been at it for forty minutes going through the approach pattern Foxy had criticized after the D-grade Tuesday and then criticized again after the Meatpacking District job.

He was not doing this because Foxy had told him to.

He was doing it because Foxy had been right, which was significantly more annoying than if Foxy had been wrong, and the annoying thing about Foxy being right was that ignoring it anyway felt stupid, and Leo had a deeply instilled aversion to doing things that felt stupid.

Foxy was on a weight bench to his left, watching.

"Better," it said, after the sixth run of the pattern. "The left side compensation is almost gone."

Leo ran it again.

"Seven out of ten," Foxy said.

Leo stopped. "Is seven out of ten good?"

"For someone who was at a four last week, yes."

"What's ten?"

Foxy was quiet for a moment, in the considering way rather than the has-nothing-to-say way.

"Probably Xan," it said.

Leo stopped moving.

He stood in the middle of the gym floor and the name sat in the air of the room and he processed it for a second — the way you process a thing that arrives unexpectedly, that finds the gap between one thought and the next and settles in it before you can decide whether to let it.

He hadn't thought about Xan today.

That was new. There'd been a stretch after the Void where Xan was the first thing in his head every morning, present before he was fully awake, and gradually the stretch between those mornings had gotten longer, and today had apparently been one of the long ones and he hadn't even noticed until now.

He picked up where the drill had left off.

Xan belonged to the Void and the Void was over and this was Manhattan and this was his life now — the mission map and the penthouse and Foxy on a weight bench rating his footwork out of ten and the Zhangs sweating over a regulatory letter they couldn't trace back to him.

That was what he told himself.

He ran the pattern three more times and the left side compensation didn't come back.

\---

Marcus called at what had to be an ungodly hour in London, which meant either he didn't care about the time or there was something worth making the call for.

It was both.

His face on the screen had the look of a man who'd been awake for a while by choice rather than circumstance — Marcus had always operated like that, running on interest rather than schedule, which was part of why he'd taken an Oxford economics degree and used it to make increasingly unhinged bets on obscure markets and had been right often enough that nobody questioned his methods anymore.

"Tell me what you know about a regulatory flag on a Chinese-American conglomerate's green energy arm," Marcus said, without preamble.

"Good morning to you too."

"It's evening here. What do you know?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Leo said.

Marcus looked at him through the screen for a moment with the expression he used when he was deciding how much to push something.

"Right," Marcus said.

And then he moved on, the way Marcus did when he'd gotten the confirmation he was looking for from the answer he'd been given, and they spent the next ten minutes talking about other things — a market position Marcus was watching, a mutual friend from Oxford who had made a questionable life choice involving a boat, the general state of things.

Leo listened and talked back and it was easy in the way that talking to people who'd known you before you became whatever you currently were was always easy.

Before Marcus hung up he looked at the screen for a second in a slightly different way.

"Whenever you're done with whatever you're doing over there," he said, "come home. We miss you."

"I'll be done soon," Leo said.

From across the room, without looking up, Foxy said, "liar."

Leo picked up the nearest thing, which was a small throw pillow from the bench Foxy had been sitting on, and threw it.

Foxy moved with the calm efficiency of something that had seen it coming and stepped aside without breaking its composure and the pillow hit the wall behind it and fell to the floor.

Marcus, on the screen, had gone very still.

"Was that," Marcus started.

"Goodbye Marcus," Leo said.

"Leo was that a — "

He ended the call.

Foxy looked at the pillow on the floor and then at Leo with an expression that was trying very hard not to be smug and not entirely succeeding.

Leo picked up his water bottle and went back to the drill.