Chapter 17 An escalation

Chapter 17 An escalation


The sixty-day preliminary review period ended on a Tuesday and by Wednesday morning the regulatory body had upgraded it to a full investigation, which was not the outcome Leo's lawyers had modeled as the most likely one.

The most likely one had been a fine.

A fine was survivable — embarrassing, public in a way that didn't help the stock price short-term, but survivable, the kind of thing a company with Zhang Enterprises' profile could absorb and reframe within a quarter if they had the right communications team, which they did. A fine meant the preliminary review had found something small enough to close with a number.

A full investigation meant someone in a government building had looked at the preliminary findings and decided there was something worth looking at properly.

Leo's lead counsel sent him the update in a single paragraph, precise and without editorializing, and Leo read it over breakfast and set it down and ate the rest of his meal.

Zhang Enterprises' stock had dropped four percent over the past week as market analysts started circling, the kind of circling that happened when a company's name appeared in a regulatory context and the analysts didn't have enough information yet to know how worried to be and defaulted to cautious.

Four percent was nothing to a healthy company.

Zhang Enterprises was not a healthy company, which was information that four percent of the public now suspected and that Leo had known for considerably longer.

He finished breakfast, put the update in the Zhang file, and went to his morning calls.

★

Wei spent two days making phone calls.

He had a list that most people in his position would have considered an extraordinary resource — connections built over thirty years, favors accumulated carefully, relationships maintained with the particular discipline of a man who understood that networks were infrastructure and infrastructure required upkeep. He worked through the list methodically, and the calls went well in the sense that people answered, and said things that sounded supportive, and implied that they would see what they could do.

Nothing changed.

The investigation continued on its schedule, indifferent to who had called whom.

Wei sat with this for a day and then called his lawyer again, because the building situation was still unresolved and the two things together had started to feel like a pattern that he couldn't see the shape of yet.

"Where are we on the ownership trace?" he said.

"We've confirmed it's a Cayman entity resolving to a Delaware holding company," his lawyer said. "Beyond that we've hit a wall. The Delaware entity is clean — registered, compliant, no surface irregularities — but it doesn't resolve to anything with a public face."

"That's not possible," Wei said. "Everything resolves to something."

"With enough resources and the right structure, you can get very close to untraceable. This is close to untraceable. Whoever built it knew what they were building."

Wei thanked him and ended the call.

He was at a different restaurant for dinner that evening, a place he'd been to twice before, good food, no particular attachment to it.

It was fine.

He told Eleanor it was fine when she asked.

He looked at the menu and ordered what seemed right and the food arrived and it was fine.

He was not thinking about the restaurant he usually went to and he was certainly not thinking about the particular silence of a space at the table where a habit used to be.

It was fine.

★

The second meeting was at nine and Leo was already in the building at eight-forty for something else, a call with the Rotterdam team that ran short, and the calendar invite had been sitting in his schedule for a week with his attendance listed as tentative, which Maya had apparently interpreted as a soft yes when she'd confirmed the meeting room.

He showed up because he was there.

Priya handled it the way a professional handled something they'd been preparing for — cleanly, no wasted time, the proposal revised from the preliminary version in ways that addressed the specific structural questions his team had flagged. She kept it professional throughout, not performing professionalism but actually in it, and he respected that the way he respected most things that were done well without announcement.

The numbers were good. He said so. Her team lead walked through the logistics corridor mapping and it held up under the questions Leo's operations manager asked.

They shook hands at the end, around the table, the standard close of a meeting that had accomplished what it set out to do.

Priya's hand held the shake for a moment before she let go.

"You came," she said.

"I was in the building."

"Of course," she said, and smiled with the quality of someone filing an answer away rather than accepting it at face value.

Her team moved toward the door in the way teams moved when the principal had the exit handled.

She was the last one out and she turned back once, her hand already on the door frame, and said his name — just his name, nothing attached to it, no question and no statement, just the word.

"Yes?" Leo said.

She looked at him for a moment, and then shook her head, something small and almost amused in it, and left.

The door closed.

Foxy materialized on the chair at the far end of the conference table, where it had apparently been sitting invisibly for the duration of the meeting, and regarded Leo with the expression it used when it had an opinion it was about to deliver.

"She's going to be a problem," it said.

"She's not going to be a problem," Leo said, gathering his notes.

"Sure," said Foxy.

★

Jamie called at seven in the evening from what looked like a cab, the outside lights moving past the window behind him in the particular blur of London traffic, and opened with, "I have an excellent idea."

"No," Leo said.

"You haven't heard it."

"When you start with excellent idea it means you've already decided and you're using the call to inform me."

"That's not — okay that's fair but this one actually is excellent." Jamie shifted in the seat, getting comfortable in the way he did when he was about to commit to something. "I want to come to New York. I've been tracking your location situation with Marcus — "

"I know about the bet."

" — and you've been in the same city for three weeks which is long for you, so something is clearly happening, and I want to see it. I'll stay out of your way."

"You won't."

"Mostly out of your way."

"Mostly," Leo said.

"Probably mostly," Jamie said, in the tone of someone being genuinely honest about their own limitations.

Leo looked at the ceiling for a moment.

"Fine," he said. "Two weeks notice. Give me two weeks to sort the schedule."

"I'll come in ten days."

"I said two weeks."

"I heard you," Jamie said, with the particular cheerfulness of someone who had heard and was choosing a different number.

Leo took the phone away from his ear and looked at it for a second.

"Foxy," he said.

Foxy looked up from the end of the couch where it had been doing whatever Foxy did in the evenings, which Leo had never fully determined.

"Say something useful."

Foxy considered Jamie on the screen for a moment, the blurred London lights, the expression of a man who had already bought a flight.

"I like him," Foxy said.

Leo stared at the phone.

Jamie, on the screen, pointed at the camera. "Was that the fox? Did the fox just speak?"

"Goodbye Jamie."

"Leo, was that — did I just get endorsed by a spirit animal — "

He ended the call.

Foxy had gone back to whatever it was doing and looked entirely unbothered, which was its default state and also, currently, the most annoying thing about it.

Leo put the phone down.

Ten days, he thought.

He was going to need to move some things around.