Chapter 14: On Purpose

He had told Milo he would be home for dinner.

The folder under his hand was the last one in the pile, and it had been open long enough that the light in the windows had gone down to nothing. He read the last page again without getting anything more out of it, signed it at the bottom, capped the pen, and set the pen down parallel to the edge of the desk.

The floor was empty except for him and Sean. This late the building ran on its own noise — vents, water in the walls, the elevator going down for somebody else — and he closed the folder.

Someone knocked.

“Come in.”

Sean Cole opened the door and stayed in it, which he didn’t usually do. “Emmett Rusk is downstairs. He wants to see you. He doesn’t have an appointment. He says he’ll wait.”

So he’s found something.

Adrian heard himself say it, level. “Send him up.”

Sean looked at him half a beat longer than the answer required. Then he nodded, pulled the door shut, and went back down the hall.

He stayed in the chair. He would be late. He squared the folder to the edge of the desk, left his hand flat on it, and waited out the ninety seconds it took the elevator to come up.

Emmett Rusk came in without knocking and stopped on the far side of the desk with his coat still on. He was a broad man with a good face, the kind that did well in photographs, and the face was not doing well now. Everything in it had been pulled tight and was being held there.

There was a chair on his side of the desk. He put one hand flat on the back of it and left it there. He didn’t pull it out, and Adrian didn’t tell him to.

“Adrian.”

Nobody in that building called him that. Adrian didn’t correct him and didn’t answer to it. He waited.

“I’m going to tell you what I have,” Emmett said. “And then I’m going to ask you what you think of it. That’s the whole visit. I’m not here for anything else.”

He waited for the small thing men like them trade across desks — the nod, the noise — and Adrian gave him none of it. Emmett went ahead anyway.

“A while back, the company started having problems. It started with the advertisers. Deals that were done — negotiated, approved, sitting there waiting on a signature. They stopped signing. All of them, one after another, and not one of them would tell me why.”

Adrian leaned back until the chair took his weight.

“I’ve been in this business a long time. People don’t walk off a finished deal. Not all of them. Not in the same month.”

Somewhere in the middle of it Adrian stopped watching the man’s face and looked past him at the window, and Emmett kept talking.

“Then it moved to the accounts I already had. The contracted ones. They started terminating. No meeting, no ask, no counter — just the notice. My people went back at every one of them, and every one of them paid the exit instead of staying. You know what that costs a company. They paid it anyway.”

Emmett’s voice hadn’t moved since he came in. Same volume, same pace, held down flat like there was a hand on it.

“So I put two people on it. It took them a month to come back and tell me what I’d already worked out for myself. It isn’t the market. It isn’t luck, and it isn’t one bad quarter. Somebody has been doing this on purpose. One account at a time, down a list, and slowly enough that I’d have to sit in it and watch it happen.”

He stopped. There was room in front of him for one more sentence, and he left it empty.

“What do you think?”

Adrian looked at him and took his time about it. It was a clean account: in order, no adjectives, no appeal. And no name.

“Is that so,” Adrian said.

Emmett’s hand tightened on the back of the chair.

“Did you find out who?”