Hayden absorbed this. A mechanic with a name and a board member with a plan was already a dangerous combination. A third figure, older and patient and not even pretending to smoke, was something else entirely. It was the shape of a man who had been brought in from the outside. The kind of man whose presence at a midnight loading dock meant the operation had a third layer Hayden had not yet seen. 

He took out his phone. He scrolled through his favorites until he reached the name he wanted and he tapped it. 

"Marcus," he said when the line picked up. "Drop whatever you are doing. I need you here within the hour." 

***

Marcus Hale had been Hayden Lockwood's personal attorney for seventeen years and his closest friend for twenty-two. He arrived at the building forty-eight minutes after the call, walking through the lobby in a charcoal overcoat with a soft leather briefcase under one arm. The kind of unhurried walk a man cultivates when he has been called to too many emergencies to ever look like he is hurrying to one. 

He took the executive elevator to the forty-second floor and then the maintenance stair to the roof because Hayden had told him to. And when he stepped out onto the helipad in the long blue light of early evening, he saw his client sitting on a bench inside a glass shelter, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and a thin boy in a hooded sweatshirt sitting silently beside him. 

Marcus did not react. He simply opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind him. 

"Hayden." 

"Marcus, this is Jamal. Jamal, this is the most trustworthy man I know. Anything you said to me, you can say in front of him." 

Marcus sat down on the small chair across from them. He set his briefcase on the floor beside him. He did not take it out. He did not take out a notebook. He simply folded his hands in his lap the way he always did when he was preparing to absorb something he could not afford to miss. 

"Tell me," he said. 

Hayden told him. He told it the way Jamal had told it to him—without ornament, without theory, just the bare sequence of what the boy had heard and seen. He included the names. He included the bandaged fingers. He included the unlit cigarette and the long coat. 

When he was finished, Marcus did not speak for almost a full minute. He looked out through the tinted glass at the helicopter sitting still on its pad. He looked at the boy. He looked back at Hayden. 

"Curtis," he said finally. 

"Yes." 

"And the deputy?" 

"Yes." 

Marcus closed his eyes briefly. He had drafted Curtis Vance's employment contract eleven years ago. He had drafted the succession clause that named the Chief Operating Officer as interim chief executive in the event of the sudden incapacitation or death of the founder, pending a board vote to be held within seventy-two hours. He had drafted that clause at Hayden's specific request. He had argued against it at the time. Hayden had insisted, because Hayden had trusted Curtis Vance the way a man trusts the brother he never had. 

"The Friday board meeting," Marcus said quietly. 

"Yes." 

"They were going to ratify the succession before the news cycle even cooled." 

"Yes." 

Marcus opened his eyes. He turned toward Jamal. "Son," he said gently, "I need to ask you one question, and I need you to think carefully before you answer it. The patch on the man's jacket, the one with the wings... was it the company patch, the Lockwood Aerial patch, or was it a different one?" 

Jamal thought. He looked down at his hands for a moment and then up at Marcus. "It was the company one, sir. The blue circle with the silver wings inside. I seen it before on the side door uniforms. But it was sewed funny, like it had been pulled off something else and put on his jacket. The thread was a different color." 

Marcus looked at Hayden. "Contractor," he said, "not a staff mechanic. Someone who was given a patch to wear so he could move through your hangar without being questioned." 

"He had a name," Hayden said. "Pat." 

Marcus took out his phone. He typed for perhaps thirty seconds and sent a single message, and then put the phone away. 

"My investigator," he said. "Her name is Delia. She is the best I have. She is already on it. By tomorrow morning, we will know whether anyone named Pat has been near your aircraft in the last two weeks, and whether anyone bandaged two fingers in any clinic within five miles of your hangar in the same period." 

He stood up. He walked once to the glass and looked out at the helicopter, and then he turned back to them. 

"Hayden," he said, "we have a decision to make tonight, and we have to make it before you go home." 

Hayden looked up at him from the bench. The light in the shelter had begun to thin, the late sun pulling itself slowly down behind the towers to the west, and the amber wash on the glass had cooled into a pale gray. 

"What kind of decision?" 

Marcus sat back down. He laced his fingers together and leaned forward slightly. "You have two paths," he said. "The first is the loud one. We call the FBI tonight. They will move on the hangar before sunrise. They will pull every aircraft you own out of service for inspection. They will question Curtis at his home before he has finished his breakfast. The story will be in the financial press by the end of business tomorrow. The stock will drop somewhere between twelve and eighteen percent before it stabilizes. The board will be in chaos."