He thought about the last conversation they had had. Not the professional one, the one that had preceded it, brief and unguarded. The kind of conversation that only happened between people who had known each other long enough to drop the architecture for a few minutes. He remembered something Daisuke had said about the nature of leverage. That real leverage was never about what you could take, only about what someone else could not afford to lose.
He had thought at the time that Daisuke was talking about business. He was looking at a young woman in a restaurant. She had spent years. She had built something. Once she had placed herself in a room where she knew he would eventually sit and she had waited and she had let him underestimate her and she had let him embarrass himself and then she had spoken.
All of it, every piece of it, was Daisuke. Takahashi stood up from the desk. He walked to the window. The city was beginning its morning in the particular incremental way cities did, lights accumulating, movement thickening, the machinery of the day assembling itself from nothing into something. "Set up a meeting," he said.
Claire looked at him. "With Amara Cole," he said. "Not here. Not the restaurant." He paused.
"Somewhere neutral." He looked at his reflection in the glass for a moment. "And tell her I'll come to wherever she prefers." When the message reached Amara, she was sitting in the kitchen of her apartment eating toast and reading a physical newspaper, one of the small daily habits she'd kept since Osaka, since Daisuke had insisted that there were things you noticed in print that you didn't notice on a screen. Her phone was on the table.
She saw Claire's name in the brief message, and she read it once, and then set the phone face down and finished her toast. Then she picked it up again and typed a reply. She sent it. Then she called Harold. "He wants a meeting," she said when he answered.
A pause. "When?" "Soon. He's not in a position to wait." She looked out the kitchen window at the alley below, a narrow strip of gray morning between two buildings.
"He found the Stent connection." "We expected that." "He found the medical record, too." She paused. "He He knows about Mori."
Harold was quiet for a moment. "Are you sure?" "He didn't say it. He didn't have to." She folded the newspaper.