"He used the word neutral when he asked for the meeting location, and he said he'd come to where I preferred." She let that sit. "He's not coming to negotiate. He's coming because he finally understands who he's actually been dealing with. Another pause, then Harold said quietly, "And now?"
Amara set the newspaper on the table. She looked at it, the front page, the headlines, the ordinary machinery of the world going about its business. "Now," she said, "we finish it." The building Amara chose was not impressive from the outside. That was deliberate.
It sat on a quiet block in the West Loop, here between a printing shop that had been there since the '90s and a Vietnamese restaurant that did most of its business at lunch. The building itself was four stories, brick, unremarkable. The lobby had a security desk and an elevator and a directory board with names that meant nothing to anyone who hadn't been given context. The kind of building that people walked past without registering. Harold's network used the third floor, had for 2 years.
There was no sign on the door. Amara arrived 40 minutes before the meeting time she had given Claire. She sat at the table in the main room with a cup of coffee and went through everything once, not because she needed to review it, but because she had learned from Daisuke that the time before a significant conversation was not dead time. It was the time you used to decide what you would not say, which was always more important than deciding what you would. Harold had offered to be present.
She had declined. Patricia had offered to be present. She had also declined. This was not a board meeting. It was not a negotiation in the formal sense.
What it was, exactly, she had not put a name to, but she knew it required her to be alone in the room when Takahashi arrived because some things only happened at the correct scale, and adding people to this particular conversation would change its scale into something that served a different purpose. She was here for the truth, for her own and possibly for his. Whether he was capable of it remained to be seen. At 10:17, Claire called to say they were 4 minutes out. At 10:22, the elevator opened.
Hideki Takahashi walked in alone. No Claire, no Yamada, no executives. He had come exactly as she had. One person, a room, a conversation. She noted that.
It was a choice that said something, and he would have known it said something, which meant he had made it deliberately. He was dressed more quietly than he had been at the restaurant. A dark jacket, no tie, the kind of clothes that communicated seriousness without display. His eyes moved through the room once, the same survey she had observed at the restaurant, and then settled on her. She did not stand.
She gestured to the chair across the table. Sit down. He sat. For a moment, neither of them spoke. The room was still.