Who would know what to look for? Who would document it the right way? Yes. And who Fitch would come after when he saw the name, Marcus said. Because Fitch coming after me meant Fitch making moves, making calls, sending texts, getting on a recorded line he thought was private.
The eucalyptus moved. Marcus, she said. First time she'd used his first name in 6 months. He noticed it. I'm here.
He said the job was real. She said, "I need you to understand that you were the right person for the Cambria project independent of everything else. I would have offered you that role regardless, but the timing was chosen," he said. "Yes, and the risk was mine to carry without knowing I was carrying it." "Yes," she said. "And that was wrong.
I made a decision about your exposure without giving you the information to decide for yourself." I She stopped. I told myself that the documentation would be enough protection, that as long as you were building a clean file, Fitch couldn't touch you. I told myself the role was genuinely good for you, which it is, and that softened what I was actually doing. Marcus had heard a lot of apologies in his life. The ones from Phoenix, the careful ones from the company lawyers, the one from his ex-wife delivered at the kitchen table the morning she said she was done waiting for him to be the version of himself that the Phoenix situation had buried.
He'd gotten good at hearing the shape of them. Which ones were for the person apologizing and which ones were for him. This one was for him. You should have told me, he said. I know.
If you'd told me, I would have taken the job anyway, he said. And I would have walked into it with better footing. A silence. I know that, too, she said. Now, the eucalyptus stilled for a moment, then started again.
Okay, he said. 72 hours from when Hartwell files. Yes, I'll be in the LA office Wednesday morning. I want to walk through what Fitch does when he gets the advance notice. Specifically, does he have access to any of the bid documentation directly or does he have to go through your ex to see it through my ex?
She said he's not an employee. He has no direct system access. Good. Marcus said that's a choke point. We can work with that a beat.
Then Diane said in a register slightly different from her operational one. Thank you for not I know. He said I was going to say for not making me explain it twice. Oh, he said that too. He heard something at the other end of the line that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite not one.
Then she was back to her operational register because she was Diane Callaway and that was the architecture she worked inside. Wednesday, she said. Wednesday, he said. He hung up. Sat in the side office with the eucalyptus moving outside the window.
He was not okay with having been the trip wire. He was also not going anywhere. Both of those things were true in equal measure. And he'd learned in Phoenix learned it the hard way. The way that costs you something you don't get back that when two true things pulled in opposite directions, you didn't resolve the tension by abandoning one.
You found the structure that could hold them both upright at the same time. He was working on that structure. He had Wednesday to work on it more. He pulled up the bid documents and got back to it. The outside council Diane had retained was a woman named Hartwell, who arrived at the Wednesday meeting 20 minutes early and spent those 20 minutes reading Marcus' documentation with the focused pleasure of someone who genuinely enjoyed a situation with multiple overlapping complications.
She had a legal pad, a specific brand of blue pen, and the manner of someone who had been in rooms like this before and found them energizing rather than draining. Walk me through the Pacific Ridge disqualification," she said to Marcus when Diane had finished introductions. He walked her through it. She asked four questions. He answered all four without hedging.
She wrote something down. "The recorded call," she said. His questions about Pacific Ridge. On that call, he references specific project parameters in a way that implies knowledge he shouldn't have if his involvement is what you're asserting. Yes, that's your strongest single piece.
She said, "It's not a confession, but it's acknowledgement of knowledge, and knowledge implies connection, and connection is what the holding company documents establish." She clicked her pin. "We can build with this." She looked at Diane. "Your ex-husband's board relationship with Fitch needs to be disclosed separately. That's a governance issue that runs parallel to the vendor fraud. I understand." Diane said, "It complicates the 72-hour problem," Hartwell said.
Because once your ex sees the letter, Fitch knows the clock started. He'll try to get ahead of it. She looked back at Marcus. What does he do? In your read, he goes after the source of the documentation.
Marcus said he tries to frame it as a vendetta. Former employee with a history of conflict around the contractor group brought in by a VP with her own motivations. He makes it a credibility argument instead of a facts argument because the facts argument is losing. Hartwell wrote something. And what's his biggest vulnerability?
The holding company. Marcus said the civil suit settled, but the underlying conduct didn't get adjudicated. If the discovery documents are re-examined in the context of a new allegation of vendor infiltration, the settlement starts looking like a containment strategy, not a resolution. Hartwell looked at Diane again. He's good.
I know, Diane said. He's also a potential witness, Hartwell said. Which means we need to be careful about how much strategy he's in the room for. She looked at Marcus, not because I don't trust your discretion, because Fitch's attorney will try to make your involvement look like coordination rather than documentation if this gets adversarial. "Tell me what you need me out of the room for, and I'll step out," Marcus said.
Hartwell nodded, went back to her legal pad. They worked for 4 hours. Marcus stepped out twice, both times for conversations about Diane's ex-husband that were above his operational level and below his need to know. He got coffee from the machine in the hallway, which was bad, and checked in with the Cambria site supervisor about a permit timeline, which was not bad, and thought about the 72-hour window. Was going to move on him.
That much was clear. The only question was the form another call, another text, or something more direct, something that involved whoever inside the company had been passing him information about Marcus' role and responsibilities. After Hartwell left, Diane walked him to the elevator. The hallway was empty. This building had the particular late afternoon quiet of a place where most of the work was done in other places, and everyone who mattered had already left.