Then she looked at Raven and said steadily, "He didn't blame you. I want you to know that he was very clear in the letter. He understood why the conclusion looked the way it did. He said that a leader can only work with the information he has and that the failure in information was his own for not finding a way to communicate sooner. She paused.
He blamed himself for that. He talked about it in the letter more than once. He shouldn't have, Raven said. No, Madison agreed. But that's who he was.
The mechanic who took personal responsibility for the fault whether or not he caused it. Raven was quiet. Cage said from his edge of the room, still in his edge of things position. What happened to him at the end in Nevada? Was he he stopped tried to find a way to ask what he needed to ask without asking for something that belonged to Madison and not to him?
Was he okay? Was he peaceful? The question from a man who had been 14 years old when Daniel Blake left and 35 years old when he died and who had spent 21 years of his life carrying the certainty that Daniel Blake was not a traitor. That question was not a simple one. Madison heard all of it.
He had a small house. She said he had a dog a big shepherd mix named Ford because of course he named his dog Ford. A couple of the men made sounds that were almost laughs. The kind that come out when something is funny and also painful at the same time. He had a vegetable garden.
He had a workshop. He taught himself to make furniture in the last 2 years because his hands needed something to do even when his body was slowing down. He had Gloria next door who fed him casserles and argued with him about television programs. And he had she stopped. He had me visiting when I could, which wasn't enough, which I will always know wasn't enough.
But the visits he had, he was, yes, he was peaceful. He had made peace with his choices. He had made peace with the cost of them. She looked at Cage. He asked about the club.
Every time I visited, he asked. He never stopped caring about the people here. Cage looked at the floor. His hands were in his jacket pockets and the line of his shoulders was doing something complicated. He talked about a kid, Madison said, and she watched Cage go very still.
Young 14 when he left. He said this kid had eyes that caught everything and a stubbornness that reminded him of the better kind of engine, the kind that refused to quit, even when you'd given up on it. She let that sit. He said if the kid grew up half as well as he hoped. He'd be someone worth knowing.
Cage didn't look up for a while. When he did, his eyes were clear. But it was the clearness of effort. He actually said that word for word, Madison said. I memorized the letter.
I have very little of him left and the letter is most of it. So she lifted a shoulder. I memorized it. Cage nodded once and said nothing more. But the change in the room after that was perceptible.
A softening of some particular tension that had been held by one person and was now incrementally being set down. 41 minutes later, the man Raven had called arrived. His name was Denny Carver. He wore reading glasses on a chain, and he had the specific irritable energy of someone who was annoyed about being woken up, but was also clearly incapable of passing up a problem that interested him. He was perhaps 60 with the kind of compact deficiency of movement that suggested he'd once been in a situation military law enforcement, something with an acronym that had permanently rearranged his relationship to urgency.
He looked at the laptop, looked at the USB drive already in it, sat down, cracked his knuckles with what seemed like actual pleasure, and said, "Coffee black now." And everyone stopped looking at me while I work. Someone produced the coffee with remarkable speed. The review took 2 hours and 40 minutes. Madison sat through most of it, answering questions when Denny called out to her across the room.
And he called out with the specific directness of a man who had no use for social ceremony and unlimited use for accurate information. This file here, the financial transfers, who's the counterparty account, and how did your father access this data? Uh, and she would answer as fully and specifically as she could, filling in the context that existed in her memory rather than on the drive the spoken versions of things her father had only sketched in the documents. Around 2:30 in the morning, Denny leaned back in his chair and took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes with the heels of both hands. Then he put the glasses back on.
He looked at Raven. It's solid, he said. It's more than solid. This is your guy built a case that would stand up in multiple contexts, legal, extralegal, organizational, financial. He cross-referenced everything.
He's got three independent threads of documentation, each of which is sufficient on its own, and all three of which point to the same person. He glanced at the piece of folded paper that had been sitting on the workbench for the past 2 hours. The name you've got, it fits. And the 16-month-old material, the most recent documentation, it shows the same structure still operating. Same pattern just evolved.
Still active, Garrett said. Still active, Denny confirmed. Which means your window for action is not leisurely. Raven stood. He looked at Hector, who was still leaning against the workbench as though he had been designed for that specific position and hadn't moved in 3 hours.
Options, Raven said. Hector said too. You go to him with this and give him the opportunity to exit cleanly or you don't. The exit cleanly option, Raven said. Define clean.
He severs the connection immediately and permanently. He provides full disclosure of what he passed and to whom names and details. He compensates for any damage calculable. Hector paused. He does this with the understanding that the alternative is the documentation going to every relevant party at once.
And if he refuses, then the documentation goes to every relevant party at once, Hector said. Which is not our preferred scenario because it's messy and uncontrolled and the fallout is larger than we can entirely predict. What do you think he'll do this from Garrett? I think he'll try to negotiate. Hector said he'll minimize.
He'll reframe. He'll make arguments about context and proportion. He'll be very calm and very reasonable because that is what a man like that does when he's cornered. He performs reasonableness as a tactic. He paused.
The key is he cannot know the full extent of what we have before we have the conversation. If he knows everything, he can calibrate his response to match. If he only knows we have something, he has to guess. And guessing under pressure is where people tell the truth by accident. Madison had been listening to this without comment.