She was looking at the access logs on Friday afternoon when she felt the specific unease of being observed.
She looked up.
Dennis Roth was standing at the end of the row of desks, not looking at her.
But he had stopped.
And she had been at her desk running account access logs in a session that, she now realized, was not entirely invisible if someone with system monitoring access happened to be watching for that kind of activity.
She closed the window.
She picked up a paper file and began reviewing it as if that was what she had been doing.
He walked past.
He did not look at her directly.
But in the space of his passing, she felt the temperature of the situation change.
By Monday morning, she had booked a one-way flight to Seattle for Wednesday.
She needed two days to secure the evidence in a form that would survive her departure and reach the right person regardless of what happened after she left.
That was what she was doing Tuesday morning when Dennis Roth appeared at the end of her desk.
“Nora,” he said.
She did not look up immediately.
“Good morning, Dennis.”
“Working on anything interesting?”
She let two seconds pass.
“Vendor reconciliation,” she said. “The Calumet data is late.”
“Which run?”
“Third quarter carryover.”
He said nothing.
She looked up.
He was looking at the cardigan she had on — not at her face, not at the screen, at the cardigan. The way it draped. The way she was sitting.
“You should go home,” he said. “You look tired.”
The sentence was delivered lightly.
She understood it as something else.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Long project,” he said. “Vendor reconciliation can wait a day.”
“I prefer to finish it.”
He smiled.
The smile did not reach anywhere near his eyes.
“Sure,” he said. “Of course.”
He left.
Nora turned back to her screen.
She had the analysis. She had the evidence chain. She had the secure drive and the documentation she had prepared over the previous four days.
What she did not have was a way out of the building before Dennis Roth made whatever move he was preparing.
She had until five o’clock.
She was working backward through the remaining steps when the call came from the executive floor.
“Mr. Harrington would like to see you,” said his assistant. “Now, if possible.”
Nora looked at the time.
Three forty-seven.
She thought about the flight. Wednesday. Forty-one hours away.
“Of course,” she said.
She took the secure drive.
She took her bag.
She took the elevator to the forty-second floor.
—
The view from Marcus Harrington’s office took in the river and the North Side and, on clear days, a line of blue that was the lake.