He wants to hit the ground running.
After a few minutes, he checks the time. He and Jessica have a dinner later on with some friends. He’ll tell her then, when he can see her reaction. It won’t be a real surprise-she’s been predicting this, or a version of it, for months-but she will be pleased.
When Howley looks up again, having jotted down another half page of notes, he is surprised to see that Jacqueline Prescott is outside his office. She’s standing at Angela’s desk. The two women talk for a bit. Then Jacqueline passes something-it looks like a file folder of some kind-to Angela.
Vaughan’s office is on the other side of the fifty-seventh floor, and it’s a fairly rare occurrence to see his PA over here. Despite her years, Jacqueline is still the old man’s Praetorian Guard, his firewall-everything that’s directed to him, or that comes from him, must go through her first.
So what’s this? Those notes Vaughan mentioned?
Howley studies Jacqueline for a moment, fully aware that out of the corner of her eye she’s probably observing him, too. Quite the piece of work, she’s soon gliding off down the hallway, that finishing school deportment of hers, after nearly fifty years, still operating at full tilt.
Howley then makes a show of going back to his own notes. But he doesn’t have long to wait. Angela comes in almost immediately, holding the file folder in her hand.
“Mr. Howley,” she says, arriving at his desk and holding the folder out to him, “Ms. Prescott has asked me to give you this.”
“Thank you, Angela.”
He takes the folder and places it on his desk without looking at it. He’s aware-from her expression, from her body language, even from a slight residue of tension in the air arising from Jacqueline Prescott’s visit-that Angela knows something is afoot and wants to be briefed on it.
But he’s afraid she’s going to have to wait.
He freezes her out with a thin smile, and when he’s alone again he looks down at the folder, closely studying its blank and slightly faded cream-colored cover. This, if Howley is not mistaken, is one of James Vaughan’s legendary “black files.”
So called.
Vaughan is no slouch in the technology department, but when it comes to data storage-or the storage, at any rate, of certain data-he appears to have a preference for the non-digital, the legacy, which is to say, hard copies only, and kept in folders like this one.
For as long as anyone can remember-and generally that’s nowhere near as long as Vaughan himself can remember-these cream-colored folders have been a feature of life here at Oberon HQ. The old man often has one under his arm, he consults them at meetings, and there are always two or three on his desk.
Howley can’t be sure until he looks, of course, but he’s guessing that the folder he has in his hands right now contains some pretty interesting material. At the same time, it seems amazing to him that the old man would even let something like this out of his sight. Because for anyone wishing to arrive at a full understanding of the Oberon Capital Group, access to the contents of these files would surely have to be considered essential, the final piece of any puzzle.
Howley takes the folder in his hands and flicks through it. It’s only about fifty or sixty pages. Some contain graphics, others just solid blocks of text.
So what’s going on here? Is this some kind of a coded vote of confidence?
Howley has no other choice but to see it that way.
He smiles to himself and opens the folder at the first page.
It’s after seven when Ellen sits at the bar in Flannery’s on Amsterdam and orders an eight-ounce cheeseburger with smoked bacon, a Caesar salad, and a pint of Leffe.
A sip or two into the pint and someone appears at her side.
“Hey, Ellie, what’s up?”
“Charlie!”
Ellen comes to Flannery’s quite a bit and has gotten to know a few of the regulars. Charlie here is a retired… something, she’s never quite been able to establish what. But he knows what she does, and he enjoys analyzing the stories of the day with her. Ellen enjoys this, too, because Charlie’s taste in news, not unlike her own, runs to the conspiratorial, and it’s a useful exercise every now and again to have to pull stuff back from the edge of crazy.
Not that he’s crazy, but he’s freer in what he can say than she is. His newsroom is the barstool, and standards there tend to be a lot less stringent. Tonight, though, she’s surprised, and a little disappointed, to find that all Charlie wants to talk about is the Connie Carillo trial. For obvious reasons, she has missed the coverage today and isn’t up to speed on developments. He gives her a quick rundown (more stuff about the lobby, how it’s lit, traffic, etc.), which he then follows up with a pretty incisive analysis of the subtle effects Joey Gifford’s newfound celebrity seems to be having on both the content and the delivery of his ongoing testimony.
Interesting as Ellen finds this-and as she demolishes her eight-ounce cheeseburger-she does try to steer the conversation around to the shooting at the Rygate today. But to no avail. Charlie is dismissive of the whole affair, seeming to imply that it’s all somehow way too obvious and predictable. Ellen would like to tease this out but knows she’s not going to get the chance. In any case, they’re soon joined by a few other people, and the conversation opens up and at the same time, inevitably, dissipates.
Two pints and a shot of Jameson’s later, Ellen finds herself heading out to smoke a joint with Charlie and a guy from the kitchen called Nestor. There’s an alley two doors down from the bar, and that’s where they go. Nestor is probably twenty-two or twenty-three, a physics major apparently, and in his tight little cook’s shirt and check pants-at least as far as Ellen is concerned-distractingly ripped.
As they pass the joint around, the conversation flits from one thing to another-the kitchen politics at Flannery’s, the right ingredients for a Reuben sandwich, what the fuck a “babyccino” is, and the routine abuse these days of the word “quantum.” When they come out of the alleyway to head back to Flannery’s, Amsterdam Avenue has notched things up a couple of gears, in terms of sound levels, color display, pixilation, and Ellen herself now feels-the word bounces back into her head, on a curve, from earlier-ripped.
Distractedly ripped.
In the bar again, she starts into a pretty intense conversation with a friend of Charlie’s about the bizarre rules governing Super PACs, but from where she’s sitting the TV set at the end of the bar is in her direct line of vision, and she can’t take her eyes off it.
They’re showing the MSNBC clip from before, and it strikes her now that it’s actually little more than a blur. You can see there’s some kind of a tussle going on, just about. Then there’s one clear shot of Scott Lebrecht looking dazed, another of the doorman being helped back onto his feet, and a very shaky few seconds of someone running out into the traffic on Broadway.
But we see this hooded figure from behind.
And that’s it.
She visualizes her own clip and it seems-from memory, through the prism of being stoned-to be so much more substantial, riper, brimming with texture and detail. From that moment on she can’t get it out of her head. She needs to see it again, as soon as possible, and on a proper-sized screen. Within ten minutes, therefore, she has extricated herself from Flannery’s and is floating up Amsterdam Avenue toward Ninety-third Street.
At Ninety-first something occurs to her and she takes out her phone. She’s assuming Val Brady is on the story, so she calls him up.
“Ellen? What’s happening?”
Dispensing with any niceties, she gets straight into it. What’s he hearing? Basically. Is there much reliable CCTV footage? Do they have any kind of a fix on the perps yet? What are his sources in the NYPD saying? Are arrests imminent?