Chapter 9: The Name Behind Selena
James Harding called Adrian on a Thursday afternoon without a lawyer present, which was either courageous or inadvisable depending on where he stood, and which Adrian suspected was the specific behavior of a man who had decided, for the first time in a long time, to do something without first calculating its strategic implications.
"I need to tell you something," James said. "Not through attorneys. Before the investigation gets there, before it becomes an official thing — I owe you the direct version."
Adrian listened.
The direct version took forty minutes.
James Harding had been a target himself, two years before Adrian and Elena. His marriage had not survived. His wife — Catherine, whom Adrian had met twice and remembered as a quiet, warm woman who asked thoughtful questions and listened to the answers — had believed the constructed version of James long enough that by the time the network was done with them, the distance was irreparable. Catherine had not learned, afterward, what had actually happened. She had built a different life and James had not known how to reach across the aftermath of it to provide an explanation that he himself had only partially understood.
He had been approached, six months after the end of his marriage and the beginning of his understanding of what had actually destroyed it, by someone from the network who had presented the situation with brutal clarity: he could cooperate with introductions and referrals, lending his credibility to the next operation, or he could have certain documents released — documents generated during the operation against him, documents that had been constructed to present him in specific, damaging ways — to his business contacts, his remaining family, the professional network he'd been carefully rebuilding.
"I knew what I was doing," James said. His voice was steady in the way of someone who has decided to be honest in full rather than in the flattering parts. "I want to be clear about that. I wasn't completely coerced — there was real pressure, but there was also the easier path, and I chose the easier path, and Adrian, I introduced Selena Cross into your life knowing she was not what she presented as. Knowing what she was there to do."
The silence on the line was long enough to have a shape.
"Why are you calling me now?" Adrian asked.
"Because the investigation is going to find it anyway," James said. "Thomas Wren's documentation almost certainly leads there. I'd rather you hear it from me while I still have the choice of how to deliver it." A pause. "And because Catherine didn't get that choice. She found out the way all the other people find out — from the outside, in official language, after the fact. I've spent two years thinking about how different things might have been if someone had called her directly first. I'm trying to be the thing I didn't have."
Adrian said nothing for a moment.
"My wife," he said. "Elena. She's — we're going to be all right. The investigation is moving forward. She's—" He stopped. "She's extraordinary. You should know that. The woman you helped put at risk is extraordinary."
"I know," James said quietly. "I could see it. I told myself it was compartmentalization. I've been examining that compartmentalization for three weeks and I no longer believe it."
"No," Adrian said. "Neither do I."
James cooperated with Okafor's investigation fully and voluntarily, which did not erase what he'd done but did provide the investigation with something it needed — the specific, inside account of how the network recruited and maintained its network of unwitting and semi-witting referrers, the mechanism by which credibility was borrowed and leveraged, the specific names and channels through which the network had been building its pipeline for years.
Okafor called it the most significant single piece of intelligence the investigation had received.
Thomas, when he heard this, allowed himself a small, private satisfaction.
May you like
He had found James Harding in the documentation. He had known Adrian would need to hear it first, directly, from the source, before the official version arrived.
He had, as he explained to no one but would have explained to anyone who asked, timed the information accordingly.
