The board member's name was Hargreaves.
Gerald Hargreaves, sixty-three, three decades on the Drax Industries board, the kind of institutional presence that accumulates in powerful companies the way sediment accumulates in rivers, slowly and without drama, until one day you notice that everything is built on it. Cassian's notes on him were two pages, which was longer than most, and the summary at the bottom said: pragmatic, non-ideological, follows value rather than loyalty. Which meant, in Cassian's precise shorthand, that Hargreaves was the kind of man who could be bought but not owned, who moved when the mathematics changed.
He contacted me directly, which was its own significant detail. Not through Lucien, not through Cassian, not through the Drax Industries communications machinery t
