KNOX
Alpha Decker came back.
Not to the shop this time — he contacted Grayson through formal channels, requested an actual meeting, proposed neutral ground at a hotel conference room that suggested he'd thought about what went wrong the first time and was adjusting his approach.
I respected the adjustment. It meant he was intelligent rather than just confident, which made him both a better potential ally and a more significant potential problem.
We met on a Friday. Grayson came. Decker brought a senior advisor, a woman in her fifties named Ortega who'd been negotiating pack agreements for twenty years and had the quiet economy of movement that comes from spending a career in rooms where things could go very right or very wrong.
We sat across a conference table. There was water in a
