On His Knees for His Enemy

Chapter 14: Working Late

By ten o'clock on Thursday, the fortieth floor of Cross Tower had reduced itself to a single overhead light at the far end of the open plan and the low blue glow of two monitors in the corner office that was temporarily mine. The rest was shadow and the ambient hum of a building that ran on its own systems without needing anyone inside it, like a ship on autopilot, indifferent to whether there was a crew.

I had been there since seven that morning. I was not tired, which was the only useful thing about grief — it had burned out my ability to be physically worn down by ordinary circumstances. You could run on grief the way old engines ran on bad fuel: inefficiently, noisily, but you ran.

Nathaniel Cross appeared in my doorway at ten twelve. He was still in his suit, jacket on, tie loosened by exactly one centimeter. He was holding a folder I recognized as the due diligence package for the Harlow fleet assessment.

"You're still here," he said.

"So are you," I said.

A beat. Then, without further preamble, he walked in and sat down in the chair across from my desk, and we went back to work.

* * *

We had been working the Harlow fleet data all week, but separately, on different parts of the file. The Friday meeting with the bank required us to be aligned on the vessel valuations and the projected replacement costs — numbers that were contentious because Harlow's internal model and the independent surveyor's assessment differed by a margin large enough to be a problem.

Nathaniel laid his version of the analysis on the corner of my desk. I pulled my chair slightly sideways so we could both see it. The gap between us was professional. Appropriate. It registered on some part of me that was keeping a separate ledger of distances, which I told to stop.

"Their depreciation schedule," he said. He pointed to a line item. "They're running a fifteen-year curve on assets that are operating at seventy-plus percent utilization in North Atlantic winter conditions. That's a twenty-year curve in calmer waters."

"The surveyor flagged it. Harlow pushed back on the methodology."

"Of course they did." He turned the page. His handwriting was in the margins — small, precise, no wasted space. "We need to present an adjusted valuation to the bank. Something defensible. Not what Harlow wants, not what our most aggressive number would be. Something a reasonable analyst would land on."

"I have a model," I said. "Built it Tuesday." I pulled up the spreadsheet. He leaned in slightly to read the screen — not crowding, but close enough that I could hear the minute shift of his breathing as he worked through the logic.

He did not speak for four minutes. That was how long it took him to read the model properly, which meant he had actually read it, every cell. Most executives glanced at output figures and asked about the assumptions afterward. Nathaniel Cross read the assumptions first.

"This is right," he said finally.

"I know."

Another fractional thing at the corner of his mouth. He sat back.

* * *

Somewhere around eleven, Nathaniel stood and went to the credenza against the wall — my office's credenza, which had come with the furniture when I'd moved in and which I had not yet bothered to examine closely. He opened the lower cabinet and produced, without any explanation, a bottle of Lagavulin 16 and two glasses.

I watched him set them on the desk.

"You keep whiskey in all your consultants' offices?" I said.

"Only the ones I intend to be here past ten."

He poured two fingers each. He settled the jacket off his shoulders — folded it once over the arm of the chair, which was the first time I had seen him remove it in an office setting — and loosened the tie properly. Not one centimeter. The full knot. He pulled it free and left it draped across the jacket.

I recognized what was happening. It was the same mechanism I had observed in difficult negotiations: the moment a person decided that the performance was no longer worth the energy, and what remained underneath was the actual substance. With most people that moment revealed something smaller. With Nathaniel Cross it revealed something that was more contained and somehow larger, like a ship that was more impressive below the waterline than above it.

I picked up my glass. "Thank you."

"It's from the credenza," he said. "Don't thank me."

We drank. The whiskey was good — smoky and long on the finish, the taste of something built rather than hurried. Outside the window, the harbor lights were blurred with the beginning of rain. The city was very quiet at this hour, the way port cities went quiet between the last freight run and the first — that particular maritime suspension between one day's work and the next.

* * *

We worked for another forty minutes. The model was solid. The presentation for the bank would hold.

At some point the work stopped being the work and became, instead, the excuse to stay in the room. I did not decide this. I simply noticed it, the way you notice the tide has turned not when it turns but when the sand is already wet.

"The Norwegian freighter desk," I said, without looking up from my screen. "In your office."

A silence. "What about it."

"My father loved boats. He had a thing about the provenance of wood. He would have spent twenty minutes on that desk asking the wrong questions."

The sentence landed in the room and stayed there. I had not intended to give it. It had arrived the way true things arrived when you were tired enough and the room was the right temperature and the person across from you was the wrong one to be honest with: without asking permission.

Nathaniel set down his glass. He did not look at me immediately. He looked at his own hands, one resting flat on the table, the other holding the edge of a page he was no longer reading.

"What did he do?" he asked.

"He ran a company. Shipping, historically. He didn't come from money — he built it. He had strong opinions about doing things a certain way and mild opinions about everything else."

I stopped there. I had said enough. More than enough.

Nathaniel didn't push. That was the thing I had not accounted for: he heard the edge in a sentence, the place where a person stopped themselves, and he left it alone. I had expected pressure — men like him tended to collect what others offered and use it. He simply nodded, fractionally, and looked back at his papers.

That restraint was harder to be in the same room with than the pressure would have been.

* * *

We finished at eleven forty. I closed the spreadsheet. Nathaniel gathered his papers and put the jacket back on — the tie went into the jacket pocket, which was a thing that made him look, for thirty seconds, like a man who had a home to go to and was remembering it.

I shut down the second monitor. One light left in the room, at the desk, and the city outside doing what it did.

At the door, Nathaniel stopped.

He did not turn around for a moment. He stood with his back to me, one hand on the door frame, and the pause was long enough to be intentional.

Then he turned.

"You have a sadness in your eyes that I recognize," he said. His voice was low, the way it was when he was not projecting for anyone. "I'm not going to ask what it is. But I want you to know I see it."

The room was very still.

I did not answer. Not because I had nothing to say, but because everything I could have said was either a lie or too true, and neither belonged in an office at eleven forty on a Thursday with the rain starting against the glass.

He nodded, once. As though I had answered him after all. Then he left.

* * *

I turned off the desk lamp. I sat in the dark for perhaps two minutes, which was two minutes more than I had given myself for anything that wasn't strategy since I landed in Boston.

Then I gathered my bag, took my coat from the hook, and rode the elevator down alone.

In the cab home, I looked at the rain on the window and let myself think the thing I had been not-thinking since he walked into my office at ten twelve with a file and a bottle of whiskey and an economy of presence that I had been trained to see as a liability. He had trained personnel. He had trained himself. He was the CEO of a forty-billion-dollar company and he had read every cell in my financial model and he had heard the place where I'd stopped talking about my father and had chosen to leave it alone.

I had come to Boston to destroy Nathaniel Cross.

I had not come to Boston to learn that the person I intended to destroy was someone I had not correctly imagined.

I didn't sleep that night. I lay in the dark apartment above the river with the rain on the windows and rebuilt the dossier in my head, page by page, looking for the part that had warned me about this. It wasn't there. Four hundred pages, and not one of them had told me what it would feel like to be seen by him.

That was the problem with building a model from the water: you never knew how the hull looked until you were standing underneath it.