NEW STRATEGY
1078 Words
Something shifted in Zion's face.
Not the almost-thing I was used to. Something deeper. Something that moved through him briefly, visibly, before he contained it.
He looked down at the table.
"He never told me," he said. "Any of this. He carried all of it alone and never—"
"He thought he had more time," I said gently. "The recording says so."
Silence.
I gave it to him.
Outside, Lagos kept its noise. Generators and horns and the particular alive chaos of a city that has never once agreed to be quiet.
After a while, Zion looked up.
The mask was back. But sitting slightly differently than before — like something that had been removed and replaced and was not quite as perfectly fitted as it used to be.
"The court case is in three weeks," he said.
"Yes."
"Valentina has our legal strategy. From the recording device under Daniel's keyboard."
"Yes."
"Which means we need a new strategy. One that nobody in this building has discussed. One that Daniel, Mrs. Fashola, and Phillip Adaora cannot have." He looked at me steadily. "Can you do that?"
I looked at this man who had just absorbed the kind of information that breaks people and was already, methodically, turning it into a plan.
"Yes," I said.
"Good." He stood. "My driver will—"
"Zion."
He stopped.
"Are you alright?"
The question sat between us.
He looked at me for a long, still moment.
"No," he said. Simply. Honestly. Without qualification.
Then he picked up his jacket and walked to the elevator.
I sat with that single syllable — that small, unguarded no — and understood that it was possibly the most honest thing he had ever said to me.
I picked up the red file.
Went home.
Did not sleep.
Valentina Morrow received a message at eleven forty-five that night. Four words. Sent from a number she had memorized three years ago: Daniel's emergency line.
The message read: They know everything.
Valentina read it twice. Then she poured herself a glass of wine, sat down at her desk, and began rewriting her entire courtroom strategy from scratch. Not because she was afraid. Because she was the kind of lawyer who found the hardest version of a problem the most interesting. And Amara Okafor, she had decided, was finally making this interesting.
I arrived at Okonkwo Tower at seven the following morning with a new legal notepad, a travel mug of my own tea because the office flask could no longer be trusted, and the energy of a woman who had spent the night not sleeping but had at least spent it productively.
The security guard at the front desk — a large, good-natured man named Biodun who had taken to greeting me with the warm familiarity, looked at my expression and wisely said nothing beyond "Good morning, Miss Amara."
"Good morning, Biodun." I signed in. "Is Mr. Okonkwo in?"
"Since five-thirty, ma."
I stopped walking. "Five-thirty."
"Yes ma. He brought his own coffee." A pause. "He never brings his own coffee."
I filed this information alongside the no from last night and kept moving.
Zion was at the whiteboard in the private boardroom on the fortieth floor when I arrived.
He had clearly been there for some time. The board was covered in his handwriting — tight, precise and organized into columns with the methodical energy of a man who processed feelings by converting them immediately into action items.
He looked at me when I entered. Then at my travel mug.
"The office flask," I said.
"Has been removed and replaced," he said. "Along with three other items in the kitchen that Daniel had unobstructed access to."
"You swept the floor."
"At six this morning. With a security team that has no connection to anyone Daniel knows." He turned back to the board. "I also canceled his building access at midnight. His personal items were couriered to his home address with a termination letter and a legal non-disclosure agreement."
I sat down. "Did he respond?"
"He called four times. I didn't answer." Flat. Controlled. "My lawyer will handle communications from this point."
Not Mr. Briggs, I noted. My lawyer. Singular. Referring to me.
I took a sip of my tea and did not address this because some things were better acknowledged through action than words.
"What's on the board?" I asked.
"Everything they know." He pulled out a chair, reversed it, sat with his forearms resting on the back in the way that meant he had stopped performing posture and was actually thinking. "Valentina has our original strategy from the device under Daniel's keyboard. Which means we need to approach this differently." He looked at me. "Tell me what you're thinking."
"I'm thinking," I said, opening my notepad, "that the greatest advantage we have right now is that they know we know."
He waited.
"They're expecting us to panic," I said. "To scramble. To file emergency injunctions and send aggressive letters and generally behave like a team that has just discovered it's been outmaneuvered." I drew a line across my notepad page. "We're not going to do any of that."
"What are we going to do?"
"We're going to let them walk into court in three weeks believing they have our strategy," I said. "And we're going to have a completely different one waiting for them."
Zion looked at me steadily. "Explain."
"The email account," I said. "Daniel and Mrs. Fashola have been uploading intelligence for four years. Emeka's team has been reading it. Valentina has been building her case around it." I paused. "But the account is still active. And we still have the login details."
The silence that followed was the particular quality of silence that happens when someone very intelligent arrives at the same place you're standing and finds you already there.
"You want to feed them false information," Zion said.
"I want to feed them a false strategy," I said. "Something that looks exactly like our genuine approach. Detailed enough to be convincing. Specific enough that Valentina restructures her entire courtroom argument around countering it." I met his eyes. "And then on the day, we present something she has never seen and has had no time to prepare for."
Zion was quiet for a long moment.
"That is," he said carefully, "either brilliant or the most catastrophic idea I've heard in my professional life."
"Those two things are not mutually exclusive." I said pleasantly.
- Writer
