When The Devil Stays

Chapter Two - Alone. Finally. Unfortunately.

The lounge was empty except for them.

This was the thing about platinum memberships, Anna supposed — they bought you quiet. The kind that pressed against the ears. The kind that made you suddenly, uncomfortably aware of the way another person occupied space. Jojo Smith occupied a great deal of it without appearing to try. He'd taken off his jacket. Rolled the sleeves of his shirt to the elbow. Sat down on one end of a long leather sofa and become completely still in the way that very few people could manage — not the stillness of someone relaxing, but the stillness of something at rest that could move very quickly if it needed to.

Anna sat on the opposite end of the sofa. Between them: a coffee table, two untouched glasses of water, and approximately three feet of air that felt considerably more charged than air had any business being.

She looked at the window. Runways. The slow crawl of a plane being guided into position. She thought about her sister's sofa, which she was no longer going to reach tonight. She thought about the drive in her pocket and what was on it and what it meant. She thought about the man three feet away from her who knew things he shouldn't and had helped her anyway and had not yet explained either of those facts.

She thought: I should be terrified of him.

She was not terrified of him. This was, itself, terrifying.

"You can ask," Jojo said.

His voice in the quiet room was different than it had been in the coffee shop. Lower. Less guarded, somehow, as though the urgency of the last twenty minutes had burned off and left something more unguarded beneath it.

She didn't look at him. "Ask what?"

"Whatever you've been turning over for the last ten minutes," he said. "You've been very quiet and very still, and people who are built the way you are don't go quiet because they've run out of things to think. They go quiet because they're organising."

Anna turned to look at him then.

He was watching her. Not the way men usually watched her — assessing, categorising, deciding what she was worth or what she wanted or how to manage her. He was watching her the way she watched a column of numbers before she understood what they were telling her. Like she was a problem he found genuinely interesting.

It was the most unsettling thing anyone had ever done to her with eye contact.

"You know a great deal about me," she said. "And I know your first name, which may or may not be real. That's a significant imbalance."

"It is," he agreed.

"You're not going to fix it?"

"Not right now, no."

"Because you don't trust me."

"Because trust takes longer than forty minutes," he said. "For both of us. You don't trust me either — you're sitting on the exact edge of that sofa in case you need to stand up quickly."

Anna looked down. She was, in fact, sitting on the exact edge of the sofa.

She shifted back exactly two inches. Not because he was right — though he was — but because she refused to be predictable.

The corner of his mouth moved.

"The Hale Group," she said, changing direction deliberately. "You said you know what the number means. So tell me what it means. If you want me to trust you with anything that's on that drive, give me something real first."

For the first time since she'd sat across from him, Jojo Smith looked like he was making a decision. Not a small one. She watched it move behind his eyes — that careful, private calculation — and she found herself holding very still, as though any movement might tip the balance.

"The figure in the Hale ledger," he said finally, "represents a payment. Not a loan, not a fee, not a dividend — a payment. To a specific account that routes through four countries before it disappears into a holding structure registered in the Caymans." He paused. "It's been happening quarterly for six years. The total is just under forty million pounds. And the account it ultimately reaches belongs to a sitting member of parliament."

The room felt very quiet.

"That's why they want the drive back," Anna said slowly. "It's not just fraud. It's—"

"It's a great deal more than fraud," he said. "Yes."

"And the two other auditors who signed the NDA," she said. "They found the same figure?"

"One of them did. The other found an earlier version of it, before they got better at hiding it." A beat. "He lives in Portugal now. Changed his name. Doesn't do audit work anymore."

Anna absorbed this. She was good at absorbing things — it was what she did for a living. You looked at the numbers, you felt the discomfort of what they revealed, and then you let the feeling settle somewhere manageable and you got on with the work.

She let this settle. It took longer than usual.

"Who do you work for?" she asked.

"A firm," he said.

"That's not an answer."

"It's the answer I can give you right now."

"Can," she repeated. "Or will?"

He looked at her steadily. "Both."

She held his gaze. He didn't look away. Neither did she. It became, after a moment, something other than a standoff — something quieter and more uncomfortable than that, because looking at him for too long produced a specific kind of awareness that had nothing to do with threat assessment and everything to do with the fact that he was three feet away and the room was very quiet and she was alone with him for the first time and the temperature of the air between them felt measurably different to the temperature of the rest of the room.

She looked away first. Toward the window.

"You said somewhere they're not waiting for me," she said. "What does that mean, concretely? Where are we actually going?"

"There's a flight to Geneva in ninety minutes," Jojo said. "I have two seats."

"Geneva," she repeated flatly.

"It's safe. I have a contact there — someone who can help build a proper case around what's on that drive. Someone who won't be bought off and can't be threatened."

"And what," Anna said carefully, "do you get out of this?"

He was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone searching for a lie — the quiet of someone deciding how much of the truth to give.

"The MP in that account," he said, "has been untouchable for six years. My firm has been trying to build a case. We've been missing the financial thread." He looked at her. "You're the financial thread."

She let that sit.

It made sense. It was logical. It was a perfectly rational explanation for everything he'd done in the last forty minutes — the watching, the lanyard, the knowing.

It was also, she was almost certain, not the whole truth.

"I'll think about Geneva," she said.

"We have eighty-seven minutes."

"I'm aware," she said. "I said I'll think."

He said nothing. He reached for his coffee cup — there was one on the lounge table, she hadn't noticed the staff member bring it — and leaned back and said nothing, and the absence of pressure was, somehow, more compelling than pressure would have been.

She looked at the window. He looked at whatever he was looking at. The clock moved. Somewhere in the building, the airport went on being an airport — announcements, footsteps, the low roar of engines — and in the lounge it was quiet and they were alone and the sofa was long but not, she noticed, as long as she'd first thought.

His knee was perhaps eighteen inches from hers.

She did not move.

Neither did he.

"Jojo," she said, without looking at him.

"Yes."

"If I go to Geneva," she said, "and any part of this goes wrong — any part, in any direction — I will burn your firm to the ground with everything I know how to find. And I can find a great deal."

A pause. Then, very quietly:

"I know," he said. "That's partly why I chose you."

She turned to look at him. He was already looking at her. The light from the window caught the line of his jaw, the dark stillness of his eyes, and for one suspended and inconvenient moment Anna Jones forgot entirely what she'd been frightened of.

Then she remembered.

She looked back at the window.

"Eighty-four minutes," she said.

"Eighty-four," he agreed.

Neither of them moved.

The clock kept going. The drive stayed in her pocket. The eighteen inches between their knees stayed exactly eighteen inches, and somehow — impossibly, infuriatingly — that felt like the most significant distance in the room.

She told herself she hadn't decided yet.She was already going to Geneva.She just needed another eighty-three minutes to admit it.