She spent four hours deciding what to leave in.
That was the part nobody understood about hiding: it was never about removing things. A file with nothing wrong in it was the loudest object in a room. What Richard Vance was going to receive at five o'clock had to contain exactly enough imperfection to look like a working document — a mistyped entity number here, a bank reference she'd let stand there, the small survivable flaws she had built into the structure eighteen months ago for precisely this hour.
At 4:52 she rode the elevator to the penthouse floor with nine hundred pages under her arm and her pulse entirely under control.
Richard's assistant was already gone. That, Maya thought, was not an accident either.
"Come in."
He was at the window, as he always was, hands clasped behind
