The glass-walled conference room on the forty-fourth floor of the Blackwood Tower always smelled faintly of ionized dust and expensive linen. By nine o'clock in the evening, the air conditioning had slowed to a low, periodic wheeze, leaving the room heavy with the stale heat of twelve executives who had spent the last seven hours trading legal threats over the future of the Atlantic rail corridor.
One by one, the briefcases had clicked shut. The junior partners from the Hawthorne legal pool had collected their encrypted tablets, nodded stiffly to the opposing bench, and filed out into the marble corridor, their heels clicking away into the silence of the elevator bank.
Elias Hawthorne hadn't moved. He sat at the far end of the modular walnut table, his hands flat against the polished wo
