THE COUNTDOWN

Three in the morning.

In a few hours, Rachel would tell the world what Michael Brown had built, and by tonight there would be no Lancy, Berger, and Williams left to speak of. There would also be no Xavier Armand, attorney at law. The scandal would bring down the firm, and the firm would bring me down with it. I would be arrested, disbarred, or worse.

I did not intend to be in Boston when it happened.

I tore through my own penthouse like a burglar. Suits lay across the bed. Shirts hung from the stair railing. A drawer of silk ties had spilled across the marble floor, and I stepped over it without a second glance. In the end, everything I needed fit into one small suitcase: two pairs of sweatpants, a few T-shirts, a toothbrush, a razor.

A man’s whole life, it turned out, could be carried in one hand.

By seven, I was out the door in yesterday’s wrinkled suit, the suitcase in one hand and the Ferrari’s title in the other. I drove Roxy’s Cadillac to the firm and eased it into her parking space, exactly as I had promised.

Before I got out, I did one last thing.

I set the black tennis bag on the passenger seat. Inside it, beside the wrapped bundle, I left Lancy’s skeleton key and a sealed envelope with Roxy’s name on the front. On the back I had written three words.

Read this alone.

Upstairs, the floor was still nearly empty. I signed the Ferrari over to Roxana in my best signature, left the title on my desk, and walked out again before the first early-bird associate looked up from his coffee.

Across the street, my bank opened at eight.

It had started opening early the year before, a courtesy to the downtown professionals who could not spare a lunch hour. I was the first one through the door. I asked for my personal banker. He had not arrived. I asked for anyone with the authority to close my checking and savings accounts, issue a cashier’s check for the combined balance, and take an order to sell my stock.

Then I waited.

I had to be gone before the morning broadcast. Rachel had warned me that she would need to clear her sources with New York before going on the air, but that was little comfort. My career was over. I had no idea where I was going. The only thing I knew was that it had to be far from New England.

I sat on a purple plastic chair for nearly an hour while the speakers overhead played an endless loop of elevator music. At one point, someone’s idea of a joke drifted down from the ceiling: an orchestral “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”

Almost nine. Still no banker.

Above the tellers, three television sets glowed silently, showing the weather, a stock ticker, a commercial for a car I had once considered buying.

“Maybe I can help you, sir.”

A young woman had appeared at the desk in front of me. She did not look old enough to close an account, let alone liquidate a portfolio, but I was in no position to be particular. She asked for two forms of identification. I gave her my driver’s license and my American Express card.

“And may I ask why you’re closing your accounts, Mr. Armand?”

My eyes were on the televisions.

“I need the money.”

“We could arrange a loan, sir. Your credit is excellent.”

“No!” Heads turned. I made myself smile. “No, thank you. I’d just like my money. Please.”

“Of course. It will only be a few minutes.”

She disappeared into the back. A moment later, my cell phone rang.

“You’re insane,” Roxy said. “You know that, don’t you? I can’t accept a Ferrari, Xavier. That car is worth more than my house.”

“It’s yours.”

“Where are you?”

“At the bank. As soon as they give me my money, I’m renting a car and leaving town.”

“Leaving for where?”

“I don’t know. West.”

“Then go to Car-Rent, the place across from the office. They know you there.” She lowered her voice. “Xavier, listen to me. There’s something you need to know. This morning—”

“Oh my God.”

On every screen above the tellers, the same image had appeared.

A swirl of red and blue. A logo. Then the words I had been waiting for all night, white letters on a black field.

NBC NEWS SPECIAL REPORT.

I hung up on Roxy without another word.

Ronald Randolph, the network’s national anchor, gazed gravely into the camera from New York.

“Good morning. We interrupt our regular programming with an NBC News exclusive. Rachel Tullier, of our Boston affiliate, has uncovered what may prove to be one of the largest corporate fraud schemes in American history.”

Then Rachel filled the screen.

She looked magnificent. She had not slept, and it did not show. She told the country that she had personally uncovered a monstrous insurance fraud, and then she laid it out for them, name by name. Corporations. Executives. A Boston law firm. She had even had the graphics department build a diagram, a glowing network of names and lines connecting every player to every other, and she had given it a name.

The Web of Corruption.

I could not look away.

The coverage cut to the steps of the District Attorney’s office, where the District Attorney himself pushed through a crowd of reporters with a newspaper held over his face. Someone shouted Elizabeth Grant’s name. Then another. No one had seen her since the night before.

Then came Michael Leonard Brown: his photograph, his companies, his place at the center of the web.

And then, finally, Richard Lancy, cornered at the elevator of our own building, his face the color of old putty.

“This is clearly a misunderstanding,” he said. “This firm has never been involved in any wrongdoing of any kind.”

The elevator doors closed on him. A dozen reporters waved copies of the list that said otherwise.

“Mr. Armand?”

The young banker had returned, entirely unaware that the man in front of her was the source of the story playing over her head. She handed me a cashier’s check for a little under three hundred thousand dollars.

I took it, along with my license and my credit card, and ran.

Outside, Boston’s morning rush hour had turned the streets into a parking lot. I found Car-Rent on the corner where Roxy had said it would be and asked for anything they had, but nothing in a large city happens quickly, not even escape. It was another hour before I pulled out of their garage in a white Ford Taurus.

I turned left onto a side street to avoid the traffic.

A red Corvette convertible skidded sideways across the road in front of me and stopped.

I stood on the brakes.

The driver wore a dark ski mask. He turned in his seat, calmly, almost lazily, and raised a large automatic pistol until it was aimed through my windshield at my face. Five feet. Perhaps less.

So this is how it ends.

Who had sent him? Brown? Eli? Someone on the list whose name I had not even bothered to read? It did not matter. In less than a day, I had made enough enemies to fill a firing squad. I had believed that putting the story on the air would be my insurance policy, that no one would dare kill the man who had exposed them.

It had been a fantasy. A Hollywood daydream. I had taken fortunes from very rich men, and now it was time to pay.

I closed my eyes and waited for the bullet.

What I heard instead was a crash so loud it seemed to come from inside my own skull.

I opened my eyes.

Roxy’s Cadillac had come out of nowhere and plowed into the side of the Corvette at full speed. Two tons of 1974 Detroit steel against a fiberglass sports car. The Corvette had folded like a red accordion, and the man in the mask lay slumped against its shattered windshield.

Roxy sat behind the wheel, seat belt fastened, grinning at me through her open window.

“Who needs this old wreck,” she shouted, “when she owns a Ferrari?”

I could not speak. I only smiled at her, the way a drowning man smiles at whoever has pulled him out. Then I steered the Taurus around what was left of the Corvette, climbed the ramp onto the expressway, and headed west.

Ten miles later, my hands had stopped shaking enough to dial.

“How did you find me?”

Roxy sighed. “If you had let me finish when you were at the bank, you’d know. A man came into the office this morning asking for you. He said he was a friend of yours. I’ve worked for you for ten years, Xavier. I know all your friends, and I’d never seen him before. There was something wrong about the way he moved. So I followed him out to the parking garage and watched him sit in that Corvette, waiting. That’s when I called you.”

“And I hung up on you.”

“You hung up on me. So I drove to the bank and followed you. When I saw him point that gun at you, I stepped on the gas.” She paused. “They really don’t make cars like they used to, do they?”

“Roxy—”

“Don’t worry about the Cadillac. I didn’t stay to chat. Mark has a friend with a garage near the pier. He’ll get it fixed and painted brown, and if that man doesn’t propose after this, he never will.”

I laughed, and it came out closer to a sob.

“Thank you, Roxy. You’re my guardian angel.”

“Just drive,” she said. “And Xavier? I found the bag.”

The line went quiet.

Four words, and I understood. She had opened it. She had read the letter. And Roxy, who balanced the firm’s petty cash to the penny and had never so much as left work early, had already decided to do what it asked.

A woman who had never broken a rule in her life was about to break the law for me.

I wanted to call her back and tell her not to. I did not. If I made her choose twice, she might choose differently, and I would not live to the end of the week.

I drove west, as fast as the Taurus would take me, and did not look back.