“I already told you. No. I never heard from him.”
“Well, it’s possible he might have reached out to you since we took your testimony the other week. Has he?”
“Why would he do that? He knows we’re being investigated.”
“Maybe he wanted to find out what exactly you were telling us. Maybe he wanted to make you an offer for your cooperation.”
I felt like I was going to throw up. “Don’t you think that I would have told you? That I would have told you if I’d heard anything from him?”
“Come on, Evan,” John or Kurt said. “You don’t exactly have a great track record with that. That’s the whole reason we’re here.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Evan,” my lawyer said, in a warning tone.
“It means you kept this deal a secret long after you knew the truth. It means you chose to keep silent about Michael’s plan even though you knew it was wrong. It means we can’t trust you to give us the full picture unless we ask.”
“I didn’t keep it a secret!”
“Then who did you tell about it?”
“Okay,” my lawyer said, shutting her briefcase with a firm click. “I think that’s enough. Let’s take a break.”
My lawyer and I had lunch together that day at the Indian place on 9th Avenue. Roger and the other analysts were at another table in the restaurant. I hadn’t been invited to lunch with them in months.
My lawyer spent most of the meal on her BlackBerry. “Sorry,” she said. “My nanny has the flu. We had to use the backup. Now the kids are sick, too. It’s a fucking nightmare.” She noticed my untouched food. “Hey. You okay?”
“No.”
She put her phone down. “You know it’s not personal, right? The things they were saying back there. They really don’t give a shit about you.”
“It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like they’re after me.”
“They’re only trying to get as much out of you as they can. So they can nail Michael and the Chinese. You’ve got the testimony they need. But you’re small fish, Evan. I mean that in a good way.”
Roger and the others walked past on the way out. Roger bumped into my chair. “Oops. Didn’t see you there, Peck,” he said, grinning. “Hot date, huh?”
After we finished eating, after she paid and we stood up to put on our coats, she asked: “What did you mean before? When you said that you didn’t keep it a secret?”
“Oh.” I was hoping she had forgotten about that. “I didn’t really mean anything. Just that, um, I didn’t consciously keep it a secret.”
When we returned to the conference room, John and Kurt looked up in unison. “Actually, we’re done,” one of them said. “For now, at least. We don’t need anything else. You can go back to work.”
“That’s it?” I said.
“We might need to call you back for a few things as they crop up. But yeah, that’s it. You’re done. Thanks for your help.”
“You must be relieved,” my lawyer said, walking me back to my office-slash-closet. “Now you can go back to normal, right?”
“I guess.” I did feel relieved—that weak but good feeling that comes after you’ve finally thrown up—but I also felt confused. Shortchanged somehow. What would come next? What was going to happen to me?
We stopped outside my door. “Well,” she said. “Good luck, Evan.”
*