He was not worried. Not for one second.
He expected me back on that aircraft within about four minutes, once I had walked down the steps and had a think and swallowed it — which is what he has watched me do for four years, perhaps thirty times, in rooms exactly like that one.
He was right to expect it, based on the evidence. That is the part I cannot be angry about.
PART 4
I went down the stairs into the private terminal.
Eleven steps. I counted them on the way down, which is a thing I apparently do.
It was warm on the tarmac. Somebody held a door for me and said good morning.
My phone filled up on the way. Missed calls, messages, one from his assistant asking whether I needed a car.
And then one name that stopped me on the tarmac, with the engines still running behind me.
I had to stand still to read it, which is a thing I have not done since 2020.
Daxon. His chief financial officer.
Nine years in that company, two of them before I ever put money into it, which matters because it means he was there when the thing nearly died.
He is fifty-one and he has never once in six years said anything to me at a dinner that was not about the weather.
He asked whether I had left the aircraft. I said yes.
And he wrote: we need to talk. There’s something you should know about her.
And then, before I could reply: not over text. And don’t trust anybody in his circle.
I asked him later why he sent the second message so fast, and he said: because I knew you’d ring somebody to check on me.
We met at eleven the following morning, in a hotel bar, which is the sort of detail that sounds dramatic and was actually just the only place open.
Here is what he had.
She is not new.
That is the first thing Daxon said, in a hotel bar, before he had even sat down properly.
She has been on a payroll for eleven months — not the company’s. A separate consulting entity, registered in another state, with a name that means nothing.
