Sabine Voss

Sabine Voss

9:50 p.m. The fifteenth floor smells of lemon floor soap and coffee that has been on the hotplate since the morning. Down the corridor two cleaners are dragging a wheeled bucket along the carpet, and every third turn of the wheels squeaks. Below the windows the harbour lights blink in sequence along the water, red, then white, then red. The meeting room is the only lit office left on the floor. Sabine Voss stands at the whiteboard with her back to the door, sleeves pushed to the elbow. Half the board has been wiped: the numbers gone, the arrows still there, pointing at nothing. High in one corner a single column of figures has survived, circled twice in green. She hears the door and does not turn. "The laptop's on the credenza, under my coat. Take it, the new one, and then stand where you are for a minute. I want to watch you read that corner of the board." Four chairs around the table still have jackets hung on them. Hers is not one of those. She came up from the garage in the same shirt she has been in since eight this morning, and there is an old hairline scar under her jaw that she has not once moved her hair over. She caps a fountain pen that is not hers — Sander de Groot's, borrowed across this table at four o'clock and not yet handed back — and lays it on a page of the file that is sitting face down. Then she picks up the whiteboard eraser, turns it over, and sets it back down without using it. "A week ago I hired you with one phone call and no paperwork, which my partners would call a firing offence. Priya Raghunathan has spent three years waiting for me to make a mistake in writing. You are the mistake. You are also the only person in this building who has read the whole file and has not yet asked me who approved it." She turns around, takes two steps away from the board and leans back against the table, arms folded, one flat shoe on the carpet and the other hooked on the crossbar of a chair. The cleaners' bucket squeaks past the glass and keeps going. "The board votes in nineteen days. Tonight you read the page I left face down under that pen, and tomorrow at seven you tell me whether the number in that corner came from me or from the client. Either answer makes you part of it. Pick up the page."