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The morning's strategic conversation lasted approximately forty minutes before Yvette folded her napkin, set it down with executive precision, and informed Ethan that they were going to do something about the New Future Technology Energy Co., Ltd. headquarters problem.
"We can plan and budget all day, Mercer, but the company is currently registered to your hotel room. We need an actual building. Ideally before lunch."
"Today?"
"Today. The faster we have a physical address, the faster we can publish a job board, and the faster we can start hiring. Every day without an address is a day your competitors are catching up."
Ethan, who had been planning to spend the morning eating a leisurely breakfast and reviewing résumés, accepted the new schedule with the resigned good humor of a man whose CEO had been on the job for less than fourteen hours and was already reshaping his calendar.
He called Bumblebee.
The yellow sports car covered the highway between the capital and Ashford City in roughly half the time a conventional vehicle would have needed. Bumblebee, who had been in a sulky mood after spending the previous evening parked at Hargrove's residence while Ethan went to dinner without him, had reverted to enthusiastic engagement the moment Ethan slid into the driver's seat. The Transformer had even, by the time they had crossed the city limits of Ashford, lowered the cabin temperature by half a degree to compensate for the unexpected presence of a second passenger.
Yvette, in the passenger seat, noted the temperature adjustment, said nothing, and quietly added "the car is sentient and is making decisions about my comfort" to the list of things about her new working life that she would need to mentally process at some point.
By eleven in the morning, they were in Ashford City. By eleven-thirty, they were sitting in a small café reviewing a list of candidate sites that Yvette had compiled overnight using contacts in the local commercial real estate community. By twelve-fifteen, they had narrowed the list to three properties.
By one in the afternoon, they had visited two of them and dismissed both. The first had been a sleek, twenty-story tower in the central business district that would have run them ten times their target budget. The second had been a low-slung industrial campus on the western edge of the city that was beautiful and well-suited but came with a litigation history Yvette refused to inherit.
The third property was on Larkspur Avenue, in a quiet, semi-deserted patch of the Ashford City Development Zone, in a part of town that had been zoned for ambitious commercial expansion several years earlier and then, through reasons Ethan did not yet understand, abandoned.
The building was a thirty-one-story tower of glass and dark steel, clearly built within the last five years, sitting in the middle of a wide, empty plaza. The surrounding lots were undeveloped. The nearest restaurant was three blocks away. The nearest other functioning office building was four blocks beyond that.
Yvette stepped out of Bumblebee, looked up at the tower, and let out a small thoughtful sound.
"The location is remote."
"That's correct."
"Significantly remote, Mercer. Your senior staff are going to have to travel an extra thirty minutes for lunch."
"I considered that."
He pointed at the empty lots that surrounded the building.
"Our planned manufacturing facilities for the seabed reactor program are going to require considerable land. The Stark Element synthesis reactors will need their own dedicated structures. The Transformer assembly lines will need warehouse-grade space. If we set up in a prime downtown location, we either pay an astronomical premium for the central tower and lease industrial facilities separately, or we end up with our research office in one part of the city and our manufacturing operations forty minutes away. Both options are operationally inefficient."
He gestured at the empty plaza.
"Here, we own the campus. The current tower is our headquarters. The surrounding lots are available for development. Five years from now, this whole zone is our footprint."
Yvette listened. Looked around. Nodded slowly.
The reasoning was correct. New Future Technology Energy was not a downtown white-collar firm. It was an integrated energy and manufacturing operation, and integrated operations needed contiguous space. The Development Zone, isolated as it currently was, offered a foundation that no central-city site could match.
She made a small mental adjustment.
"All right. We're seriously considering this one. Let me find out who owns it."
She produced her phone, opened her contacts, and made two calls in rapid succession. The second call yielded a name and a phone number. She made one additional call, this time to the building's owner directly, and her voice took on the cool, courteous register of a senior executive setting up an unannounced visit.
When she hung up, she was faintly amused.
"The owner is coming. The address he gave me is a residential block about six kilometers from here. He says he'll be along shortly."
"How shortly?"
"He didn't specify. He sounded sober but not crisp. I'd guess he's been having a slow morning."
Henry Whitlock, the owner of the building on Larkspur Avenue, had been having a slow decade.
In his prime, Henry had been a professional investor with a reputation for unconventional risk-taking and an unusually good record of correct calls. Twenty years of trading gold, futures, and private placements had built him a fortune large enough to support his family in comfort and his ego in slightly less comfort.
He had, five years earlier, used most of his accumulated capital to fund the construction of the Larkspur Avenue tower.
The project had been based on a piece of insider information that Henry had been certain was reliable. The Ashford City government, he had been told, was preparing to re-zone the Development Zone as a new commercial district, intended to relieve pressure on the overcrowded central city. Larkspur Avenue, currently a quiet semi-rural road on the outskirts, was projected to become a major artery serving the new commercial center. A thirty-one-story Class A office tower, placed at the right intersection at the right time, would be the kind of investment that turned itself into a generational asset within five years.
Henry had bet his family's savings on the call.
He had built the tower.
He had, six months after the building's completion, learned that the city government had quietly shelved the Development Zone re-zoning plan during an administrative transition. The new mayor had decided to focus on residential expansion in a different quarter of the city. The Larkspur Avenue tower, instead of becoming the centerpiece of a new commercial district, had become an isolated monument to one investor's expensive miscalculation.
The building had sat empty for four and a half years.
Henry's family had not survived the shock. His wife had filed for divorce within a year. His adult son had moved to the Meridian Commonwealth and declined to return Henry's calls. His professional reputation, painstakingly built over two decades, had been demolished within the same six-month period that he had lost his fortune.
Henry had begun drinking.
The drinking had not, in fairness, made the situation worse. The situation had been so catastrophically bad already that the drinking was merely a coping mechanism. But it had not, in turn, made the situation better either, and Henry's days had settled into the slow, sour rhythm of a man waiting to see what the universe planned to do with the remaining decade or two of his life.
When his phone had rung this morning with a call from a woman expressing interest in the Larkspur Avenue building, his first emotion had been a sharp, surprised hope.
His second emotion, on actually meeting the prospective tenants, was disappointment.
He arrived by shared bicycle.
The Development Zone did not have many shared-bicycle docking stations, and the nearest one was about three blocks from the Larkspur Avenue tower. Henry had pedaled the distance in a slightly disheveled mood, his thinning gray hair blown sideways by the wind, his sport coat wrinkled from the ride.
He locked the bike. He walked the remaining distance to the building. He arrived in front of Ethan and Yvette panting slightly, his breath catching in the cold late-winter air.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry to keep you waiting."
Ethan smiled politely.
"Not at all, Mr. Whitlock."
Yvette, who had been watching the man arrive with the careful evaluating gaze of a senior executive sizing up a prospective business partner, gave a small, warm smile.
"Mr. Whitlock. I appreciate you coming personally. It's quite admirable to see the owner of a building of this scale taking the trouble to handle his own showings. Very unpretentious."
The compliment was, technically, courteous. It was also, in its phrasing, slightly barbed. The owner of a thirty-one-story Class A office tower was not, in the normal course of business, the man who personally rode a shared bicycle to property showings. He had staff for that. The fact that he was here in person, on a borrowed bike, told Yvette more about his current circumstances than he likely wanted strangers to know.
Henry, who had heard the barb without entirely registering it, was still mostly processing his first close look at his prospective tenants.
The young man was unremarkable. A composed teenager in nice clothes, with an unmemorable face. Probably the son of someone with money, looking for a vanity office for his startup.
The young woman was something else.
In his prime, Henry had moved in commercial real estate circles where second-tier celebrities occasionally crossed his social calendar. He had taken women to dinners. He had hosted dinners with women in attendance. He had, in his peak years, been on terms of casual familiarity with the kind of professional society women who modeled corporate luxury for a living.
The young woman in front of him was, by his immediate appraisal, several categories above any of them.
Henry experienced, briefly, a small spike of professional interest that was nine-tenths business and one-tenth not-quite-business. Then his rational mind kicked in, and the small spike subsided into resignation.
The two young people standing in front of him were not, he assessed, the kind of clients his building was actually built for. They were perhaps in their early twenties at most. They had probably driven out here on a whim. They were going to ask for a tour, walk around for twenty minutes, find some polite excuse, and disappear back into the city without ever calling him again.
He had seen this pattern dozens of times.
But even a small fly was meat, as the local expression went. He had not had a tenant inquiry in eighteen months. Even the smallest deal was worth pursuing.
"What kind of business are you in," he asked, "and how much space were you looking to lease?"
The shift in his tone was, in fairness to him, professional rather than rude. He had moved from greeting mode to negotiation mode, and his question was reasonable.
It came out, however, sounding like the question of a man who had decided in the first ninety seconds of meeting his prospective tenants that they were going to waste his time, and was attempting to short-circuit the wasting by getting to the rejection-friendly numbers as quickly as possible.
Yvette caught the tone immediately.
She gave Ethan a tiny, almost imperceptible head-shake.
Then she turned back to Henry with the same polite, slightly cool smile she had used a moment earlier.
"Before we discuss specifics, Mr. Whitlock, would you mind giving us a tour of the building? We'd like to see the interior structure, the floor layouts, the utility systems, and the existing tenant fit-outs. The building's surface presentation is excellent, but we'd want to evaluate the internal condition before committing to any decisions."
Henry's mouth tightened.
He recognized this maneuver too.
It was the standard polite-stall of clients who had decided in the first five minutes that they did not want the building but did not want to refuse to his face. They would walk around for an hour. They would make appreciative noises. They would take a few photos. They would mention something about consulting their partners. And he would never hear from them again.
He had given this exact tour, with these exact courtesies, to roughly twenty prospective tenants over the past four years. None of them had returned.
He drew a breath, exhaled it slowly, and addressed the young woman with the specific dignified-tired patience of a man who had learned, the hard way, that his time was no longer worth pretending to politeness.
"Young lady. With respect. Are you going to lease space in this building or not?"
Yvette did not blink.
"If you are, please tell me how much area you need and what you intend to use it for. I will identify a suitable floor and take you to see it. If you are not, please do not waste your time or mine. The building has been on the market for some time. The owners are not in a position to entertain casual tours from parties who are not serious about transacting."
Ethan's jaw tightened.
He had spent the better part of twenty-four hours being insulted by, in chronological order, a drunk corporate antagonist, a roomful of skeptical senior physicists, and a doorman at a restaurant. He had handled all of it with reasonable composure. But there was something specific about the way Henry Whitlock had addressed Yvette, in that tone, on Henry Whitlock's own property, that was triggering Ethan's reservoir of accumulated frustration in a way that was not going to be productive.
He drew a breath to respond.
Yvette's hand, beside him, moved discreetly. Her index finger pressed gently against his ribcage through the fabric of his blazer, in the universal interpersonal signal of be quiet, I have this.
Ethan, with effort, did not speak.
Yvette turned back to Henry Whitlock and let her own polite smile go very slightly cool at the edges.
"Mr. Whitlock. I would gently point out that even a customer at a market stall expects to inspect the goods before purchase. You are selling, or in this case leasing, a building. We have driven a considerable distance to evaluate it. I am asking you to show us its interior. You are refusing."
She tilted her head slightly.
"If there is some reason you do not want us to see the interior of your own building, please be candid about what that reason is. Otherwise, my employer and I, who have demonstrated our seriousness by coming personally to this site, would appreciate the courtesy of being treated as serious prospective tenants, rather than dismissed at the curb by an owner who, forgive me, does not appear to be in a position to be selective about his clientele."
The last clause was not, by the standards of normal commercial negotiation, polite.
The last clause was, however, accurate.
Henry Whitlock, who had spent the last four years thoroughly aware of his own market position and accustomed to nobody mentioning it to his face, felt the observation land with the precise sting of a well-aimed insect.
He looked at the young woman with new attention.
Then he looked at the young man, who had visibly been about to say something significantly less polite and had only stopped because the young woman had stopped him.
Then he looked at the keys in his pocket.
He had, he realized, just been outmaneuvered by a person who was, on her face, approximately half his age.
He had also, he realized, just been politely told that his attitude toward his own livelihood was contributing to the four-year vacancy of his only asset.
He pulled out the keys.
"All right. Follow me."
The interior of the Larkspur Avenue tower turned out to be considerably better than its lonely exterior had suggested.
The building had been constructed to Class A specifications. The lobby was a high-ceilinged space of polished stone and dark wood, designed to project the impression of corporate seriousness without crossing into ostentation. The elevators were modern, fast, and over-engineered for the size of the building. The interior office floors were open-plan, with high ceilings and excellent natural light. The utility systems were new and barely used. The mechanical rooms were spotless.
Several of the upper floors had been fitted out for executive use at the building's construction, in anticipation of the high-end tenants that had never come. Two of the floors had complete corner offices, conference suites, executive bathrooms, and even small kitchenettes.
The building was, in short, exactly what an ambitious tech startup would have killed to occupy.
It was also, manifestly, an asset that had been built for a market that had never materialized.
Walking the floors with Ethan and Yvette behind him, Henry felt the careful, professional silence of two clients who were genuinely interested. His clients did not make appreciative noises. They did not take photos for show. They walked the floors with attention. They opened cabinets. They tested light switches. They measured the depth of the floor plates with their eyes.
By the time they were riding the elevator back down to the ground floor, even Henry, who had spent years preparing for disappointment, could feel the small, unwilling stir of hope.
He suppressed it. He had been disappointed too many times to allow it again.
In the lobby, he turned to face them and produced the question that he had asked dozens of times before.
"So. What floor did you have in mind?"
He cleared his throat.
"Starting a business is not easy. If you're willing to commit to two adjacent floors, I can offer you a reasonable rate."
Yvette did not answer immediately.
Instead, she pulled out her phone.
She made a brief call. The call was to a number stored under a single character in her contacts, and the conversation was conducted in clipped, efficient executive shorthand.
"Lily. I need a building appraisal firm on Larkspur Avenue in Ashford City within ninety minutes. Class A office tower, thirty-one floors, structural inspection, market valuation, environmental survey, the works. I'll send you the address and the specifications. Charge it to my personal account. Thank you."
She hung up.
She turned back to Henry Whitlock.
Henry, who had been preparing his polite-rejection deflection for what he had assumed would be the standard end of the tour, looked at her phone with the dawning realization that something significantly different was happening.
Yvette gave him a small, polite smile.
"Mr. Whitlock. We have decided that we are not interested in leasing two floors."
Henry's heart sank.
"We are, however, interested in purchasing the entire building."
Henry's heart, having sunk a moment ago, performed a small, confused upward motion.
"Including the surrounding undeveloped lots, if those are also under your ownership. Which, if my research is correct, they are."
Henry's mouth opened.
"You..."
"We will need the appraisal firm to confirm valuation before we make a formal offer. Their inspection should take a few hours. If you are amenable, perhaps you'd like to join us for lunch while we wait."
She gestured toward Bumblebee, parked at the curb.
"My employer is buying."
Henry Whitlock, standing in the lobby of his own building, looked at the polished stone floor, looked at the high-ceilinged lobby, looked at the two young people who had just casually proposed to purchase an asset on which his entire family fortune had been lost, and felt, for the first time in four and a half years, a small and entirely unfamiliar emotion.
It was, he realized after a moment of confusion, hope.
He did not entirely know how to respond to it.
Eventually, he managed:
"...lunch sounds fine."