Liam arrived at Ashford Technologies at ten past ten, later than usual, the morning already running behind the schedule he'd intended for it. The meeting had gone long — the specific, unavoidable length of a conversation about Ray Carver that refused to be contained in the hour he'd allocated, because the problem of Ray Carver was not an hour-shaped problem. He had sat across from a man who understood certain kinds of threat in ways that lawyers and board members did not, and they had talked through options, and he had come away with the beginning of a plan and the particular, residual weight of a morning spent thinking about how to neutralize someone who didn't operate by any rules he could predict.
He stepped through the lobby doors.
