Nick had already had an intern dump my pencil cups, my sticky notes, and my business cards into the trash.
Sitting at the center of the clean mahogany laminate was my framed photograph:
Clara, my wife, holding our two daughters, Maya and Chloe, on the porch of our small brick bungalow in Lakewood, their faces laughing into the summer sun, their arms wrapped around our golden retriever, Barnaby.
The glass of the frame had been cracked across the corner.
A deliberate, sharp pressure mark where someone had stepped on the frame before tossing it onto the desk.
Beside the broken frame lay my grandfather’s brass drafting compass—an antique maritime instrument forged from naval ordnance brass in nineteen-forty-two, which my grandfather had carried aboard a destroyer escort in the South Pacific.
The pivot screw had been loosened; the needle point was bent forty-five degrees.
I didn’t curse.
I didn’t pick up a chair and throw it through the glass partitions.
I slowly reached into my trouser pocket, pulled out the titanium cryptographic transponder key that the woman on Route 6 had pressed into my palm, and laid it flat atop my desk:
*CLINK.
*
The titanium shank clicked against the laminate with a sharp, metallic ring that carried across the silent bullpen like a gunshot.
From the end of the corridor, behind the heavy double-leaf frosted-glass doors of the Executive Boardroom, came the sound of loud, triumphant laughter.
Nick Sterling’s voice boomed through the acoustic glass, rich with that theatrical, practiced charm that had swindled twenty regional businesses out of their marketing reserves:
*”To the merger, gentlemen!”
* Nick roared, followed by the clinking of crystal champagne flutes:
*”To the acquisition of Vanguard Creative Group by The Holbrook-Vance Syndicate!”
*
*”With Sebastian Miller removed from the operational registry, our intellectual property conveyance is complete!
We sign the master asset transfer at twelve o’clock, and the wire from Zurich clears the clearinghouse before the banks close!”
*
I picked up the titanium key.
I picked up the broken frame of my family.
I walked down the central hallway of the agency.
I didn’t knock on the frosted glass.
I drove my right Red Wing boot directly into the center seam of the double mahogany doors with two hundred pounds of linear kinetic force:
*KABOOM.
*
The heavy glass doors did not swing open; the brass latch sheared clean out of the jamb, the two panels slamming inward against the drywall stops with concussive, deafening violence:
Nick had already had an intern dump my pencil cups, my sticky notes, and my business cards into the trash.
Sitting at the center of the clean mahogany laminate was my framed photograph:
Clara, my wife, holding our two daughters, Maya and Chloe, on the porch of our small brick bungalow in Lakewood, their faces laughing into the summer sun, their arms wrapped around our golden retriever, Barnaby.
The glass of the frame had been cracked across the corner.
A deliberate, sharp pressure mark where someone had stepped on the frame before tossing it onto the desk.
Beside the broken frame lay my grandfather’s brass drafting compass—an antique maritime instrument forged from naval ordnance brass in nineteen-forty-two, which my grandfather had carried aboard a destroyer escort in the South Pacific.
The pivot screw had been loosened; the needle point was bent forty-five degrees.
I didn’t curse.
I didn’t pick up a chair and throw it through the glass partitions.
I slowly reached into my trouser pocket, pulled out the titanium cryptographic transponder key that the woman on Route 6 had pressed into my palm, and laid it flat atop my desk:
