Chapter 9 The Audit Begins
The report arrived at six-fifty in the morning, encrypted, through a server that had nothing to do with anything that had anything to do with Leo.
He read it over breakfast.
Foxy was sitting in the chair across from him doing a convincing impression of a normal animal — still, quiet, ears relaxed, eyes half-closed — and Leo had almost started to believe in the impression when he turned to page seven and Foxy said, without moving or opening its eyes fully, "they've been laundering through the green energy subsidiary since 2019."
Leo looked up slowly.
Foxy opened its eyes the rest of the way.
"How do you know that," Leo said.
"I can read documents from across the table."
Leo looked at the fox for a moment, and then looked back at page seven, which did in fact contain what Foxy had just said, buried in the subsidiary cash flow breakdown in the way that things are buried when someone has spent years getting good at the burying.
He decided this was fine and turned the page.
The picture the report painted was the one he'd expected in rough outline but hadn't had the specific numbers for until now. Zhang Enterprises looked solid from the outside — the kind of solid that got you into rooms with presidents — but the internal structure had the bones of something that had been patched and re-patched over a long time without ever being properly fixed. Their liquidity wasn't real in the way that mattered. It was propped up by three key relationships, each load-bearing in a way the Zhangs probably didn't think about anymore because it had been stable for so long they'd stopped checking it.
Leo could dissolve all three with a phone call each.
He made notes in the margins with a pen, which was a habit he'd never broken from Oxford, and by the time he got to the end of the report his coffee was cold and the notepad beside him had two pages of observations and a short list with three names on it.
It was a good morning.
★
The first move was so quiet that it made almost no sound at all.
Through a sub-entity under the Aethelgard Trust — which was three layers of corporate structure away from anything with Leo's fingerprints on it — he submitted an anonymous regulatory tip about the green energy subsidiary to the relevant oversight body. Detailed, specific, and sourced entirely from information that was technically already public if you knew how to read the right filings in the right order.
Completely legal. Completely untraceable.
It wouldn't become anything visible for six to eight weeks, which was the nature of regulatory reviews — they moved slowly and they moved quietly and then one day they arrived and they were thorough. In the meantime, a portion of the subsidiary's operating budget would sit frozen while the review was pending. Not enough to cause a headline. Enough to matter.
Leo closed his laptop.
Foxy looked at him from across the coffee table with an expression that asked the question before it asked the question.
"That's it?" it said.
"That's it."
"That's the whole move."
"That's the whole move."
Foxy looked at the closed laptop and then back at Leo with the energy of someone who had shown up to a fireworks show and been handed a birthday candle.
"Anticlimactic," it said.
"Give it six weeks," Leo said, and picked up his coffee.
Foxy was quiet for a moment, in the specific way of something turning an idea over and examining the underside of it, and then it made a small sound in the back of its throat that wasn't quite a word and wasn't quite nothing, somewhere in the range of reluctant acknowledgment.
Leo drank his coffee.
★
Her name was Priya and she had been trying to get his attention for about three weeks, which Leo was aware of in the same background way he was aware of most things — not because he was looking for it but because he noticed patterns and this one had been consistent.
She worked for a firm that ran contracts through one of his subsidiaries, which made her Zephyr Global adjacent and therefore someone he'd been briefly briefed on at some point. Smart, visibly ambitious, the kind of person who was used to rooms opening for them because rooms generally had. She was also, objectively, beautiful, in a way that didn't require anyone's opinion to establish.
Today she showed up at his building with a folder of documents and a reason for being there that would have been more convincing if the documents couldn't have been emailed, which they absolutely could have been.
Leo received her in the lobby because he wasn't rude.
She did everything right. She was wearing something that knew what it was doing. She was funny in a quick, unforced way that suggested she was actually funny and not just performing it. She found a reason to touch his arm twice in the course of a conversation that lasted nine minutes, which was either natural or very well-practiced and honestly it didn't matter which.
Leo listened, took the documents, said thank you, and wished her a good afternoon.
She left through the revolving door and he watched her go in the mild way he watched most things and then turned and went back to the elevator.
In the elevator she was probably confused, which was her problem.
Foxy was waiting on the couch when he got upstairs, having not moved from the exact position it had been in when he left, which somehow communicated that it had been paying close attention the entire time.
"She likes you," Foxy said.
"I know."
"And?"
"And nothing," Leo said, setting the folder on the side table.
Foxy stared at him with the sustained patience of something that was going to wait as long as it needed to wait for an answer that made sense to it.
Leo opened his laptop.
Foxy kept staring.
The laptop offered no further comment and neither did Leo.
★
The evening map showed seven white dots clustered in Midtown, sitting close enough together that the system had already flagged a probable hairline tear in the area.
D-grades. Seven of them. An hour of work, maybe less, and a tear that size would close clean with the cores.
Leo got the sword, put his jacket on, and headed for the elevator.
"I want to come," Foxy said.
"No."
He got in the elevator. The lobby was quiet at this hour. He got in the car, the driver pulled out, and Leo looked out the window at the street moving past and thought about the Midtown layout and where a hairline tear was most likely to sit relative to the dot cluster on the map.
Foxy was sitting on the roof of the car.
Leo could see it through the glass, silver-tipped ears flat against the wind, looking deeply and personally pleased with itself.
"Stop," he said.
The driver glanced at the rearview mirror.
"Pull over," Leo said.
"We're already moving," Foxy said, its voice arriving through the roof the way that made no physical sense and also made complete sense given what Foxy was. "It would be inconvenient."
Leo sat back.
He looked straight ahead at the road and the city doing its evening thing outside the windows and he started counting down from ten in his head with the specific calm of a man who understood that the counting wasn't actually going to help but was doing it anyway because it was something to do.
He made it to seven.
"If you distract me during the fight," he said, to the roof, "I will find a way to send you back. I don't care what the system says about it."
A pause.
"Understood," Foxy said.
Another pause, shorter this time.
"I would still like to watch though."
Leo said nothing.
He kept his eyes forward and let the silence sit there and didn't fill it with anything, which was not the same as agreeing to something, but Foxy settled down on the roof with the quiet ease of something that had decided to interpret it that way, and the car moved through the Midtown traffic, and Leo did not count down from ten again because he had a fairly clear sense of where it would get him.
