Chapter 16:The Same Room

Leah was reconciling Davenport & Associates' Q3 vendor payments when the door opened behind her. She didn't turn. At Chesapeake, the door opened and closed a dozen times a day — Sofia coming back from the break room, Marcus arriving for a client call, Diane moving between her office and the conference room. The sound of the door was background noise, as routine as the hum of the HVAC system or the faint smell of coffee that had seeped into the carpet over the years. But the footsteps were wrong. They were deliberate. Measured. The kind of footsteps that belonged to someone who entered rooms with the expectation that people would notice. Marcus walked fast, Sofia walked light, and Diane wore heels that clicked a specific rhythm on the hardwood floor near her office. These footsteps were leather soles on hardwood — slow, confident, purposeful. Leah's fingers paused over the keyboard. She turned. Howard Pemberton stood in the doorway. He was in his usual configuration — gray suit, white shirt, no tie, the silver cufflinks that caught the light when he moved his hands. His hair was cut short and neat, the kind of haircut that cost more than Leah's monthly rent. His face was the same composed mask she had seen in every visit: intelligent, controlled, giving nothing away unless he chose to. Today, something in his posture was different. He stood in the doorway the way a chess player stands over a board — not admiring the position, but calculating the next three moves. "Leah," he said. "Good afternoon." "Mr. Pemberton." Leah saved her spreadsheet and swiveled her chair to face him. "I wasn't expecting you." "No one is." He stepped into the office proper, closing the door behind him with a soft click. The click was deliberate — Leah noticed because Pemberton did everything deliberately. "Where's Diane?" "Step meeting at the CPA society. Back by four." Pemberton nodded, as if this was exactly the information he needed. He moved to the small conference table near the window — the same table where Leah had found the Delaware Good Standing certificates two weeks ago — and set a leather portfolio on the surface. "I have a new assignment for you," he said. Leah's pulse didn't change. She kept her expression neutral, the same pleasant attentiveness she wore for every interaction at Chesapeake. Inside, the calculation was already running: *New assignment. From Pemberton. While Diane is out. This is deliberate — he wants me alone, without a buffer.* "What kind of assignment?" Pemberton opened the portfolio. Inside was a manila folder, unmarked except for a string of numbers written in pencil in the top right corner: TF-Q4-2024. "Thorne Foundation quarterly grant reconciliation," he said. "The Foundation's fiscal year-end is December 31st. The Q4 grant disbursements need to be reconciled against the approved budget before the December board meeting." He slid the folder across the table. "Diane tells me you're the most thorough bookkeeper we've had." The compliment landed like a coin on a scales — precise, weighted, impossible to ignore. *Diane tells me.* Pemberton was telling Leah that he had been asking about her. That he had been gathering information. That he knew exactly how good she was, and he was choosing to use that knowledge. "Thank you," Leah said. She picked up the folder but didn't open it. "Is this something Chesapeake handles regularly?" "Chesapeake handles the Foundation's back-office accounting," Pemberton said. "Grant disbursements, vendor payments, investment tracking. It's routine work." He paused. "But Q4 is always more sensitive. The board meeting is in three weeks. Martha likes the reconciliation clean." *Martha.* He said her name the way other people said *the weather* — casual, familiar, proprietary. The name of the woman who had ordered Leah's murder, spoken in a Midtown office by a man who did her legal work, as if they were discussing a quarterly report. "I can have the initial pass done by Friday," Leah said. "I know you can." Pemberton was watching her with that evaluator's gaze — the same one Ethan Hunt had worn at L'Étoile, the same one that made Leah feel like she was being X-rayed through clothing and skin and bone. "The folder contains the Foundation's grant log for the current fiscal year, the approved budget, and the bank statements for the disbursement account. Cross-reference every grant against the budget. Flag anything that's outside the approved parameters." He paused again. "Anything at all." *Anything at all.* The emphasis was slight — barely perceptible — but Leah caught it. Pemberton wasn't asking her to reconcile numbers. He was asking her to look. To dig. To find whatever was buried in the grant records and bring it to the surface. The question was: why? Two possibilities. First: Pemberton was testing her. Assigning her to the Foundation grant records — which would inevitably reveal the pattern of Martha's just-below-threshold disbursements — and watching to see what she did with the information. If Leah flagged the pattern, she was thorough. If she buried it, she was complicit. If she ran to the authorities, she was a threat. Second: Pemberton was using her. The Foundation grant records were a problem — Hunt Capital's due diligence was pressing, the December board meeting was approaching, and someone needed to make the numbers look clean before external eyes arrived. Leah was the most thorough bookkeeper Chesapeake had ever had. Pemberton needed the best to sanitize the worst. Either way, Leah was being pulled deeper into the financial infrastructure of the conspiracy. And she couldn't refuse without raising suspicion. "I'll start this afternoon," Leah said. Pemberton nodded. He picked up his leather portfolio, tucked it under his arm, and walked to the door. Then he stopped. "Leah." She looked up. "Thoroughness is valuable," he said. "It's also visible." The same words he had used at L'Étoile, months ago, when the SEC flagged the Greyscale coding error. He said them the way a man says a password — not a warning, but a reminder that he was watching. "Be thorough. But be careful about what you do with what you find." He opened the door and left. Leah sat motionless for ten seconds after the door closed. Then she opened the folder. --- The Thorne Foundation's grant log was a spreadsheet — not QuickBooks, but Excel, which meant it had been maintained by a human rather than an automated system. Leah had worked with enough small-organization accounting to recognize the signs: inconsistent formatting, merged cells, color-coding that had been updated by three different people over five years, and a notes column that contained everything from "Follow up w/ J. Morrison re: receipt" to "Martha approved — do not flag." The current fiscal year's log ran to 847 entries. Leah had expected a high number — the Thorne Foundation distributed millions annually to educational and charitable causes — but the pattern she found in the first thirty minutes of cross-referencing made her stop scrolling and sit back in her chair. The Thorne Foundation's bylaws, as stated in the approved budget document, required board approval for any individual grant exceeding $50,000. Grants below that threshold could be approved by the trustee — Martha — at her discretion. Martha had made 312 individual grants in the current fiscal year. Of those, 287 were for amounts between $45,000 and $49,999. The pattern was so consistent it was almost beautiful. $47,500. $48,200. $46,875. $49,100. $45,000 exactly. The amounts varied enough to avoid the appearance of a formula, but they never, not once, crossed the $50,000 line. Leah pulled the bank statements and began matching. Every grant had a corresponding wire transfer from the Foundation's disbursement account at First Manhattan Bank — the same bank, she noted, that had handled the initial seed money for the shell companies. The transfers were coded identically: "Educational/Charitable Grant — [Recipient Name]." She created a new spreadsheet. She copied the 287 grants into a separate sheet and sorted by recipient. The recipients were a mix of legitimate organizations — universities, hospitals, research institutes, arts programs — and entities that Leah couldn't immediately identify. She counted forty-three recipients she didn't recognize, ranging from a "Center for Applied Ethics in Governance" (address: a virtual office in Wilmington, Delaware) to the "Whitfield Educational Initiative" (address: a London postcode she recognized from Kevin Marsh's evidence — the same address as Whitfield Financial, the offshore intermediary). Leah stared at the screen. Then she summed the 287 grants. $13.2 million. Thirteen point two million dollars, distributed in individual grants of $45,000 to $49,999, each below the board approval threshold, each approved by Martha Thorne alone, over a single fiscal year. And the trustee amendment she was pushing at the December board meeting — the one Leah had learned about at the Metropolitan Club — would raise that threshold from $50,000 to $250,000. Five times the current limit. Five times the room to operate without oversight. Leah understood now. Martha wasn't expanding her authority because she needed it. She was expanding it because she was already drowning in the volume of her below-threshold disbursements. The current system worked — $13.2 million in a year without a single board review — but it was labor-intensive. Three hundred individual grants, each just under the line, each requiring a separate wire transfer and a separate notation. Martha was running the Foundation like a money laundering operation, one small payment at a time, and the sheer volume was becoming a liability. The amendment would solve that. At $250,000 per grant, she could move the same $13.2 million in 53 payments instead of 287. Fewer wires, fewer records, fewer chances for someone to notice the pattern. And in December — the same month the NexGen deal would close and the shell company money trail would vanish — Martha would make it legal. Leah closed the spreadsheet. She closed the folder. She sat in the quiet office and listened to the HVAC system hum and thought about what she had just found. This was evidence. Not the kind that would hold up in court — not yet — but the kind that would give Ethan Hunt's investigation a direction. Hunt Capital was going after the Thorne Family Trust's charitable distributions. They had filed — or were about to file — a request with the New York State Attorney General's office for records related to those distributions. If they got the same grant log Leah was looking at, they would see the same pattern. And if they connected the pattern to the offshore recipients — Whitfield Educational Initiative in London, the Delaware virtual offices — they would see what Leah saw: Martha Thorne using the Foundation as a personal money pipeline. The question was timing. Hunt Capital was pressing from the outside. Leah was pressing from the inside. Both were converging on the same evidence. But if Hunt Capital got there first, they would use the evidence for their client's purposes — leverage in a corporate deal, a negotiating position, a due diligence report that would never see the light of a courtroom. Leah needed the evidence for a different purpose. She needed it to destroy Martha. *Sooner or later, we're going to collide.* The thought from the Moleskine, written after the Metropolitan Club, surfaced again. Ethan Hunt was building a case. Leah was building a case. They were building the same case from opposite sides. Leah reopened the folder. She began working through the reconciliation — methodical, precise, exactly as Pemberton had asked. She flagged nothing. She noted nothing. She produced a clean reconciliation that showed every grant matched its budget allocation and every wire transfer matched its corresponding entry. She was giving Pemberton what he wanted: a clean Q4. And she was keeping what she had found for herself. --- 7:45 PM. L'Étoile. The Wednesday night crowd was lighter than usual — the week before Thanksgiving always was — and Leah was assigned to section four, which covered the middle tables between the bar and the main dining room. Section four was not the VIP section; that was Priya's domain. Section four was the transition zone — guests who were well-dressed but not well-known, couples on date nights, business dinners where someone was trying to impress someone else. Leah had been working for forty-five minutes when she saw him. Ethan Hunt was not at the bar. This was significant. Every previous visit to L'Étoile, Ethan had sat at the bar — alone or with colleagues, back to the wall, watching the room. The bar was an observation post. It gave him sight lines to the entire restaurant, including the VIP section, while keeping him in a position where he could leave quickly if needed. Tonight, he was sitting at table fourteen. Table fourteen was in section four. Leah's section. It was a two-top near the window, with a clear view of the entrance and the main dining room but not the VIP area. It was the kind of table a solo diner might choose — quiet, well-lit, private enough for a phone call but public enough to watch people come and go. Ethan was wearing a charcoal sweater over a collared shirt, no jacket. He had a menu in his hand but wasn't reading it. He was looking at the room — not scanning, the way he did at the bar, but studying, the way someone studies a painting they've seen before and are trying to see differently. Leah approached the table with her standard greeting already loaded: "Good evening, welcome to L'Étoile. Can I start you with something to drink, or would you like a few minutes with the menu?" Ethan looked up. The recognition was immediate — a flicker in his eyes that wasn't surprise but confirmation, as if he had known she would be the one to approach his table. "Leah," he said. He said her name the way someone says a word they've been practicing — not perfectly, but with deliberate precision. "How are you tonight?" "I'm fine, thank you." Leah kept her voice level. "Can I get you something to drink?" "The Macallan 12. Neat." He set the menu down. "And I'll have the duck confit to start, followed by the branzino if the kitchen has it tonight." Leah wrote the order on her pad — Macallan 12, neat, duck confit, branzino — and paused. Ethan Hunt had never ordered food at L'Étoile before. Drinks, yes. A glass of wine, a second glass of wine, once a third. But never a full meal. Ordering dinner meant he was staying. It meant he planned to be in this restaurant for at least an hour, possibly two. It meant he wasn't just observing tonight. He was participating. "I'll put that order in," Leah said. "One more thing." Ethan picked up the menu again, not to read it but to hold it — a prop, something to do with his hands while he talked. "I've been coming here for a few months now. I realize I've never properly introduced myself." He extended his hand. "Ethan Hunt." Leah looked at his hand for a beat longer than was normal, then shook it. His grip was firm, dry, controlled — the handshake of a man who had been taught to shake hands by people who shook hands for a living. "I know," Leah said. Ethan's eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch. "You know?" "You come in regularly. You order the same drink. You sit at the bar and watch the room." Leah shrugged — the gesture of a server who noticed patterns because noticing patterns was her job. "It's hard not to notice." "Impressive." He released her hand. "Most people don't notice half of what you just described." "Most people aren't paying attention." "No," Ethan said. "They're not." He leaned back in his chair, and his posture shifted — not relaxed, exactly, but recalibrated. The evaluator was still there, but something else was layered on top of it. Curiosity. Not the professional curiosity of a man conducting due diligence, but the personal curiosity of a man who had noticed something interesting and wanted to know more. "So, Leah," he said. "How long have you lived in New York?" The question was casual. The way a man asks a woman at a restaurant how long she's lived in New York — polite, filler, the kind of question you ask when you're trying to start a conversation. But Leah heard the specificity beneath it. *How long have you lived in New York* was not *where are you from.* It was a question about roots, about attachment, about whether she belonged here or was passing through. "About two years," Leah said. "Where did you live before?" "Queens. Then I moved to Midtown." "Queens is a big place." "Jackson Heights. Then a studio in Astoria for a while." "What brought you to the city?" The questions were building. Each one was innocuous on its own — the small talk of a stranger making conversation — but together they formed a profile. Leah recognized the technique from the psychology courses she had taken online: structured interviewing, the method intelligence professionals used to build a picture of a target through layered questions. Each answer constrained the next question. Each response revealed a data point. "Work," Leah said. "There's more of it here." "What kind of work?" "Various things." Leah smiled the small, contained smile she used when she wanted to end a line of questioning without being rude. "Right now, I do bookkeeping during the day and this in the evening." "Bookkeeping." Ethan repeated the word as if it tasted interesting. "For whom?" "Freelance. Small businesses, mostly. Restaurants, retail, that kind of thing." "Freelance bookkeeping." He nodded slowly, and Leah could see the gears turning — not suspicion, exactly, but classification. He was sorting her into a category: service industry, working class, no apparent connection to anything he was investigating. The category was exactly where Leah wanted to be. "That must keep you busy," Ethan said. "Two jobs." "It pays the bills." "Does it pay well enough? New York isn't cheap." Leah's eyes met his. The question was a probe — not about money, but about ambition. Did she have plans? Was she going somewhere? Or was she exactly what she appeared to be: a twenty-year-old bookkeeper and waitress with no trajectory beyond the next rent check? "Well enough," Leah said. "I'm not here to get rich." "What are you here to get?" The question landed differently than the others. It was personal in a way the previous questions hadn't been — not about data points and timelines, but about desire. What do you want? What drives you? What would you do if you could have anything? For a moment — a fraction of a second, no more — Leah felt the answer rise in her chest like a tide. *I'm here to destroy the woman who tried to kill me. I'm here to take back everything she stole. I'm here to make Martha Thorne pay for every lie, every theft, every death she's arranged in the name of power.* She swallowed it. "Experience," she said. "I like being around people who are doing interesting things. Even if I'm just serving them dinner." Ethan studied her for a moment. Then he smiled — a real smile, not a social one, the kind of smile that transformed his face from handsome to something warmer and more dangerous. "You're an interesting person, Leah." "I'm a waitress who does bookkeeping on the side." "That's what you do. It's not who you are." Leah held his gaze for two seconds longer than was comfortable. Then she picked up her pad. "I'll check on your drink," she said, and walked to the bar. --- The Macallan was ready when she arrived — Karim had poured it the moment Ethan walked in, because Karim noticed patterns too. Leah picked up the glass and carried it back to table fourteen. Ethan had pulled out his phone while she was gone. He set it face-down on the table when she approached — a gesture so practiced it was almost certainly unconscious, the reflex of a man who dealt with sensitive information and had trained himself to keep screens private. "Your Macallan," Leah said, setting the glass in front of him. "Thank you." He picked up the glass, swirled the amber liquid, took a sip. "Can I ask you something?" "You've been asking me things for the last ten minutes." "One more." He set the glass down. "You have very precise hands." Leah's fingers tightened around her pad. She kept her expression neutral. "Precise?" "The way you hold the pad. The way you set down the glass — no wobble, no adjustment. The way you write." He demonstrated with his own hand, mimicking the angle of Leah's pen. "It's the hands of someone who was trained to be precise. Not just neat — trained. Muscle memory." Leah said nothing for a beat. The silence was a risk — silence invited filling, and filling invited mistakes — but speaking too quickly would be worse. She needed the pause to be exactly the right length: not defensive, not evasive, just... thinking. "I took piano lessons when I was a kid," Leah said. "My parents made me practice two hours a day. I hated it at the time." She held up her hands, palms down, fingers slightly spread. "But I guess it stuck." Ethan looked at her hands. Not for three seconds, like he had at the bar two weeks ago. For five. His eyes moved from her fingertips to her wrists to the thin white scar above her eyebrow — a trajectory that was almost certainly intentional, a scan that covered every visible detail and filed it away. "Piano," he said. "That explains it." "It's just hands." "It's never just hands." He picked up the Macallan again. "Not with someone like you." The phrase hung in the air between them. *Someone like you.* It was ambiguous — a compliment, an observation, or something sharper. Leah couldn't tell which, and the uncertainty was its own kind of pressure. "The kitchen is about to send out your duck confit," Leah said. "I'll bring it when it's ready." She walked away. Her pulse was elevated — not racing, but above baseline, the controlled acceleration of someone who had just been probed and had deflected the probe without breaking cover. Ethan Hunt was not just curious about the Thorne family anymore. He was curious about her. The questions about her life, her work, her hands — they weren't the random small talk of a lonely diner. They were the questions of a man who noticed things for a living and had noticed something about Leah Chen that didn't fit. The piano explanation was good. It was specific enough to be believable, vague enough to be unverifiable, and it accounted for the precision of her hands without revealing anything about her actual training — which was not piano, but bookkeeping, which was not bookkeeping, but financial forensics, which was not financial forensics, but the systematic dismantling of a conspiracy. Ethan had filed the answer. She could see it in his face when he said "That explains it." He hadn't believed her — or rather, he had accepted the explanation provisionally, filed it under *Leah Chen: trained hands, piano lessons, working-class background, no apparent connection to Thorne family* — and moved on. But he would revisit it. He would add it to whatever other data points he was collecting about the waitress at L'Étoile who happened to work in the same restaurant where the Thorne family dined and happened to have precise hands and happened to deflect questions with the skill of someone who had been trained to do exactly that. Leah delivered the duck confit. Ethan ate it slowly, making notes on his phone between bites. Leah served two other tables, refilled water glasses, cleared a dessert course, and did not look at Ethan again for twenty minutes. When she brought the branzino, he set the phone down and said, "How long have you worked here?" "About nine weeks." "Do you like it?" "It's fine." "Fine isn't the same as like." Leah paused. The question was another probe — not about the restaurant, but about satisfaction. Was she content? Was she settling? Was she the kind of person who said "fine" when she meant "I want more"? "I like the people," Leah said. "The regulars are interesting." "The regulars," Ethan repeated. "Including the ones who sit at the bar and watch the room?" "I didn't say that." "You didn't have to." He cut a piece of branzino and ate it. "I know I'm not subtle. It's a professional liability." Leah said nothing. She let the silence sit between them like a third diner at the table. "You know who I am," Ethan said. It wasn't a question. "You recognized me before tonight. The night I came in with my colleagues — you already knew my name." "I read the news." "The news doesn't print my face." "Society pages do. You were at a charity event last month. Your firm sponsored a table." Leah's voice was flat, factual — the delivery of someone who had done her research and was presenting it as ordinary knowledge. "Hunt Capital Partners. Corporate intelligence. You investigate companies for clients who want to know what they're buying." Ethan set down his fork. He looked at her with an expression that was new — not evaluator, not curiosity, but something closer to respect. Or the professional respect of one operative for another. "You're very well-informed for a waitress." "I'm very well-informed for anyone." The words were out before Leah could stop them. They hung in the air for a full second — a beat too long, a crack in the armor. Leah saw Ethan's eyes sharpen. He had caught it. The sentence had revealed more than she intended: not just that Leah was informed, but that she was aware of being informed. A waitress who happened to read the news was one thing. A waitress who was aware of her own information gathering, who had the self-awareness to frame it as a competitive advantage — that was something else entirely. Leah recovered. She smiled the small contained smile and said, "I told you. I like being around people who do interesting things." Ethan held her gaze for three seconds. Then he nodded — once, slowly — and picked up his fork again. "Leah," he said. "If you ever want to talk — about anything — I'm a good listener." "I'm sure you are." She walked away. This time, her pulse was not just elevated. It was racing. --- 11:23 PM. Leah's apartment. Leah sat at her desk with the Moleskine open and the conspiracy map behind her and the Foundation grant log — copied to a flash drive she kept in a locked drawer — sitting on the desk beside her. She had spent the hours between the L'Étoile shift and now processing three things simultaneously. First: the Foundation grant records. $13.2 million in below-threshold disbursements over a single fiscal year. Forty-three unidentified recipients, including entities linked to the same offshore infrastructure that handled the shell company money. The trustee amendment would raise the threshold from $50,000 to $250,000 — not because Martha needed more authority, but because she needed fewer transactions to move the same volume of money. The December board meeting was three weeks away. Second: Ethan Hunt. He had moved from the bar to a table in her section. He had ordered dinner. He had asked her questions that were structured interviews, not small talk. He had noticed her hands, her precision, her deflection — and he had noticed that she had noticed him noticing. The conversation had been a chess match conducted over duck confit and branzino, and Leah had won the exchange but left pieces on the board. The "I'm very well-informed for anyone" line was a mistake. Not a fatal one — Ethan couldn't do anything with a single sentence — but a chip in the armor that he would remember and revisit. Third: Pemberton's assignment. The grant reconciliation was a test and a trap. Pemberton had given Leah the key to the most sensitive financial records in the Thorne Foundation's operation, and he had done it while Diane was out of the office, alone, with no witnesses. He wanted to see what she would find and what she would do with what she found. Her clean reconciliation — no flags, no notes, no anomalies reported — was the correct play. It told Pemberton that Leah was either oblivious or complicit, and either interpretation served her purposes. But the clock was accelerating. Hunt Capital was pressing from outside. Pemberton was watching from inside. And Leah was sitting in the middle, holding evidence that could destroy Martha Thorne's financial infrastructure — evidence that she couldn't use without exposing herself. She picked up the pen and wrote. *Wednesday, late November. Three developments.* *1. Pemberton assigned me the Thorne Foundation Q4 grant reconciliation. The assignment came while Diane was out — deliberate. The grant log reveals a systematic pattern of below-threshold disbursements: 287 grants in the current fiscal year, each between $45K and $49,999, totaling $13.2M. Forty-three recipients are unidentified or linked to offshore entities (including Whitfield Educational Initiative — same London address as Whitfield Financial). Martha is using the Foundation as a personal money pipeline, one small payment at a time.* *2. The December trustee amendment would raise the threshold from $50K to $250K. This would allow Martha to move the same volume in 53 payments instead of 287. Fewer wires, fewer records, fewer chances for detection. She's not expanding her power because she needs it — she's expanding it because the current volume is becoming a liability.* *3. Ethan Hunt moved from the bar to a table in my section. He ordered dinner. He asked structured interview questions: where I'm from, how long I've been in New York, what I do, why I'm here. He noticed my hands again — this time with more specificity. I deflected with the piano explanation. He filed it but didn't buy it. He knows I recognized him before tonight. He knows I'm "very well-informed for anyone." I made a mistake — a small one, but visible. He will remember.* *Assessment: The three-way convergence is accelerating. I am inside the Foundation records (via Pemberton's assignment). Hunt Capital is pressing the Foundation from outside (AG filing on charitable distributions expected). Pemberton is managing the legal layer and watching me. Ethan is building a profile of the waitress who knows too much.* *We are all converging on the same evidence. The question is who gets there first, and what they do with it when they arrive.* Below the entry, she added a line in smaller letters: *Ethan Hunt asked me if I ever want to talk. "I'm a good listener," he said. He meant it as an invitation. I heard it as a warning.* *He is getting closer to me. And I am getting closer to them.* *Sooner or later, we're going to collide. And when we do, one of us is going to see the other for who they really are.* She closed the Moleskine. She turned off the lamp. She lay in the dark and thought about Ethan Hunt's hands when he mimicked the angle of her pen. The precision of the gesture. The way his fingers had moved through the air with the same controlled accuracy as her own. He had noticed her hands. He had noticed her precision. He had noticed her deflection. What he hadn't noticed — what he couldn't notice, not yet — was that the woman who served him branzino with a steady hand and a flat voice was the same woman whose photograph was pinned to the wall of his investigation, labeled *Isabella Thorne: Deceased.* But he would. Sooner or later, he would.