Chapter 4 : Diana Voss

I met Diana Voss three days after the boardroom.

I had not planned to meet her. Gerald had been managing communications, keeping Voss Technologies at arm's length while we worked through the legal challenge and started untangling exactly what I had inherited. I had spent those three days mostly with Marcus and Lena Park, a young analyst Marcus brought in on day two, who had worked for Victor covertly and who carried around a tablet like it was attached to her by biology.

Lena was the first person in Manhattan who talked to me like a normal human being. She walked into the penthouse study on day two, put her tablet on Victor's desk, sat down without being invited, and said: "You don't know anything about Cole Global yet and we have about ten days before Raymond starts moving money. Let me show you what's real."

I liked her immediately.

We had spent two days mapping the company. Cole Global was large in ways I had not understood from the outside. Tech division, logistics arm, two pharmaceutical subsidiaries, a media holding company, a private security firm that Marcus had run before becoming Victor's personal head of security, and buried under three layers of subsidiary paperwork, the research division that housed Project Helix. Lena had worked on Helix directly. She knew what it was. She had not told me everything about it yet, but from what she had shared, I understood that Victor had been sitting on something that could fundamentally change how certain kinds of communications infrastructure worked. Private, encrypted, untrackable communications infrastructure.

That was all she had said so far. But the way she said it made my chest tighten.

I was in the lobby of Cole Global's building on Sixth Avenue on day three, coming back from a meeting with the company's CFO, a careful man named Park who had worked for Victor for twelve years and who had looked at me during the entire meeting with the expression of someone watching a child try to defuse a bomb, when I walked into Diana Voss.

She was standing near the reception desk, speaking with Gerald's associate Claire. She was tall, blonde hair pulled back in a way that looked effortless but was not, wearing a coat that was the exact shade of gray that costs real money, and she had the particular stillness of someone who is always aware of exactly where they are in a room. When she saw me, she stopped speaking mid-sentence.

I recognized her from the acquisition offer document. But the photograph on that document had not fully conveyed the quality of attention she had. She looked at people the way Marcus looked at rooms, like she was mapping exits.

"Mr. Cole," she said.

"Ms. Voss," I said.

"I was hoping we could speak," she said. She did not look like she was hoping anything. She looked like she had decided we were going to speak and had arranged for it to happen.

I looked at Claire, who was staying very carefully neutral.

"I have ten minutes," I said.

We sat in a meeting room on the second floor. Just the two of us, which I was aware was a choice she had made, the removal of intermediaries. She had a file folder in front of her that she did not open. I had nothing in front of me except my hands.

"I want to make a new offer," she said.

"The answer is no," I said.

She tilted her head. "You do not know the terms yet."

"I know you want Project Helix," I said. "And the answer is no."

Something shifted in her eyes. It was not surprise exactly. It was the adjustment a person makes when they find out the situation is not what they assumed. She had come in expecting a naive man who did not know what he had. She was recalibrating.

"Victor was not willing to sell," she said carefully. "I respected that. My new offer is not a purchase. It is a partnership."

"A partnership gives Voss access to Helix," I said. "Which is what you want. The answer is still no."

"Mr. Cole." She leaned forward slightly. "You are twenty-eight years old. You have inherited a company that operates in seventeen countries. You have a technology that three government agencies are already aware of and at least one of them is actively trying to regulate into inaccessibility. You have an uncle who is trying to dismantle your inheritance from the inside. And you have been running this company for seventy-two hours." She paused. "I am not your enemy."

"You were working with Raymond," I said.

The stillness broke. Very briefly. A flicker in her expression, gone in under a second, but I had been watching for it.

"Where did you hear that?" she said.

"It does not matter where I heard it."

She sat back. She picked up the file folder and set it down again without opening it. For a moment she was somewhere else in her head, working through something I could not follow.

"I met with Raymond once," she said. "Three weeks before Victor died. Raymond came to us. He told us Victor was going to sell the company and that he wanted to be cut in as an intermediary for any deal. He had information about Helix that he claimed Victor had shared with him."

"Had Victor shared it with him?"

"I do not know," she said. "I ended the meeting. Raymond was offering to broker a deal using his father's confidential information. That is not a partnership I wanted."

I watched her. She was either telling the truth or she was the best liar I had encountered in thirty days of dealing with people who were very good at it. The problem was that those two things looked identical from where I was sitting.

"What was in the information Raymond had about Helix?" I asked.

She looked at me for a moment. Then she said: "He knew the encryption key architecture. He knew the development timeline. He knew which three government agencies had been briefed, and he knew the name of the one contact inside Cole Global who had been feeding those agencies information about the project."

The room got very quiet.

"There is a mole inside Cole Global," I said.

"There was," she said. "I do not know if they are still active. But when Raymond came to me with that level of detail, I knew Victor's circle had a leak. I cut the meeting short and I reported it to my own legal team. That is why my acquisition offer went through formal channels rather than through Raymond."

I thought about that. I thought about why she was telling me this now, in a second-floor meeting room, without lawyers.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

She met my eyes. "Because whoever killed your grandfather," she said quietly, "is still inside your company. And if you do not find them, they will finish what Raymond started."

I sat with that.

"I have not confirmed that Victor was killed," I said.

"You do not need to confirm it to me," she said. "I watched the acquisition offer get rejected and then the man who rejected it died three days later. I understand math."

She stood. She picked up the file folder and held it out to me.

"This is everything I have on Raymond's visit to my office," she said. "Transcripts, my legal team's notes, the information Raymond disclosed. I am not your enemy, Mr. Cole. But I understand if you need time to believe that."

I took the folder.

She left. I sat there with the folder on the table in front of me and thought about what she had said. Not the words, but the way she had said them, the way she had delivered the information about the mole like she was placing something fragile down carefully, like she knew exactly how much weight it carried.

I thought about her eyes when I mentioned Raymond. That flicker.

She was afraid of something. I did not know what yet.

Back in the penthouse that evening, I gave the folder to Lena.

She read through it in eleven minutes. Then she looked up at me.

"She's telling the truth about Raymond," Lena said. "The information he had about Helix, the names and the key architecture, that level of detail could only have come from two people. Me or someone else who had direct project access."

"Could it have been you?" I asked.

She looked at me flatly. "No."

"I had to ask," I said.

"You did," she agreed, without taking offense. "Which means the other person with direct project access is someone Victor trusted completely." She paused. "Victor only trusted three people completely. Me, Marcus, and Gerald Fitch."

We looked at each other.

"Do not say it yet," I said.

"I'm not saying anything," Lena said. "I'm saying we need to be very careful about who we talk to."

I nodded.

Outside the window, the city moved on, indifferent and glittering and full of its own secrets.

Somewhere inside my company, someone had been feeding information to the people who wanted what Victor had built.

Somewhere inside my company, someone knew who had killed him.

I had a folder from a woman I did not trust yet who might be the only honest person I had met since walking in from that Detroit parking lot.

I went to bed at midnight and lay in the dark thinking about that flicker in Diana Voss's eyes.

It was not fear of me.

It was fear of something she had not told me yet.

I could already tell she was going to tell me eventually. People who are carrying something heavy always do.

The question was what it would cost us both when she did.