Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

An unfamiliar voice emerged from Richard’s molded-plastic earpiece, saying, “You’re up. We’re live in twenty seconds,” and in the background, he thought he heard Toni saying, “We’ve got one, and a mobile unit,” and he knew the background chatter was about something else. A different control-room voice said, “Standby camera. Intro package one.” On the monitor at his feet, Richard saw the pretaped image of himself paired in split screen alongside Congressman Bickley. Then the graphics flew in, and the music began.

JENNY DROVE, and Jeris sat in the passenger seat, fiddling with the camera, playing the tape over and over, watching the playback in the two-inch viewfinder. Jenny’s sister Tara leaned into the front seat and tried to see what she could over his shoulder. It did not occur to her that she had left her maid’s cart sitting outside room 118, or that she’d left the rest of the rooms along the west side of the first floor untended. Tara would receive a phone call the next day asking her not to come to work.

She had no idea where they were going. Movement was simply required. The reflexology of disaster made it impossible to stand still.

Jeris hugged the camera nearly to his chest, bringing the viewfinder to eye level and then holding it at arm’s length, as if he were a middle-aged man trying to deal with the unexplained disappearance of his reading glasses. To Tara, the scene on the video looked like a model rocket, sputtering in near circles, leaving a trail of black smoke. Then the camera went back close to his face, and the radio, which Tara had not noticed, announced itself with a quick theme, four attention-getting tones and a pre-recorded announcement— From FBN News in New York, this is a special report —and Tara ordered her sister, “Turn that up.”

“Chaos.” That is how the fire chief at the Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport describes the scene this hour following the crash of Panorama Airlines Flight 503, which fell to the earth some twenty-seven minutes ago. Initial reports say the plane had not signaled an emergency, and that all aboard—that’s some seventy-seven passengers and six crew—are dead.

And Jeris tapped at the viewfinder and said, “Do you know what I have here? Do you know what this is?”

Only Tara answered. “Gold.”

CHADLEY WAS watching a twenty-four-hour news channel, the volume muted but the closed captioning on. “They’re talking about my company,” Chadley said, pointing at a roundtable discussion that the graphics on the screen titled Corporate Fraud: The Worst Offenders.

It took a moment for the room’s temperature to register on the skin of Cadence’s bare legs, and for the noise of the city, even through the insulated windows, to whisper to her, Chicago. The Magnificent Mile. Her headache announced itself once Chadley turned on the bedside lamp, and her mildly sour stomach turned a bit when he poured a glass of orange juice. “I’d offer you some breakfast, but they brought the food about an hour ago. You slept.”

On the other side of the bed was a room-service cart holding a carafe of juice, a pot of coffee, and a pair of plates smeary with grease and ketchup. Once she had been able to eat like that, omnivorous. The best cure for her hangover had always been a bagel piled high with an egg, cheddar cheese, four slices of bacon. Now whatever she ate got weighed, portioned, cataloged, written into a food diary. Never more than 30 percent of calories from fat. Nothing after eight o’clock p.m. She avoided processed foods, nitrates, milk with hormones, and yogurts with too much sugar, and all she wanted now was a cup of coffee, a liter of water, to work up enough of a sweat on the treadmill so that the hint of her hangover would break like a fever.

Chadley poured her some coffee and handed it over. He turned the sound on as the anchor asked the panel, “The more pressing question is this: just how likely are more indictments?”

“Very likely,” answered Chadley. “Bordering on inevitable.”

The screen cut to file footage of executives being led into the United States courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue, the sandy-colored stone edifice that Cadence remembered from every other Washington scandal. Chadley tapped her on the arm with the remote control. “That’s my boss. My boss’s boss, anyway.” United States marshals escorted a man in his late fifties—black suit, no tie or belt, hands cuffed in front of him but the cuffs hidden beneath a raincoat—through the courthouse doors.

Cadence wasn’t surprised. Her bosses had long considered dumping Chadley’s company as their auditors, a decision that would be made above her pay grade, something she did not worry about. She did manage, however, to keep up with the narrative in the papers, Chadley’s firm under constant heat, growing questions regarding the practices of offshore subsidiaries, the tax treatment of preferred stock, an excess of deferred executive compensation.

Chadley had stylish three-button suits and dress shirts with their elongated, European collars. But he was what, twenty-six? and she knew it to be a costume. It was hard for Cadence to believe that at the heart of Chadley’s career was anything resembling conviction. In her quieter moments, Cadence often wished that she was married to some absolute beliefs that required her full attention; she wanted a vocation, not a career. She did not want to be one of the zombified salarymen she saw emerging, hobbitlike, out of the subway tunnels each morning. She did not want to be an interchangeable part. Her career was what it was, a job, one that provided for her, gave her an ample safety net, allowed her to send money home to her father, fulfill this sense of duty that grew in her as she got older. But she could turn the job off at night. All she required then was peace.

With Chadley, she could see the end game. Her view of his future felt clairvoyant, his path the inevitable one that meant he’d bail out of consulting, take the LSAT, attend law school, followed by a few years of backbreaking associate’s work in a white-glove law firm, billing his two-thousand-plus hours, then a hasty stab at marriage and a move to Bethesda or North Arlington, a pair of children in quick succession. Nearly everyone who had disappeared from her social life went down the same path. But Chadley didn’t have the ability to view himself with brutal objectivity, and Cadence could not provide it for him. Sooner or later, something might jar him enough to provide a massive dose of self-awareness, but that would be a problem for the next girl, or the one after the next.

Or maybe that jolt was already on its way. His Chicago project was going poorly. Chadley’s company was supposed to be auditing the books of the Department of Aviation, the massive bureaucracy that ran O’Hare Airport, trying to find a few hundred million dollars that had slipped between the sofa cushions. No one could pin down an exact number. But the newspapers had dredged up evidence of people skipping off to St. Barts for executive retreats; machines the airport bought from Cadence’s company either didn’t work or sat uninstalled, unpacked from their shipping crates, in a distant hangar. The news this New Year’s Day reported indictments and a congressional investigation, pressure on the airport authority to save money across the board. Everyone knew the firings were coming. Chadley might survive the turmoil of the Chicago project with his job intact, but she doubted it.

Chadley was an auditor, and at work, his only responsibility was deciding between competing realities—spreadsheets versus corporate reports. He spent his days poring over boxes of financial documents; finding the bad seed of exaggeration meant days of entertainment. How little he understood the real world of middle management, memoranda, and mortgages he was assigned to disturb and uproot. Chadley often called Cadence to talk about the mild malfeasance he had uncovered, business lunches at strip clubs, gambling markers covered with a corporate MasterCard, executives with expense-account girlfriends tucked into suites at the InterContinental, the Four Seasons, or the Drake. He’d clearly been left out of the larger machinations of the firm. Now the audit of Chadley’s Chicago project had already claimed careers—two transfers and four retirements—before anyone opened a box of paperwork.