Chapter 23: Falling

"Yvette," Palmer said, and for the first time his voice was not soft.

"Put that down."

"I can't," she said. "Forty thousand people are watching me."

She turned the phone to show the little number in the corner of the screen, climbing as she spoke.

"My name is Yvette Vandermeer, and I pushed Jonas Wray off the roof of the Halden Building on the ninth of October."

"I did it with my own hands. Palmer Stanfield told me to."

A hush fell over the hall so deep I could hear the air system.

"I have the recording," Yvette said. "Oz, please."

The sound system hissed once.

A man's calm voice filled four thousand seats.

"He sends it at midnight, Yvette. To a reporter and to a federal office. You will be on that roof before he does."

"He trusts me."

"That is why it has to be you. He wouldn't believe it of anyone else. Tonight, and no mess."

On the giant screen, behind a live image of Palmer Stanfield's face, the words of the recording appeared one by one in white.

He stood in front of them and heard himself.

I saw the exact moment the room understood.

It moved through the hall from the front row back, a long, slow, angry turning of heads.

"That is a forgery," Palmer said, loudly now. "Security!"

Nobody came.

The charcoal men stood in the aisles with four thousand phones pointed at their faces.

One by one they took their hands out of their pockets.

Palmer looked at them.

Then he looked at Jonas, standing three steps away in a stagehand's jacket with a legal pad in his hand.

"You," he said. "You were supposed to."

"Supposed to what?" Jonas asked.

"To die like a gentleman."

It was the only thing he said that day that was entirely true.

He lunged.

He went for Yvette's phone, and Jonas stepped between them with his cast raised, and Palmer shoved him hard in the chest with both hands.

I screamed.

Jonas staggered back one pace, two, and caught himself on the lectern.

Palmer swung toward Yvette again.

He didn't see the edge.

Oz had killed the stage lights except for one spotlight, and the lip of the stage ran black under Palmer's expensive shoes.

He stepped back into nothing.

He fell six feet into the orchestra pit with the sound of a dropped sack.

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