Chapter 20: Playback

The hotel suite filled the sixty-foot screen, and nine hundred people stopped breathing.

Lena at twenty-three, in a ponytail, with room-service fries.

Brandon with a notebook on his knee.

The gray-haired man in the navy blazer, at the head of a glass table.

"What is this?" the host said, half rising.

Nobody answered her.

On the screen, Brandon laid out the plan in the voice I had first heard in the back of a rental car, and now the whole country heard it with me.

A woman in the third row put both hands over her mouth.

My face filled the glass table, and the man in the blazer tapped it with one finger.

*Does he have a price?* he said.

*Everyone does,* Brandon said, *and this one will hand it over himself.*

A man somewhere in the audience said, "No."

Across the stage, Brandon whispered "Turn it off" to nobody at all.

The producer in the wings pulled off her headset and stared at the screen.

Nobody turned anything off.

Lena's grip on my arm was crushing.

I did not look at her.

I looked at the people in the seats, because they were the ones I had come for.

Then a second file began.

Maura had found it Thursday, deeper in the BURDICK folder, dated the morning after the first.

I had watched it once, in my mother's garage, with the sound off, and then I had told her to play it.

Now it ran on the biggest screen in Los Angeles.

The same suite, from the same hidden camera, with the glass table cleared.

Lena sat alone with Brandon, and she pushed her plate away and licked salt from her thumb.

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