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Sometime after one, I stop. I stand at my office window with a cold coffee, looking down at a wet street with two cars on it.

I’ve never done this. That’s worth saying plainly. A man like me could have spent the last twenty years doing this every third Thursday. I didn’t. I’ve moved money through structures that were designed by better lawyers than me to sit exactly on the line. I’ve written reports that were true in every sentence and dishonest in every paragraph. I’ve never in nine years put a signature on a page that wasn’t entitled to be there.

That wasn’t scruple. It was arithmetic. A man who forges an instrument has handed somebody else a rope with his own name on it. I’ve spent twenty years making sure nobody has one of those. I sat in a rented office at nineteen and watched an entire sport decide about me on the strength of an envelope I couldn’t explain.

I go back to the desk and finish it.

At the end of it there are nine documents, all dated correctly, all internally consistent, all of which would survive a first review by an agent, a club, an accountant, and probably a tax authority.

Every one of them is real except the one fact underneath all of it, which is that the forty thousand dollars is mine, and that I moved it out of my own savings to keep a woman from calling in a debt.

I send the paperwork to Suze at five past eight in the morning with two lines explaining the delay.

She replies at nine seventeen.

Got it. Front-loading makes sense. Nice bit of work—you should send me the consultancy’s details. I’ve got two guys who need exactly this. S.

I look at that message for a while.

Then I put my glasses on the desk and sit in my office above a sewing-machine repair shop with my eyes shut. Downstairs the man tests a machine the way he does every morning, four short bursts and one long one.

Priya Raman catches me in the corridor outside the club’s business offices on Friday.

I’m here legitimately, for a per diem reconciliation with a woman in finance who has a spreadsheet she doesn’t understand. I have a lanyard and an appointment. My name is on a list.

“Mr. Brandt. Have you got a second?”

Yeardley is with her—gray suit, flat shoes, legal pad against her hip.

“Frances, this is Marek Brandt. He’s Kieran Doyle’s financial manager. Marek, Frances Yeardley, league integrity.”

I shake her hand.

I shake her hand and say it’s nice to meet her.

“Financial manager,” Yeardley says. “Not the agent.”

“No. Ms. Okafor does his contracts. I do everything after the money arrives. Tax, structure, the mortgage he doesn’t have, the truck he won’t replace.”

Priya laughs. Yeardley doesn’t, but she’s not being unfriendly; she simply doesn’t laugh at things.

“How many athletes do you carry?”

“Four. Two here, one in a different sport, one retired.”

Yeardley doesn’t look down. “And how long with Doyle?”

“Since November.”

She writes nothing down. I’ve sat across from four investigators in my life, and the ones who write nothing down are the ones who remember everything.

“Card?” she says.

We exchange them. Hers is the same card I’ve already seen once, folded into a coat pocket on a mat in my own hallway at half eleven at night.

“If anything ever looks strange in a player’s accounts,” she says, “the money usually knows before anybody else does. You’d see it before his coach would.”

“I would.”