[Pearson Darby, 46th floor deposition suite — June 27, 2012, 9:53 AM]
Cross's hands were very still.
This was how I knew he was afraid — not the stillness itself, which any experienced executive could manufacture, but the quality of it. Cross was a man who worked with his hands in the sense that he gestured when he spoke, that he turned his glass on a table when he was thinking, that he traced the edge of a map or a blueprint with one finger while he talked about what was on it. The stillness meant he had specifically decided to eliminate the tell. The decision was correct. The effort was visible.
"Harlan." I kept my voice at the same register I used before all depositions: low, even, not particularly concerned, because the attorney who appeared unconcerned at 9:53 AM sent a message to opposing counsel that was worth three minutes of prep time. "Look at me."
He looked at me.
"You know more about this contract dispute than she does. Not the legal theory — that's mine. The facts. The specific facts of what happened at the November meeting, the January revision, the March approval. You were there. She was not. Every time you answer her questions, you're giving her facts she doesn't have. Your job is to give her the facts she already has and nothing else. Do you understand the distinction."
"Yes."
"If you're not sure whether she already has a fact, you tell me the question confused you and I'll sort it out."
"Okay."
"Not 'I don't recall.' Not 'I'm not certain.' You say 'I'm not sure I understand the question.'"
"Got it."
I had converted $800 that morning. The conversion had felt like paying a toll on a road I built myself. Eight LP, purchased, sitting in the reserve with the slightly-wrong quality that meant the Library would work but I would notice it working. Good enough for a full deposition overlay — the full array of colored tags, the relationship mapping on Lena Kwan's known case pattern, the strategy review on the contract dispute's key documents.
The deposition suite was on the forty-sixth floor of the Pearson Darby building, a floor above the floor where Harold had declined a compensation sheet three weeks ago. The suite had a conference table, two lawyers' chairs, a witness chair, a court reporter, and a camera. The room smelled like the entire building smelled — institutional money, slightly recirculated air, the faint background note of someone's lunch brought in from outside.
Lena Kwan was already seated. She was reading something on her tablet with the flat attention of someone reviewing familiar material. She was around forty, dark jacket, precise posture — the kind of precision that was not stress but habit, the same way Harold's desk organization was not anxiety but method. She glanced up when we came in, registered me, registered Cross, and returned to her tablet.
The court reporter was arranging her equipment. The camera operator was adjusting the angle.
I opened my notepad. The Library overlay activated in the background, mapping the deposition room's geometry against the known facts in the Greystone dispute — the infrastructure contract Cross had signed four years ago, the regulatory approval timeline, the March revision that was now the disputed document.
Red tag: Contract terms / Cross's internal review records — potentially discoverable. Handle with care. Gold tag: Kwan known pattern — methodical, non-threatening opener, builds to specific clause. Protect the March 15 communication.
"Okay," I said to Cross. "We're starting."
Lena Kwan was methodical in the way that deposition attorneys who win by accumulation are methodical. She did not ask the dramatic question first. She built a foundation: Cross's role at the company, his involvement in the original contract negotiations, his understanding of the approval process. The answers were simple. Cross gave them cleanly. The stillness in his hands lasted through the first forty minutes, and by the forty-minute mark he had found his rhythm, which was the rhythm of someone telling a story they had lived and knew the shape of.
The Library's overlay tracked her questions against the contract's clause structure. Most of them mapped to publicly available information. Two of them did not.
At 10:47, she asked:
"At the time of the March 15 revision, were you aware of the city's internal position on the approval timeline?"
Cross glanced at me, very briefly, for the half-second that was professional and not long enough to look coached.
"I'm not sure I understand the question," he said.
She rephrased.
I was running the Library in parallel. March 15 communication — city internal position — source: The overlay ran a tag chain. Not fast. The purchased LP had the slightly sluggish quality I had come to associate with the gap between the Library's optimal state and its current one.
The tag returned gold. #source-flagged: Internal city memo, negotiation phase, not filed publicly. Appeared in PD opposing counsel's document production: November 2011. Previously read-in counsel: Richard Gaines, Pearson Hardman.
Richard Gaines. Conflict-cleared PD attorney. He had been Cross's counsel at PH before the merger, on the original contract. He was supposed to have been walled off from this matter. The inside knowledge in Kwan's question was not her own research. It was Gaines's briefing.
I did not change my posture or my expression. The court reporter's keys clicked steadily. The camera was still rolling. Cross had given a technically accurate and appropriately limited answer to the rephrased question, and Kwan had moved on to the next one.
I wrote a note on the legal pad, very small, in the corner: Gaines. Document log after.
At 11:34, my phone vibrated in my jacket pocket.
I did not look at it. Forty minutes later, when Kwan asked for a five-minute recess to review her notes, I excused myself to the hallway with Cross.
"You're doing well," I told him. "One thing. If she comes back to the March 15 revision, I want you to say: 'I'd like to review the document before answering questions about it.' Not anything else."
"What's happening."
"A procedural matter that won't affect today's session. I'll address it tonight." I looked at him. "Do you trust me to handle it."
He had the look of a man who had trusted someone before, in a professional context, and had been burned by it, and was deciding in real time whether the person currently standing in front of him was the same category. The look lasted about two seconds.
"Yes," he said.
"Then we go back in. You're thirty minutes from the end."
The email had arrived from the Law Offices of Richard Gaines at 11:34 AM.
Dear Mr. Klein — I write to inform you, as an officer of the court, that I have become aware of information suggesting that my prior representation of Mr. Harlan Cross in related matters may create a potential conflict of interest with respect to the deposition proceeding currently underway. While I was conflict-cleared from this matter at the merger, I believe the parties and the court should be aware of this issue. I am copying PD's general counsel on this correspondence...
I read it on the courthouse steps — we had broken at 12:15, the session over on its scheduled time, Kwan wrapping up with the efficiency of someone whose last question had landed clean.
The letter was designed to create a procedural pause. If the court took it seriously, it could potentially expose Cross's communications with Gaines from the PH era to discovery review — which was exactly where the inside-knowledge document had come from in the first place. The architecture was clean: use the deposition to confirm what they knew, then trigger a conflict flag to expand the document exposure to cover the rest.
It was a good play. I disliked it for being good.
I sent two emails: one to Cross's phone, one to the clerk's office for filing in the morning. Then I sent a third email, short, to a contact at the bar association's ethics office who had once told me his direct line was for genuine procedural questions rather than discovery disputes, and what Gaines had just done occupied an interesting gray area between the two.
Cross came down the courthouse steps two minutes later. He had his jacket back on and the stillness in his hands was gone — the deposition was over and the held composure with it, replaced by the specific exhaustion of someone who had spent two and a half hours being precise.
"How'd we do," he said.
"Clean. No material admissions. The March 15 question didn't land."
"She knew about the internal timeline."
"Yes. I know where it came from. I'll deal with it."
He was quiet for a moment. A cab went past on the street below. The June heat was doing its work on the city.
"You knew she'd go for the March 15 communication before she asked."
"I anticipated it."
"That's — " He stopped. He had been going to say something about how that was impossible. He had done this before, when I had handed him the Hartley QC contact three weeks before his London deal needed it. He had been going to say impossible and had found a different word. "That's why you called the recess."
"The recess was for the other matter."
"Right." He straightened his jacket. The gesture was very Harold — the organizing reflex, the physical restoration of order when the mental order had been disrupted. "Best six hundred dollars an hour I've ever spent, Klein."
I didn't respond to that because it was the kind of sentence that didn't require response and Cross knew it.
"I want to talk about the Gaines matter," I said. "Tonight if you can. I want to handle the morning filing with your input on one factual point."
"My office at six."
"Six."
He nodded and got a cab. I stood on the courthouse steps for a moment with the Library already running the Gaines conflict analysis — not waiting for my instruction, just running it the way it ran things when the facts were in and the question was obvious and the LP in reserve was enough to start.
Eight LP spent. Five LP earned from the win.
The reserve sat at 5.2 LP — the highest it had been since early April.
Small victory. The firm was intact, Cross was loyal, the conflict letter had a response that was going to land before Gaines expected one. The Library's tag chain opened three green nodes: #cross-loyalty-confirmed #gaines-conflict-documented #referral-track-active.
I put my phone away and went to flag a cab.
The next problem was already waiting. That was, I had come to understand, the only thing that was ever waiting.
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