Babayaga

right now was wrap up this meeting and go talk with Brandon. “I understand, I get it, I will start researching this approach right away,” Will said, escorting Guizot to the door. “Maybe check in with me a couple of days from now.”
    “Wait—” Guizot began to protest, but Will cut him off.
    “I like your idea. Intriguing. But I have to wrap this up, as I told you, I have a client meeting.” He gestured toward Brandon and the other two, whom his secretary was now guiding toward a conference room.
    “Huh.” Guizot sniffed the air toward Brandon. “What do you sell for those guys?”
    “Pharmaceuticals,” Will said, surprised to have come up with a lie so fast.
    “Ah, I see,” said Guizot. “Drug peddlers. I don’t trust any of them.”
    “Well, they’re certainly handy when you have a hangover. Listen, check in with me on Wednesday. I’ll have some progress for you by then.” He patted Guizot on the back and sent him off down the hallway. Then he went back to his desk, snatched up the Bayer file, and went to meet Brandon and his friends in the conference room.
    Entering the room, Will looked at them seated around the table. He immediately took it as a bad sign that they had not removed their hats.
    “Will, this is Mike Mitchell and Caleb White,” Brandon said. “I asked them to join me here today, hope you don’t mind.”
    “Sure. No problem. Can I get you guys anything? Coffee?” Will said, sitting down.
    “It’s fine, your girl is getting some for us,” said Brandon.
    Will set the file on the desk. “Well, I have the Bayer research right here for you but there are a few things I wanted to talk about first,” Will said, wondering where exactly he was going to begin. When he met Oliver at the party? The scene in the back room at the bar? Or when Boris hit him with the phone book?
    “Sorry, whatever you got is gonna have to wait,” said Brandon, reaching into his briefcase and pulling out a thick envelope, which he tossed onto the table in front of Will. Picking it up, Will intuitively knew what it contained even before he opened it.
    Sure enough, there was the Hoffmann-La Roche file, though not the report itself, only low-quality photographs of its contents. Many of the pictures were blurred, others captured only part of a page—whoever had snapped them had been in a rush. Will briefly considered blurting out some attempt at an explanation, but a voice in his head told him to wait, there was more bad news coming.
    “So what is this about?” he asked.
    “Well, we were hoping you could clarify that for us.” Brandon’s tone was different, less like the arrogant collegial jock that Will had known for so long and more like a stern border patrol agent, cold and procedural. “Our people recognized it right away as one of your company’s reports, the format is identical, the language is similar. Even without any letterhead, that is easy enough to prove. Now the interesting thing is where we found it. An agent of ours managed to snap these photographs this morning when the file was being shuffled through the Soviet embassy.”
    “The Soviet—?” Will was confused.
    “Yes,” said Brandon. “Seems like the Reds have got their eyes and ears working here in your shop as well.”
    Will let it sink in. He could not believe it. He had been both beaten and betrayed. Why had he assumed that Oliver was working on his side? The arch, upper-class accent had no doubt misled him; it would never have occurred to him that someone as clearly aristocratic and moneyed as Oliver would support the Communists. Not much about that man made any sense, but still it seemed like there had to be another explanation.
    Will quickly ran through his options, for at the moment the idea of coming clean with the truth seemed very unwise. He was apparently guilty of handing over private documents to a Soviet agent. It probably would not matter that he had been blackmailed into it. After all, a great number of history’s spies had undoubtedly begun as the unfortunate victims of set-ups and extortion, but the faultless roots of their errors did not matter much to the firing squad. Will realized he should have gone to Brandon immediately, he could plainly see that, in the same way that he could also see, painfully, that it was absolutely too late now. It didn’t matter, either, that the files were, for the most part, strategically useless documents; the enemy was the enemy, and he had, somewhat inadvertently,