Page 142 of The Session

“Kevin? He just wanted to paddle around in his kayak and go flirt with tourists,” Lightman said. “He had no interest in any of this. He was no threat to anybody.”

“He might have known more than you think,” Mark said.

“What makes you think that?” Lightman asked.

Mark looked at his father. Did he really know the man? Common sense said he should leave the beach cottage behind and let fate handle it.

But he also knew what it was like to be abandoned during a crisis by the people closest to you.

Interfering with whatever was going on could have serious consequences—but if Morris was Diane’s insider, then there was no knowing what he’d told her. Chances were Morris had fabricated everything.

“I got approached by a woman working for a law enforcement agency,” Mark said.

“Which one?” Lightman asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe the French. She said there was an insider cooperating with them.”

“Goddamn it,” he swore. “That’s textbook Morris.”

“What else did she say?” Tru asked.

“She wanted to know about the Vault,” Mark replied. “The location.”

“What did you tell her?” Lightman asked.

“Everything I knew—which is nothing. What should I know?”

“It’s made out to be more than it is,” Lightman said.

“Come on, Max,” Marnie said.

“Okay. It’s more than that. But not what people think. Arnold and I were trying to gather information on human behavior at a scale nobody had ever tried.”

“That also served as blackmail material,” Mark added.

“That was never the intent,” Lightman insisted. “We realized a lot of problems are universal, but people keep things to themselves. You have to find a way to get them to reveal it.”

“You’re making it sound worse,” Marnie said. “The intent was noble, but the application had flaws.”

“So it’s real?” Mark asked.

“Yes,” Tru said. “My dad wanted it to help people. He called it the Calculation.”

“And instead you ended up with a way to extort people.”

“That’s what Morris is after. That and the intelligence part of Summit,” Lightman replied.

“Safid,” Tru said. “He’s made offers to buy Summit outright. If Max gets hit with a red notice and the board panics, Morris can force an emergency vote, then sell to Safid as the ‘only stabilizing option.’”

“And I refuse to let that happen. They’d relocate it to Qatar and sell to anyone,” Lightman argued.

“What does that mean? Aren’t you international right now?” Mark asked.

“If Summit is acquired by a foreign entity, they’re not bound by US law,” Tru told Mark, then turned to the others. “A former employee told me that Future Strategies was making trips and laundering money in sketchy parts of the world.”

“What’s Future Strategies?” Mark asked.

“Nathan’s pet project. A think tank tasked with finding where we should take Summit,” Lightman told him.