And because Cardinal Systems supplied components under federal contracts, she added, the board had already referred the findings to the appropriate federal authorities — a sentence that changed the color of the air in the room, because everyone understood the difference between a private company matter and a federal one.

You could feel the room register it.

A private company can fire a man and claw back his bonus and show him the door, and it is a hard day, and then everyone goes home.

The word federal is a different weather system entirely, and the two hundred people who heard it understood at once that what they were watching was no longer an internal matter being handled in-house but the opening minute of something much larger, with its own machinery and its own patience and no particular interest in Damian’s charm.

Camilla grabbed Damian’s sleeve.