He was a successful executive; he was not a fool.

What undid him so quickly was not a deficit of intelligence but a surplus of a particular kind of arrogance, the arrogance that comes from having gotten away with things for a long time.

He had been having his affair, and expensing it, and lying about it, for six months, and none of it had caught up with him, and that accumulating impunity had made him sloppy and confident in equal measure.

He had come to believe, as people who get away with things always eventually come to believe, that he was fundamentally uncatchable, that the rules that govern other people did not quite apply to him, that his cleverness was a permanent shield.