But they were always going to walk into it, because being the kind of people who would do this to me was the same as being the kind of people who would do it to each other.

Chapter 12 — The Confident Man

Charles came to me himself, in the end, which is the arrogance of a certain kind of thief: he could not imagine that the softest target in the room had ever been anything but soft.

He came to the penthouse on a gray afternoon, silver-haired and calm in his perfect cashmere coat, carrying a slim leather case and the easy confidence of a man who had been getting away with it for twenty years.

He had heard, through Nathan, that I’d “had an episode,” that I’d signed the power of attorney, that I was finally, fully broken — and he had decided that this was the moment to accelerate, to move the last of what he believed was a two-billion-dollar primary trust into Switzerland before the noise around Nathan’s clumsy scheme drew any official attention.