Chapter 7: Anna Chase's Methodology

The assignment arrived at 9:04 a.m. via email, which meant Anna had composed it before the Olympia session ended. Either she'd drafted it in the room on her phone while Zeus was mid-sentence — possible, I had watched her thumb move twice under the table — or she'd written it the night before and scheduled the send, which meant she'd known the meeting's outcome before she walked in.

I filed both options and opened the email.

The subject line was: DUE DILIGENCE — MERIDIAN ANCHORAGE SECONDARY POSITION. The body was four lines. She needed a full asset verification on a maritime secondary — fund structure, underlying instruments, counterparty exposure, current custodial documentation — by three o'clock. She had attached a document package that, when I opened it, expanded into twenty-six files. The file names were long and used abbreviations I didn't recognize. The body text, when I clicked the first one, was dense with numerical tables formatted in columns so narrow they ran into each other.