It was ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, a single bank strap, still in its original yellow paper band, about an inch thick. The bills had gone soft and slightly furred at the edges from years of handling. He held it in his palm for a moment, feeling the familiar weight, and then he slipped it into the inside left pocket of his jacket, over his heart, where it had always gone.
He had not carried it in two years.
The brick had been a gift, of sorts, from his first real mentor, a man named Frank Doyle, who had sold database licenses to Fortune 500 companies in the 1990s and had been fired from four of them for reasons that were mostly to do with whiskey. Frank had been loud and red-faced and, when he was sober, the best natural salesman Bradley had ever seen. One evening, at a steakhouse in Dallas, when Bradley was thirty-one and terrified of a deal he was about to lose, Frank had reached into his own jacket and taken out a strap of hundreds and slid it across the tablecloth.
Carry this, he'd said. Never spend it. Never show it to anybody. Just carry it. You'll see. You'll walk different. You'll talk different. A man with ten grand over his heart doesn't beg.
It had been half a joke and half the truest piece of advice Bradley had ever received. He had carried the brick into the meeting the next morning and closed the biggest deal of his career up to that point. He had carried it into every important meeting for the next ten years. It had become a superstition, and then a habit, and then something more than that, a part of who he was, the way some men were their watches or their cars.
His favorite story about it, the one he told at dinners when he'd had two glasses of wine, was about a poker game in Las Vegas in 2014. Big table, private room, real money. He had been holding nothing, absolutely nothing, a pair of fours, and a man across the table had pushed in a raise that should have ended it. Bradley had reached into his jacket and taken out the brick and slapped it down on the felt, hard, without breaking eye contact, and said Call. And the other man had looked at the brick, and looked at Bradley, and folded.
He had been holding two pair. Bradley found out later. Kings and nines. He'd had Bradley beaten cold, and he'd folded to a strap of cash and a stare.
Bradley had stopped carrying the brick two years ago, when the factory numbers started coming in and it had begun to feel less like a talisman and more like a joke at his own expense. This morning, standing in front of his dresser in the navy suit, he felt the weight of it settle over his heart and thought: If ever there was a day.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
He looked, he thought, like a man with fifty-three days.
* * *
In the back of the black sedan on the way across the city, he read Grace's briefing notes for the fourth time. Eleven pages, single-spaced, in a plain font, with no headers and no bullet points, because Grace said bullet points were for people who did not intend to read.
Chairman Lin values patience above almost everything. The first hour of a meal is not about business. It is about family, hometown, food, travel. If you raise money before he does, you have told him you are desperate. You are desperate. Do not tell him.
He will watch how you treat everyone at the table. Not only him. His aides, his lawyers, your own staff, the person who pours the tea. Especially the person who pours the tea. He has told me more than once that he learns more about a man from how he speaks to a waiter than from a year of due diligence.
Do not exaggerate. About anything. He has been lied to by Americans before, more than once, and he remembers every number anyone has ever told him. If you do not know, say you do not know. If it is bad, say it is bad.
He understands far more English than he lets anyone know. Assume he is listening. Always.
Bradley took out a pen and underlined Do not exaggerate. Twice.
Then he put the notes down on the seat beside him and looked out the window. They were coming into the Presidio now, the road winding up through eucalyptus and cypress, and below them, as the trees opened, he could see the long gray sweep of the bay and the fog lying on it, beginning to tear, and the red towers of the bridge coming and going through the gaps.
He stopped thinking about the notes.
* * *
At five past twelve, Bradley came up the gravel path through the front of The Glasshouse with his phone at his ear, talking to his CFO.
Marcus Bell was already there, waiting by a fern near the entrance, heavyset and anxious, with a leather folder clutched under one arm. He was on the phone too, and Bradley realized after a moment that Marcus was on the phone with him, which meant Marcus had seen him come in and still not hung up. That was Marcus. He did not know how to end a conversation with his boss.
"If they ask about capacity," Bradley said, walking fast, not looking at Marcus, talking to him through the phone from six feet away, "you say two gigawatt-hours by the end of next year."
"Bradley." Marcus's voice was low. "The engineering number is—"
"I know what the engineering number is. If we say the engineering number, they walk out before dessert. Two gigawatt-hours. End of next year. Say it like you mean it."
"That's not the nameplate. That's not even—"
"Marcus." Bradley stopped walking. "Fifty-three days."
There was a short silence.
"Two gigawatt-hours," Marcus said.
Bradley hung up and put the phone in his pocket.
He did not notice, and would not have cared if he had, that a tall young woman in a black apron standing by the ferns at the far end of the lemon-tree path had heard every word.