Page 104 of The Session

These insights helped Mark anticipate what an answer to a test question might be. For example:

A senior person praises you publicly but often “forgets” to include you on key emails. You’re unsure whether it’s incompetence or deliberate.

Which probe is best?

A. Confront them in private and accuse them of sabotage.

B. Ask HR to audit their email behavior.

C. Create a low-stakes situation where inclusion is necessary (e.g., a doc they must forward) and set a simple marker that confirms whether they forwarded it unchanged.

D. Start cc’ing everyone on everything so they can’t exclude you.

In Lightman’s writings, Mark had noticed a fondness for John le Carré and British spy novels generally, which focused less on the flow of information and more on kinetic storytelling. The obvious answer from Lightman’s point of view would be the one that was the most overkill: C. Whether or not it was the best answer, it was certainly the most entertaining. And that was the real tell: The correct answer made you stop and think about it the most.

Mark found it amusing that Lightman had written an entire book about discovering people’s patterns, while his own lay nakedly in the open for anyone who bothered to look.

When the plane landed, he looked out the window into the darkness and saw an unfamiliar airport.

“Is this Exuma?” Mark asked the flight attendant, who had spent most of the trip in the forward crew section.

“I apologize. There’s been a change of schedule. We have to switch airplanes. Somebody should be here to meet you,” the flight attendant explained.

Mark stepped out of the airplane and onto the tarmac. There was no control tower or even hangars—just an airfield in the middle of nowhere. From the sound of crashing waves and the salty air, it was clear he was on a narrow island. Footsteps came from around the plane, and two men wearing body armor with rifles strapped to their chests appeared.

“Mr. Greenley, we need you to come with us,” one of the men ordered. He was bald and wore sunglasses that made him interchangeable with any number of military contractors Mark had dealt with before.

“What’s going on?” Mark asked, alarmed.

“There’s been a security incident. Please come with us,” the man replied.

The other man walked up to Mark and took him by the elbow—not forcefully, but in a way that made it clear this wasn’t up for negotiation.

They brought him around the plane to where a large black SUV was parked. Mark was placed in the back seat next to his escort.

“Can somebody tell me what’s going on?” Mark asked.

“We don’t have any information we can share with you right now,” the lead man replied.

“Could you at least tell me where we are?”

After that, they stopped responding to Mark’s questions. He looked at the door handle and considered diving out of the vehicle, but this was surely yet another island used by Summit Strategies. There would be nowhere to run.

His pulse quickened as he realized he probably hadn’t done as good a job as he’d thought covering up his little investigation in Eleuthera.

He assured himself nobody could know what he’d figured out—unless they got to Holly. No, they wouldn’t go that far, he told himself. If they thought he’d learned too much, diverting the plane she knew he’d boarded would leave a trail.

Mark’s hand went to his pocket where he kept his cell phone. If he could send a text to Tru, maybe she could clear everything up.

“There’s no cellular network here,” the man sitting next to him said. “And you’ll find a sat phone won’t work either.”

“How can a sat phone not work out here?”

No one answered.

The road seemed to go on forever. Occasionally, through the windswept grass, Mark could see the ocean and the gray sky beyond. He tried to calculate the flight time and the distance traveled to get some idea of where he might be. He regretted not paying as much attention as he should have. All he could deduce was that he was probably still north of the equator, which wasn’t exactly helpful.

Other than the airstrip and the road they were on, the island appeared extremely underdeveloped.