“That doesn’t sound so bad. Except for the half part.”

“It was more the company I was keeping.”

“Lawyers?”

On cue, Corvallis’s phone began vibrating down in the cupholder. He glanced at it. Stan was calling from his work number. “Gotta take this. See you in a few.”

He tapped the screen and switched over to Stan. Then he pulled out into a gap in traffic and began heading north toward downtown.

“You took El’s call,” Stan said. “I’d rather you hadn’t.”

“Hell, I sat across the table from him.”

“What!?”

“No shit. While we were talking in the hotel, he flew up from San Rafael. With his security detail in tow.”

“Jesus. And threatened to get a court order?”

“Yeah, is that even possible legally?”

“It’s rare. Rare enough that I’ll need to do some research,” Stan said. “But in principle, yeah. If the family is about to take some step that directly violates the health care directive, then the attorney general can take an interest in it, go to a judge, get a court order.”

“And then—?”

“And then if the family, or the doctors, violate the court order, they’re in contempt of court. So that is definitely a club he can wave over Zula and Alice. But I find it shocking he would even consider it.”

“He’s protecting his brand, he says.”

“Fine way to do it.”

The organization known to Alice as the Weird Cyber Bank had bought a great big old building from an old-school, non-weird, non-cyber bank that, around the turn of the millennium, had gone belly-up in a financial downturn and pursuant imbroglio.

During the 1930s, this building had probably been considered tall and futuristic. Now it was medium-sized and retro-quaint. The new owners had done all of the structural upgrades needed to keep it from collapsing into a huge mound of bricks during the next earthquake and then they had parceled it out into chunks for use by various of their subentities.

The Weird Cyber Bank per se—the for-profit financial institution that had been spawned out of an earlier startup called Epiphyte, and been joined by diverse more or less murky coconspirators—occupied the upper two-thirds of the building. The lower floors were for the Waterhouse-Shaftoe Family Foundation and its offshoot, WABSI.