I knew I was on the right trail, or corridor, when we started meeting other people heading the same way we were. We got a lot of stares—strangers in the midst, women, to boot, in the midst of a sea of gray-and brown-suited men. When I double-checked that we were going the right direction, I found people assumed we were vendors from outside the company. I wondered if morning church was a required ritual for doing business with By-Smart.

As we looked around for seats together, a woman whispered to me that the front row was reserved for the family and for senior officers of the company. Marcena said that was fine, the farther from the center of the action the better. We found two chairs together about ten rows back.

When Billy the Kid had invited me to the prayer meeting, I’d pictured something like the Lady Chapel at a church where a friend of mine is in charge—statues of Mary, candles, crucifixes, an altar. Instead, we were in a nondescript room in the interior of the fourth floor, windowless except for the skylights. I saw later it was a kind of multipurpose room, smaller and less formal than the auditorium, where employees could hold exercise classes or other activities that weren’t exactly work related.

This morning it was set up with chairs fanning out in concentric half circles from a blond wood table in the middle. Old Mr. Bysen arrived just before the session got under way, when everyone else was seated. A thickset man whose midsection had expanded in old age, he wasn’t fat, but certainly substantial. He carried a cane, but he still walked briskly, using the cane almost like a ski pole to propel himself along. An entourage, chiefly of men in the ubiquitous gray or brown, clustered in his wake. Billy the Kid, in jeans and a clean white shirt, entered with Andrés at the tail of the parade. His reddish-brown curls were slicked down heavily. In this room of gray-and-white men, Andrés’s dark skin stood out like a rose in a bowl of onions.

There were a few women besides Marcena and me; one of them arrived in Bysen’s entourage. She appeared both deferential and self-assured—the perfect personal assistant. Her face was flat, like a skillet, and covered in heavy pancake. She was carrying a slim gold portfolio that she unzipped and left on the desktop, open so that both she and Bysen could see it. It was she who sat at Bysen’s right hand as the inner circle fanned out in the padded chairs; Aunt Jacqui, who arrived a few minutes later, only rated the front row.

Morning service seemed to be where Bysen held court. Before the prayers started, a number of people came up to hold low-voiced conversations with him. The skillet-faced woman paid careful attention to them all, jotting notes into the gold portfolio.