Photo after photo slipped past of Madame de Martineau back in her supermodel days, before she became one of the iconic fashion designers of the late twentieth century, before she founded CDMI. The photos showed a big-eyed girl with spiky lashes and teased-up hair. Her age was a fiercely guarded secret today, but the clothes and makeup she wore in the photographs were classic 1960s styles, which probably placed her well into her seventies. I knew from my research that Madame de Martineau now lived in virtual seclusion somewhere in the Loire Valley, but she still reigned as chairman of the board of CDMI. She was universally known as Madame, though no one knew whether or whom she’d ever married.

The slideshow lingered on her most famous photo, the one that once adorned posters in thousands of dorm rooms. She was nude, with her arms strategically folded over her nipples and a white dove perched on one shoulder. I studied her face closely. In each photo she seemed to adopt a different persona. In this one, a waif; in that one, a vixen; in the next, a warrior. She was a woman who’d reinvented herself in real life, too, from walking mannequin to celebrated designer to corporate titan. At every turn of time and tide, she’d been smart enough to take the temperature of the world and navigate the best route to the top.

I hadn’t been smart at all, but I needed to be now, smarter than I’d ever been. I needed to process everything I knew about Ingram Barrett and navigate the best route to a yes. So what did I know? I’d studied his photo in the company’s annual report and knew that he was balding and wore Clark Kent glasses. I’d studied his bio in Martindale and knew that he was Harvard-educated, the clichéd white-shoe, country-club corporate attorney with a big-bucks practice on Wall Street until he left it to become general counsel here. He still made big bucks—according to the SEC filings, he had an eight-figure comp package—but even so, not many lawyers in his position would give up the power and prestige of the practice he’d already enjoyed. He was probably on the speed dial of a couple dozen Fortune 500 CEOs. Why would he leave that to answer to a single board of directors and some notoriously litigious shareholders?

The answer to that question might be the answer to mine as well. I needed to figure out what factors made him take this job, then build the same factors into my own profile. If he could see himself in me, I’d be his ideal employee.

I left the wall of screens for the wall of windows. The fog was starting to clear over Manhattan, and I took myself there, back to my old firm, to my office on the sixty-seventh floor, to the library carts of client files that lined my walls and the phone console with half a dozen lines, the lights sometimes blinking on all of them. I remembered all of it, and I formulated what I prayed would be the winning strategy.