Suits: The Win Rate System

Louis looked smaller outside the office.

Not diminished — just human-sized, without the three-piece suit and the pocket square and the PSL-partner armor. He was in a grey blazer and dark jeans and he had the particular look of someone who'd arrived at the diner early enough to drink one cup of the bad coffee and was already regretting it.

A manila folder sat on the table between his elbows.

"You look like you haven't slept," I said.

"I haven't slept." He pushed the second cup toward me, freshly poured. "It tastes like burnt ambition. Drink it anyway."

I sat down and drank it. He was right on both counts.

Louis had both hands flat on the folder. The posture of a man who'd spent several hours working himself up to something and was now committed to saying it before he could second-guess himself again.

"Just tell me," I said.

He opened the folder.

"Meridian Communications," he said. "I found them in PSL's quarterly vendor payments. Forty-five thousand per month for reputational management services. Which is normal — firms our size routinely engage external PR consultants." He pushed the first page across. "What's not normal is the billing increase. Meridian's invoice to PSL increased by thirty percent in March. Same month Forstman started his share accumulation in Gillis."

I looked at the invoice. The jump was clean and visible — February's number, March's number, the delta impossible to miss once you were looking for it.

"They're billing for additional access," I said.

"Correct. But that alone doesn't tell you much. PR firms bill for expanded scope all the time." He pushed the second page. "What told me something was wrong was the client list. Meridian's corporate client list is public — they advertise their major relationships on their website. Standard for PR firms." He let me read it.

TechVista Inc. was on line seven. Gillis Industries was on line twelve.

I set the page down.

"Same firm," I said.

"Same firm. Both your client and Harvey's client represented by the same external PR company. Eighteen months." Louis's voice was careful and precise — the voice he used in depositions when the testimony mattered. "Three weeks ago, Meridian hired a new senior consultant. Her name is Patricia Lane." He slid the third page across — Lane's LinkedIn profile, pulled and printed. "Previous employer: Forstman Capital Management. Senior Communications Director, 2011 to 2013."

The diner noise continued around us — a short-order cook, a trucker at the counter, the ambient hum of a place that had been serving people who needed to be anonymous since 1978. None of it registered.

I read Lane's profile twice.

"She's his plant," I said.

"Yes." Louis folded his hands on the table. Not agitated — finished. The posture of someone who had delivered the thing they came to deliver. "Every time Amanda Cross discussed defensive communications with her PR team, Lane had access. Every time Gillis's board briefed their communications consultants on strategy, Lane was in the network. She would have seen the shift in messaging when both companies started coordinating — same narrative frame, same timing, same defensive posture." He paused. "She told him."

[ Blackmail Archive: Meridian Communications — Patricia Lane. Employment: Forstman Capital 2011-2013. Current: Meridian Communications (senior consultant, March 2014). Access level: both TechVista and Gillis strategic communications. Intelligence value to Forstman: high. Breach type: vendor channel, not personnel. ]

I looked at Louis across the table.

"How did you find this?" I said.

He looked mildly offended. "The billing spike was in the vendor summary I review every quarter. I notice anomalies because that's what I do." A pause. "And then I checked every shared vendor between PSL's Gillis representation and any company I knew you were working with. It took about four hours." He shrugged with one shoulder. "I've been doing forensic financial review since before you were a practicing attorney, Scott. This was not difficult. It was just someone needing to look."

Under the table, my hand was slightly clenched. The pieces connecting.

"Louis." I looked at him directly. "You were reviewing PSL's financial records. Your firm's internal records. You brought this to me first."

"Yes."

"Before you brought it to Harvey. Before you filed a report internally."

"Yes." He met my eyes without hesitation. "You asked me once if we were going to face things together. I said yes. I don't say things I don't mean."

The diner was quiet around us for a moment, or felt quiet.

"I need to call Harvey," I said.

"I expected so." Louis picked up his terrible coffee. "I'll sit here and wait."

Harvey answered in two rings.

"We found the leak." I kept my voice low and even. The trucker at the counter wasn't paying attention, but the habit was its own discipline. "It's structural, not personal. Both TechVista and Gillis share a PR firm — Meridian Communications. Forstman placed a former employee, Patricia Lane, inside Meridian three weeks before he started accumulating. She had access to both companies' strategic communications."

Harvey said nothing for fifteen seconds.

In Harvey Specter's silence was the rapid processing of a man who had just understood something he'd been missing.

"Every defensive communication brief we helped draft," he said.

"Went through Meridian. Yes."

"The board presentations—"

"She had access to the PR narrative around them. Possibly the actual documents, depending on their information sharing protocols."

Another silence. Then: "Who found this?"

"Louis."

A pause of different quality — not processing, this one. Registering.

"Louis was reviewing PSL's vendor records," Harvey said.

"Yes."

"And he—" Harvey stopped. I waited. "Tell him." Another stop. The specific silence of a man who had very few words available for a category of feeling that didn't get regular use. "Tell Louis I said thank you."

I looked across the table.

"Harvey says thank you." I held Louis's gaze. "He means it."

Louis's face ran through its seven expressions. The first two were surprise. The middle three were various shades of something that wanted to be denial. The sixth was the truth. The seventh was Louis pressing the back of his hand to his mouth and looking out the diner window.

He drank the terrible coffee and winced.

"Tell him he's welcome," Louis said. His voice was somewhat rougher than usual. "And that PSL's vendor audit protocols are an embarrassment."

I passed it on.

Harvey made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Fair. We cut Meridian today. Both companies. No warning, no explanation — just termination. New PR firms by end of week, no shared exposure."

"Agreed. And Lane's access to existing files—"

"Gets revoked immediately. I'll have IT at both companies document the access logs. Everything she touched from March onward." Harvey paused. "The evidence package. We add this."

"Lane's employment history, the billing spike, the timing correlation with share accumulation — it turns the pattern filing into a specific evidence brief. It's no longer circumstantial. It's documented."

"Do it." Harvey paused. "And Roden — Louis just saved us six months of chasing our own tail."

After the call, I set the phone on the table and looked at Louis.

He was watching the street through the window, the particular look of a man giving himself a moment he wouldn't acknowledge requiring.

"He took it well," I said.

"He took it characteristically." Louis set down the cup. "Harvey Specter thanks people by immediately identifying what comes next. He's not a lingerer."

"He called you by name. He almost never does that for people he's not actively trying to recruit."

Louis looked at me. Something moved through his face — complicated, real, and Louis enough that he immediately tried to organize it into something more manageable.

"Well," he said. "That's—" He stopped. "That's something, isn't it."

"It is."

He picked up the manila folder and squared the pages against the table.

"Now go fix this," he said. "I have a bachelor party to plan and the venue requires a deposit by Friday."

He stood and flagged the server for the check. Outside, the Midtown morning was building to its usual controlled chaos — delivery trucks, commuters, the ordinary machine of a city that didn't pause for anybody's intelligence operations.

He paid the check before I could. Flagged a cab with the decisive authority of a man who'd been doing it for twenty years in this city.

Before he got in, he turned back.

I was holding the manila folder.

"Louis," I said. "Thank you."

He held my gaze for a moment. Then he got in the cab, and it pulled into traffic, and he was gone.

I stood on 53rd Street in the May morning with the folder in my hand and thought about loyalty — what it looked like when it wasn't convenient, when it crossed the lines of professional allegiance, when it showed up at a diner at seven in the morning with a manila folder and terrible coffee and information that cost something to bring.

Louis Litt. Neurotic, dramatic, impossible, loyal Louis Litt.

I put the folder under my arm and started walking.

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