CHAPTER 171The restaurant was exactly what the search had suggested.Discreet. Unhurried. The kind of place where the tables were far enough apart that conversation didn't travel and the staff had developed the professional invisibility of people who understood that what happened at the tables was none of their business.Lucian was already seated when they arrived.This surprised Isabella. She had expected to arrive first. Had planned for it. The specific advantage of being settled when the other person walked in.He had taken that from her. Deliberately or not she couldn't tell yet.He stood when they approached. A courtesy. Old-fashioned and genuine in the way that the courtesies of people who had been raised with them were genuine, reflexive rather than calculated.He looked at Jean Baptiste.Jean Baptiste looked at him.Forty years between those two looks. Everything that forty years contained."Jean Baptiste," Lucian said."Lucian," Jean Baptiste said.They did not shake hands.

CHAPTER 173Two weeks became one week became four days became tomorrow.The countdown had not been tracked with the urgency of the first seventy-two hours. It had been tracked with the quieter awareness of something approaching that you had done everything you could to prepare for and were now simply moving toward.Fabian's documentation was complete. Not closed. The review period would continue regardless of the session's outcome, because what they were building was not contingent on a single decision even if the single decision mattered enormously. But complete in the sense of being ready. Everything that could be in it was in it. Everything that needed to be said had been said in the form that would serve it best.The attendance had been confirmed twice. Once in the original grant and once in a follow-up confirmation that Rafael had requested because requesting it was the kind of thing you did when the stakes were high enough to warrant the redundancy.The travel arrangements were