Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 31: Thief PART 1

The café Diana used on Tuesday and Thursday mornings was three blocks from the Morrison tower — small, reliable, the kind of place that understood that its regular clientele came for the consistency of the coffee and the quality of the wifi and the absence of anyone who would want to have a conversation with them.

She had a corner table. She had used the same corner table for two years, and the staff had long since stopped asking her what she wanted because the answer had not changed.

She arrived at eight fourteen, ordered without looking up, opened her laptop, and began the work that she preferred to do before the office filled with the particular ambient noise of people who needed things from her.

The man who sat down two tables away did so at eight twenty-one.

Diana did not look up.

He was unremarkable in the specific way that people are unremarkable when they have worked at being unremarkable — average height, average build, the generic business-casual of someone who could have been employed in any of fifteen different professional categories. He had a coffee and a laptop and the practiced, peripheral body language of someone who was not paying attention to the woman two tables over.

He was paying very close attention to the woman two tables over.

The software he was running was not visible. It operated in the background of a program that looked, on his screen, like an ordinary browser window, and it was doing something very specific to the network traffic moving through the café's wifi connection — reading the keystrokes of every device in range with the patient, automated efficiency of something that did not need to hurry because it had already started and the target had no idea.

Diana typed her corporate banking credentials at eight thirty-one to check an account balance before a nine o'clock call.

She typed her company login at eight forty-four.

She finished her coffee, closed her laptop at nine oh eight, and left without looking at the man two tables over.

He stayed for another twenty minutes.

When he left, he sent a single message to a number that routed through four countries before it reached Liam Steel's burner phone.

The message was three words: Package delivered. Clean.

She was in a budget review meeting when Sophie knocked.

The knock had a quality to it — the specific, apologetic urgency of someone who would not be interrupting a meeting if the alternative were viable — and Diana registered it before she'd finished processing the sound.

"One moment," she said to the two analysts across the table, and stepped into the corridor.

Sophie was holding her tablet with both hands, which she only did when she was managing something she didn't want to drop.

"There's been a withdrawal from the corporate operating account," Sophie said, keeping her voice at the precise volume required for only Diana to hear it. "A wire transfer. It processed this morning."

Diana looked at her. "How much?"

"One hundred and fifty thousand dollars."

The corridor was very still.

"Authorized how?" Diana asked.

Sophie hesitated. The hesitation was brief — a fraction of a second — but it was there, and Diana had been reading Sophie's hesitations for long enough to know that this one contained something she was deciding how to deliver.

"The transfer was made out to Marcus Hayes," Sophie said carefully. "Given that —" another fractional hesitation — "given the circumstances, I wanted to confirm with you directly before I escalated it. I assumed it was something you had authorized and perhaps —"

"Yes," Diana said.

The word arrived before she had fully made the decision, deployed by the professional instinct that had protected her from showing weakness in corridors and boardrooms for a decade. She kept her face completely level. "Yes, I authorized it. I was going to mention it — it slipped my mind with everything that's been going on." She held Sophie's gaze with the practiced calm of a woman who has never once in her professional life allowed a room to see her caught off-balance. "It's handled. Go back to the Evans file — I'll be in the meeting in two minutes."

Sophie looked at her for exactly the amount of time it took to decide whether to accept this at face value.

"Of course," she said.

Diana went back into the meeting.

She sat down. She picked up her pen. She looked at the quarterly projections on the table in front of her and processed none of them.

One hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Withdrawn from the Morrison Accounting Group's corporate operating account.

Made out, with whatever authentication had been used to authorize it, to her husband.

She drove home faster than she needed to.