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CHAPTER 168
Darius got home that evening a little after seven, and found a note on his bed in Reginald's blocky, deliberate handwriting. *Study. When you're ready. No hurry.* He washed his face and changed his shirt and stood for a moment in front of the mirror, rehearsing an expression. Then he walked downstairs. The old man sat behind his desk with his reading glasses low on his nose and a sheaf of papers fanned in front of him, and when Darius came in, he took the glasses off and gestured to the chair. "Sit. You look tired." "I'm fine." "You always say that." Reginald's mouth twitched. "Alan tells me you've been out most days. Business?" "Some of it. It just some things I'm trying to work out. Nothing worth reporting." "Good." Reginald nodded slowly, and Darius felt a small, cold relief, because the old man did not ask what things he was talking about. "I'm glad you're out of the house. I've worried about you in these rooms. Too many corr
CHAPTER 167
Mills left first, hurrying out through the glass door with his coat flapping, and Darius watched him cross the street. A few steps from the corner, Mills pulled his phone from his pocket, glanced over his shoulder, and answered the call that had been buzzing all afternoon. He turned his back and kept his head low as he spoke to the phone. Darius picked up his briefcase, dropped three bills on the table, and walked out onto the pavement just as the gray jeep pulled to the curb. Blade came out of the restaurant behind him a moment later, folding his newspaper under one arm. "He called someone," Blade said quietly. "Right after you shook hands." "I saw." "Want me to follow him?" "Two cars. Don't let him see either." Darius opened the rear door of the jeep and got in beside Lucifer, who was studying him with open curiosity. "And find out who owns the number on that call." The car pulled away from the curb. For several blocks nobody s
CHAPTER 166
The restaurant Lucifer had chosen was called Marenco's, and it sat between a dental clinic and a bank on a street where nobody looked twice at anybody. Darius thought it was the safest room in the city for a conversation that could not be overheard, and he disliked it for exactly that reason. He arrived ten minutes early in a charcoal suit, with a leather briefcase containing nothing but a notepad and a calculator. He took the corner table by the window, ordered sparkling water, and watched the door. Two tables away, Blade sat with a newspaper he was not reading. Lucifer had not come inside. He was parked across the street in a gray jeep. Gareth Mills walked in at 12:40, five minutes late. He was shorter than his photographs suggested, a soft-bodied man of forty-eight with thinning sandy hair and a slightly stooped posture. He paused inside the entrance and looked around the room with the quick, darting attention of a man checking for e
CHAPTER 165
Lucifer rose, pulled his coat from the chair, and paused beside the table. "For what it's worth," he said, "I'm sorry. About the video. About all of it. But I'll ensure when this is done, the footage gets deleted." Darius didn't answer. Lucifer waited a moment longer, then nodded to himself and went up the stairs, the room falling quiet after he left. Darius sat for a while with the lamp humming and the paper pinned to the wall, now crowded with names, arrows, and small, neat question marks. He felt the stiffness settle into his shoulders. He picked up his pen. He set it down again. "The footage is destroyed the day the job is done." He had turned the sentence over a dozen times since the beach. Roberto had not said where the recording was kept. He had not said who held it, or in what form. The promise was an exchange rate: do what we ask, and we'll stop holding what we hold. It had no mechanism. It did not take a criminal mind t
CHAPTER 164
They worked until two in the morning. It was slow, patient work, nothing like the cinematic version Darius had half expected. Pike pulled procurement records from state databases and from a leaked vendor list somebody had once posted on a forum. Marguerite sorted them into columns. Darius sat at the table with a legal pad and wrote in a small, careful hand, asking questions that seemed to have nothing to do with a heist. "How many people clean the east wing?" "Contractor, eight. Night shift." "Who vets them?" "A security firm in the capital." Pike scrolled. "Contract renewed every three years." "Who vets the security firm?" Pike stopped scrolling. "I don't know." "Find out." The picture formed slowly, the way a face does in a darkroom. Stratton was, as advertised, terrifyingly well defended against anyone trying to get in from outside. But it was also an organization of three hundred and forty employees and sixty-odd co
CHAPTER 163
Alan had not moved in two hours. He sat behind the wheel with the engine off and his hands folded in his lap, exactly as he had been told, watching the sea turn from silver to pewter and the gulls wheel over the empty sand. Twice a man in a dark coat had walked past the car without looking at it. When the door of the building ahead finally opened, he saw Darius step out alone and stop on the threshold, one hand braced against the frame. Alan had the engine running before Darius reached the car. He got out to open the rear door, and Darius gave him a small, tired nod and slid onto the seat without a word. The road back was long. The salt air thinned and the refineries rose out of the haze, and still Darius said nothing. He sat with his head turned toward the window and one hand pressed flat against his thigh. "Sir," Alan said at last, very carefully. "Would you like me to stop somewhere? Water, perhaps. Or...""No.""Yes, sir."A mile passed.
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