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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.
CHAPTER 162
The words fell into the room like a stone into a well. Darius went still. "What footage?" "Of the cottage." The old man's voice was perfectly quiet. "The cellar. Everything you did to those four men from the moment you came down the stairs, in detail and in color, with sound. Your face. Your hands. Your voice, telling them why you were doing to them what you did." A cold wave moved down Darius's spine, slow and prickling. "You had me recorded?" "We knew we would need collateral," Roberto said. "A man with your talents doesn't join a family because he's asked nicely. We did what we had to do." "You had cameras in that cellar." His own voice sounded strange to him, small and far away. "I checked the walls. I checked the ceiling." "Lucifer's technician is very good. He is the best in the country. He made the small camera ever." Darius turned his head slowly and looked at Lucifer. He found nothing there, only a steady gaze that did not dr
CHAPTER 161
Lucifer stood a pace behind the chair with his arms folded. He did not smile. Darius met his eyes briefly and found nothing in them, neither welcome nor warning. "Roberto." Darius took the seat across the table. "You look better." "I look like a corpse with good manners." The old man laughed, a thin, dry sound that turned into a cough. He waved off the man who stepped forward with a glass of water. "Don't fuss. I'm told the herbs did their work, and I'm told you nearly died from them. I'm sorry for that. I mean it." "Two of your men did die." "Yes." The smile faded. "Trigger and young Jules. I think of them every morning." He looked at his hands. "It's a hard thing to owe a man your life and know it cost you two others." "Well, bygones. I didn't come to talk about that." "No, of course not. But we'll talk a little before we talk a lot." Roberto lifted his cup with both hands. "Tell me, how is the weather in the city? I haven't been out in weeks." It went on for a quarter
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