The Janitor of War

Chapter 10 — Four Days

Thursday arrived the way difficult things often did — quietly, without announcement, wearing the same face as every other morning.

Ethan was at Blackridge by 5:40. The east corridor floors needed buffing — genuine maintenance, scheduled, nothing invented. He set the buffer running and used the noise as cover for thinking, the way he used most things.

Four days.

He separated them the way he separated everything else. Not as a countdown — countdowns created urgency, and urgency created errors — but as four distinct operational surfaces, each with its own requirements and its own constraints.

Thursday: information. He needed to know more about Vane's associates before Sunday. Names, if possible. Roles within the network, if not names. The board pre-meeting had given him faces. Faces were a beginning.

Friday: position. He needed to understand what Sunday dinner was designed to accomplish from Vane's perspective — assessment, as he'd concluded last night, but assessment of what specifically. Whether Ethan was compromised by his cover. Whether the years had cost him something Vane could exploit. Whether Diana or Jake had become liabilities in ways Vane could use as leverage.

Saturday: preparation. Not weapons, not equipment — those were available to him through channels he hadn't needed to open yet and wouldn't open until necessary. Preparation meant the dinner itself. What Ethan would be, across that table, in a room full of people who were measuring him.

Sunday: the table.

He ran the buffer in even lines and let the four days settle into their columns.

Lena found him at seven thirty in the east stairwell, replacing the second-floor handrail grip that had been working loose since October. She came up the stairs from below with a stack of marking and stopped one step down from him — the position that put their heads at the same level and their conversation below the sight line of anyone looking through the stairwell window from the car park.

She had chosen the step deliberately. She always had reasons for where she stood.

"Vane," she said. "I made him last night from the pre-meeting. Ran the face against the watch list."

Ethan worked the grip onto the rail. "And?"

"He's been dark for eight years. Whatever he's been doing in that time isn't in any system I have access to." A pause. "The two associates are cleaner than clean. I think they're cut-outs — present for the relationship, not the operation."

"Vane doesn't use people he doesn't trust."

"Vane doesn't trust people," she said. "He uses them until the use runs out. There's a difference." She shifted the marking stack. "Gerald Hargrove had a call this morning at six forty-seven. Duration eleven minutes. The number traces to a telecommunications relay in the Czech Republic."

Ethan stopped working the grip.

"Gerald made the call," Lena said. "Not received. He called out."

He sat with that for a moment. Gerald Hargrove, at 6:47 in the morning, calling a relay number in Prague that connected to nothing clean. Not receiving instruction — initiating contact.

The column he'd labeled Gerald shifted. Not dramatically. Just enough to change the angle of what it connected to.

"He might not know what the number is," Ethan said carefully.

"He might not," Lena agreed, in the tone of someone who considered that a minority position.

"Vane's network gives people numbers to call. Normal-looking, legitimate relay. Gerald calls it thinking it's a business contact. The relay bounces it to wherever Vane needs it to go."

"That's a generous interpretation."

"I give everyone the same weight," Ethan said. "Until the evidence earns something heavier."

Lena said nothing, which was its own kind of response. She went back down the stairs, footsteps even and unhurried, and pushed through the ground floor door without looking back.

Ethan finished the handrail grip.

The Gerald column had shifted. He acknowledged it and moved on.

Jake was waiting outside the maintenance shed at noon.

Not lurking — standing, in the direct way of someone who had decided to be somewhere and was committing to it. He had his hands in his jacket pockets and was watching the south fence line with the focused attention Ethan was beginning to recognize as Jake's version of thinking.

"I did what you said," Jake said, when Ethan reached him. "Stopped searching."

"Good."

"It was hard." He said it without embarrassment, which Ethan noted. "I kept wanting to pull the next thread."

"That impulse will get people killed," Ethan said. Not harshly. As information.

Jake absorbed it with the seriousness it deserved. "Dad confirmed Sunday dinner this morning. He sounded — I don't know. Deliberate. Like he'd planned the call."

"What time did he call you?"

"Six forty." Jake frowned slightly. "Why?"

Seven minutes before the Prague relay call. Gerald had organized his morning — called Jake first, then made the other call. Sequential, intentional. Not a man who had stumbled into something he didn't understand.

Or a man who had been given a schedule to keep.

Ethan couldn't tell which yet.

"What do you know about his current business dealings?" Ethan asked. "Specifically the last six months."

Jake leaned against the shed wall. "Veridian Solutions is the main new thing. Security systems. Dad's been pushing it hard for Blackridge and three other institutional clients. He seems genuinely excited about it, which is unusual — Dad doesn't get excited, he gets strategic."

"Genuinely excited," Ethan repeated.

"Like someone showed him something impressive and he bought in." Jake paused. "He let me see a product demo last month. The integration was — it was actually good. Everything talking to everything, all the data feeding one system. I remember thinking it was almost too clean for something that new."

Too clean. Too new. A four-month-old company with a Delaware mail drop and a product impressive enough to make Gerald Hargrove genuinely enthusiastic.

"The demo," Ethan said. "Where was it held?"

"Dad's office. Someone came to him."

"Who ran it?"

Jake thought. "Tall guy. Eastern European accent, I think, though he didn't say much. Mostly let the system speak for itself."

Sable.

Sable had run the product demo for Gerald Hargrove a month before arriving at Blackridge as a PE instructor. The same man. The same network. Gerald had been shown something real — a genuine system, genuinely impressive — and had bought in without knowing what he was actually buying.

Which answered one question and opened three more.

"Sunday dinner," Ethan said. "I need you to do something."

Jake straightened slightly. The change in his posture was small and immediate — the unconscious adjustment of someone who had been waiting to be useful and was now being given the opportunity.

"Seat placement," Ethan said. "Wherever your father puts me, I need to be able to see the room entrance and the garden exit simultaneously."

Jake stared at him. "That's — how do I do that without it being obvious?"

"You know your father's table. You know how he seats people. Suggest I sit beside Diana. She always sits with her back to the garden — which means I face it."

"Dad puts his guests of honor opposite the entrance."

"Then make sure I'm not a guest of honor."

Something moved across Jake's face — complicated, quick, the expression of a man assembling a picture from pieces that had been in front of him for years without making sense until now. He didn't ask the question that was clearly sitting behind his eyes.

Instead: "Okay," he said. Simple. Committed.

Ethan nodded once and went inside.

Behind him, he heard Jake exhale — the long, quiet breath of someone who had just stepped across a line they hadn't seen until they were already over it.