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Chapter 140
John Bones made the first contact on a Tuesday evening, through a man named Craw.Craw ran a small security outfit in Silver Lace's southern district, one that provided muscle for clubs and private events and asked no questions about the nature of the events in question. He was not powerful, not well-connected in any serious sense, but he was embedded, and embedded people knew other embedded people, and that was the point.John had been watching Craw's operation for four days before he made contact. He wanted to know the shape of the man before he sat across from him, which was a habit he had never broken regardless of how small the meeting.He walked into the bar where Craw held court on Tuesday evenings at eight-thirty, took a seat two down from him at the counter, ordered a beer, and waited.Craw noticed him by eight-forty-five. It was hard not to notice John Bones in most rooms, besides,.Craw was a man smart enough to notice who stood amongst normal men.He leaned over after a few
Chapter 139
"It's close enough to the same thing that the distinction doesn't do much work," Alan replied sternly.Dane smiled at that, a short, genuine one. "Fair point.""Lucia." Alan dropped her name after a brief moment of silence.Dane set his glass down. "What about her?""You don't have to act so aloof. Hazel found out through other channels." Alan kept his voice even. "I want to understand what you asked her to do.""I asked her what you care about," Dane responded reluctantly. "I wasn't asking her to act against you. I was asking her to help me understand you."Alan narrowed his eyes. "Meaning?""I’m not particularly obliged to answer that question, Mr Walked,” Dane shrugged with a small smirk. He seemed to be enjoying his time ther. "But do not fear, I didn't ask her to do anything else. Whatever she's decided to do separately, that's her own."Alan sat with that for a moment. It tracked with what he understood of Lucia's calls, the solicitor visit, the documents she had told him about
Chapter 138
In a small restaurant in the old district, away from the business centre, Alan was calmly seated at a table. He had eaten there twice before, once with Hazel and once alone, and he liked it because the tables were spaced properly and the staff were very good at their job. Their discretion was very professional and he would argue that they showed more etiquette than in higher-class restaurants.He arrived ten minutes early and took the corner table, the one with a clear view of the entrance and the secondary exit near the kitchen. It was an habit of his. He ordered water and looked at the menu without reading it.Dane arrived at exactly the agreed time. He wasn't a minute late, nor a minute early. The man was right on time, almost irking Alan.‘What is he trying to prove?’ Alan couldn't help but ask himself. No one would go that far just for the sake of it.Dane came alone, as Alan had specified. No Sera, no assistant, no lawyer hovering in a car outside. He wore a jacket without a tie
Chapter 137
The documents had been sitting in the bottom of Lucia's wardrobe for six weeks, inside a manila envelope, underneath a stack of sweaters she hadn't worn since winter.She had put them there the day she came back from the solicitor, tucked them under the sweaters, and told herself she was waiting until she knew what she wanted to do with them. Six weeks later, she still hadn't moved them, which she had started to understand was itself the decision to keep not deciding, which worked right up until it stopped working.It stopped working on a Thursday morning.Michael had left early for a meeting with someone from the Donovan family's legal circle, which he had mentioned the night before in the offhand way he mentioned most things these days, a brief summary that didn't invite questions. She had nodded and gone back to Peace, who was at the stage where she demanded constant attention and rewarded it with the kind of complete, uncomplicated joy that made everything else feel smaller by com
Chapter 136
The warehouse district on Silver Lace's eastern edge was an area that got busy between five and nine in the morning and then went quiet for the rest of the day. Logistics traffic, mostly. Delivery vehicles moving in and out of the loading bays, forklifts, the occasional flatbed carrying construction materials to one of the development sites further south. By ten, the roads between the warehouses thinned to almost nothing, and by noon you could park a car on the service road that ran behind the third cluster of buildings and sit there for two hours without anyone coming past.Taskmaster had been doing exactly that for four days.He had identified the eastern warehouse district as one of three supply chain entry points worth watching about a week after settling into Silver Lace. The logic was straightforward enough. Trident's local infrastructure in the city, the part that had been quietly built over the preceding year before Taskmaster was assigned as regional coordinator, relied on t
Chapter 135
The piece ran on a Tuesday morning, in three publications simultaneously.Clara had spent two weeks placing it, which was longer than she would have liked but shorter than it could have taken if she hadn't been careful about which journalists she approached and in what order. The goal was not a favourable story. Favourable stories looked like what they were, and what they were was paid for, and the moment a reader sensed that, the whole thing collapsed into the opposite of its intention. What Clara wanted was a balanced story, one that presented Gold Aries' record accurately and let the record speak without anyone's thumb on the scale.The headline in the first publication read: Gold Aries' Community Footprint—A Closer Look At What The Numbers Actually Say. The article that followed laid out Gold Aries' employment figures across Silver Lace over the past three years, the ShopVille integration's effect on local retail jobs, the Regal Express expansion's contribution to the northern l
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