27. Chapter 27 #2
“If she’s in there and we move before we’re ready, she’ll be in a car and gone before we reach the gate. You know that.” He doesn’t raise his voice. “We’ve moved too early once before. I’m not doing it again.”
Decker puts his hand over hers on the table.
“He’s right, sweetheart,” he says. “Sit.”
She sits.
Rain has started against something above us, a vent or a shaft, and for a moment it’s all I can hear.
She has her sister’s mouth. She has the same way of lifting her chin when she’s determined.
I could end this for her right now.
I pull the map toward me instead and turn it around. I put my finger on the north track and talk about approach angles until my voice sounds the way it usually does.
Faine watches me do it.
“The audit,” Viktor says, when the map talk runs out. “Tell the room what you told Crowe.”
“The compound’s books get checked every quarter by a woman who comes down from above the manager.
Vasile has spent months telling her about the client who spends more in his house than all of his client list put together.
Last week I asked him to introduce me to the people above him, and he made the call while I watched.
” I keep my eyes level. “Two days later a letter came to my house. Heavy paper, no letterhead. She’ll see me on the last night of the month, while she’s there auditing the quarter. Her name is Ecaterina.”
“Why would she agree to meet you?” Viktor says.
“Because I’m a privileged client. And I told Vasile I want to see more of their stock. Get introduced to some of the other sellers. Those are decisions for higher up.”
“Anything else?” Faine says.
The room is quiet. Jericho has stopped typing.
The last line of the letter asked for a private conversation after the audit.
Just the two of us, somewhere quiet. If I read that line out at this table, Crowe kills the operation inside a minute, and Viktor backs him.
They send in one of their own, who never gets past the front desk, and that building keeps running for who knows how long.
“She confirmed the date,” I say.
Crowe comes off the wall.
He walks the length of the room and stops at the end of the table. He waits me out. He’s been reading liars in this city for thirty years, and he doesn’t hurry it.
“Before this goes any further,” he says, “I want everyone here to hear my objection.”
“Go on,” Viktor says.
“He’s exposed. There’s talk going around the trade that Val-Serein has a taste for magic blood and can’t manage it.
That talk started out as his cover, and it’s stopped being useful.
” He puts one hand on the back of the nearest chair.
“Five nights ago, somebody above the manager logged an inquiry. They’re checking up on him.
And now, the same week, they’ve invited him in. ”
“Then say the rest of it,” Viktor says.
“He shouldn’t go. Send someone else instead, and give it six months.”
“What does six months buy us?”
“Someone inside that they’ve never had a reason to suspect.”
“It also puts more people through that ward,” Nadia says. “Not to mention what would happen to those already in there.”
“Yes,” Crowe says. “That’s true.”
Viktor turns to me. “Seigneur.”
“His objection is sound. I’m going anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the only person they’ve agreed to see. I’ve spent considerable time and money earning that house’s trust, and a new man would be starting from the beginning. And because if it works, I walk out of that building at midnight and hand you the name at the top of this trade.”
Craven speaks from the end of the room.
“Then let’s talk about what happens if it goes wrong.”
They build it in under an hour. Two teams, one on the access road, one in the treeline off the north fence, which is as close as anyone can get without lighting up the whole compound.
Jericho runs communications from a vehicle.
Craven puts fourteen dragons on the ward doors once the signal goes, and nobody argues with him about it.
“Once you’re through the front doors, you’re on your own in there,” Viktor says. “Nobody comes in behind you until you give the signal. If it goes wrong, the fastest anyone can reach you is four minutes.”
“Four minutes.”
“On a good night.”
“That’s acceptable.”
“It isn’t,” Crowe says.
“We’ve already heard your objections, Crowe.”
“I’ll keep saying them.”
Viktor closes the folder. “It’s set, then.”
The room starts standing. Chairs go back. Craven is already talking to Jericho about vehicles, and Nadia takes the map down off the screen and copies something from it.
I pull my coat on.
Serenity will be up when I get home. She waits for me in the study now, with a book off my shelf that she has no intention of giving back. She’ll ask where I’ve been. I’ll say out. She’ll let it go.
I could tell her tonight. I could tell her that her sister is alive.
Then she’d ask how I know, and I’d have to tell her I sat nine feet from Grace for two hours and never opened my mouth.
Zoe comes back in with a fresh pot nobody wants. Viktor lifts the stack of folders off the table and puts it into her hands.
“Copies for the file,” he says. “One set for the field kit.”
“Yes, sir.”
She puts them under her arm and carries them out into the corridor.
Grace is at the table, saying something to Decker with her hand on his arm. Four words would end months of not knowing for her.
I button my coat, and I walk out of the mountain without saying them.