Chapter 1 #2
The gallery unfolds behind her. High ceilings. Warm lighting. Art on the walls that has been selected with the precision of a hostage negotiator---nothing too challenging, nothing too cheap, everything measured to make wealthy people feel intelligent for standing near it.
I take a champagne flute from a passing tray. I don't drink. The glass is a prop. A thing to hold that signals I am relaxed, I belong, I am one of you.
I scan the room.
Crowd assessment is automatic. The hedge fund managers, the junior royals, the tech wives---they register as furniture.
Expensive furniture, the kind that costs six figures and smells of self-congratulation, but furniture nonetheless.
They move in predictable patterns: bar, painting, conversation, bar.
No one watching the exits. No one watching anything except their own reflections in the champagne.
There's an older woman near the bar in a vintage Halston, dripping with amber jewelry. She carries herself differently---chin up, shoulders loose, the posture of someone who stopped performing for rooms decades ago. But she's still just set dressing.
The security details are more useful. They think they're invisible, but they move in grids---mechanical, regular, the opposite of organic. I track their patterns. Two near the east exit. One roaming. One stationed at the hallway leading to the offices. That's my corridor.
I drift. I make small talk with a woman who collects Basquiat prints and wants me to know about it.
I nod at a man who is explaining blockchain to his date with the confidence of someone who has never been told to shut up.
I am polite. I am forgettable. I am wallpaper that happens to have cheekbones.
The server room is behind a door marked PRIVATE at the end of the east corridor. I know this because I studied the building's planning applications for two days. Victorian properties in Mayfair have predictable bones---the service corridors always run along the east wall.
I wait for the roaming guard to complete his circuit. His pattern is a six-minute loop. I've counted it twice.
On his third pass, I slip into the corridor with my champagne glass still in hand---a man looking for the toilets. Casual. Slightly embarrassed. The kind of person security waves through because confronting a guest is worse than losing sight of them for thirty seconds.
The door is locked. Electronic. Four-digit code. I pull the device from my pocket. I hold it against the reader. It doesn't need to open the door. It needs proximity---three inches from the gallery's network hub, which sits on the other side of this wall.
I press the activation switch. A single pulse of warmth against my fingertips.
Nothing happens.
The indicator light stays dark. I pull it back, reposition, press again.
The warmth pulses---but the light flickers amber instead of green.
The hub must be farther from the wall than the blueprints suggested.
I need to hold the device flat against the door itself, right above the reader, where the wiring runs thickest.
I shift position. The champagne glass is in the way. I set it on the floor beside my foot---a mistake, because now I don't have a prop, now I'm just a man with his hand pressed against a locked door in a private corridor.
Footsteps. Behind me, from the gallery. Wrong rhythm for the roaming guard---he's not due for another two minutes. This is someone else. Heels. Sharp ones. Getting closer.
The light flicks green.
I pocket the device, scoop up the champagne glass, and turn in one motion. A woman rounds the corner---mid-forties, sequined clutch, the determined expression of someone who actually is looking for the toilets. I give her Robert Hathaway's mildly confused smile.
"I think we've both gone the wrong way," I say.
She laughs. We walk back toward the gallery side by side. My pulse hasn't changed. My hands are dry.
But that was close. Closer than Killian would tolerate.
The job is done. I should leave. Protocol says I should leave. Killian's voice in my head, the one that sounds like gravel and disappointment: Get in. Get out. Don't be you.
I'm heading for the entrance when I see him.
He is standing at the far end of the gallery, near a painting he isn't looking at.
I stop walking.
He is tall. The kind of tall that has nothing to do with proportion and everything to do with the space he carves out of a room.
He is dressed in black---bespoke, the fabric matte, absorbing the gallery's warm light rather than reflecting it.
He stands with his back to the wall, sightlines to both exits.
The drink in his hand is untouched. A prop. The same trick I'm pulling.
His face is severe. Sharp jaw. High cheekbones that throw shadows under the gallery lights. His hair is silver at the temples and dark everywhere else, swept back from a face that has been worn into something brutal and precise by decades I can only guess at.
His eyes are grey. They are moving. Slowly. Scanning the room with the patience of a man who has been cataloguing threats since before I was born.
A couple drifts toward his corner of the gallery, champagne in hand, and then adjusts course without seeming to decide to---a half-step sideways, a sudden interest in the nearest painting.
They don't look at him. Nobody near him looks at him.
There's a pocket of empty floor around the man, three feet in every direction, as if the crowd has collectively agreed he is a load-bearing wall they should not touch.
And he knows it. The stillness in his posture isn't patience. It's ownership.
I know who he is. I've seen the photographs---grainy surveillance shots, a single passport photo from the '90s. None of them prepared me for the physical fact of him.
Kazimir Volkov.
The Ghost.
The man financing the war that almost killed my brother. The reclusive ex-Russian kingpin who disappeared from every database and every intelligence file five years ago. The man Killian sent me across an ocean to find, to get close to, to destroy.
I should leave. The device is planted. The mission is complete.
Every operational instinct I have---every lesson Killian drilled into me---says walk out the front door, get in a cab, and call Killian from a burner in Hackney.
Walking toward this man is walking into the gravity of something I am not equipped to survive.
His eyes complete their circuit of the room.
They land on me.
And stay.
The gallery shrinks. The ambient noise---the laughter, the clinking, the string quartet sawing through something inoffensive---drops to a frequency I can't hear anymore. There is only the man in black and the thirty feet of overpriced hardwood between us.
He doesn't smile. He doesn't nod. He just... looks. Like he's reading the brushstrokes under my surface. Like he can see the forgery.
A cold finger traces the length of my spine.
My mouth goes dry. My pulse, the one that stayed flat through the entire server room hack, is hammering now---a hard, rapid beat against the side of my throat.
Rory Kavanagh, the real Rory, the one under the Tom Ford and the slicked hair and the borrowed name, should be terrified.
This man has killed more people than I've forged paintings, and that's saying something.
My hand tightens on the empty champagne flute. I set it down before the tremor shows.
Killian's voice: Don't be you.
Too late.
I straighten my cuffs. I fix Robert Hathaway's empty, pleasant expression onto my face like wet paint over a masterpiece.
And I walk toward the Ghost.