Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Thiago
My phone rang while I was still standing at the kitchen counter with the Orpheum floor plan spread beneath my hands.
Luca had left the kitchen a few minutes earlier.
Dominic was in the salon with the doors closed, a thin stripe of light showing beneath them that hadn’t changed for the past hour.
Eamon had stepped outside to take a call from the police liaison, and I’d heard the courtyard gate open and close behind him.
The number on my phone screen was Michael’s.
He texted when he had questions. He called when something had hardened from possibility into fact.
“Reyes.”
“Confirmation on Devereaux,” he said, skipping the greeting. His voice was clipped and calm. “Hotel reservation in New Orleans through the twenty-ninth. He checked in two days ago.”
I looked down at the floor plan, tracing the narrow service lane behind the Orpheum with one finger. “We expected that.”
“There’s more.” I heard papers shift on his end. “A traffic camera picked him up on August twentieth, entering the service lane. The time stamp puts him inside the building for about eleven minutes.”
I stopped moving my hand.
“Before the stage mark moved,” I said.
“Exactly. Enough time to walk the wing and confirm the line of sight. He wasn’t there to work. He was there to measure.”
“Roles are separating cleanly,” Michael said.
I picked up my pencil lying beside the floor plan. “Go on.”
“Micah is the weapon arm. Devereaux is the distraction arm. Bridget supplied the intelligence.” A pause. “Henri coordinates. He designed the entire thing and remains outside of it.”
I wrote the names in a column. Seeing them in my handwriting clarified the structure.
I leaned back against the counter. “What else?”
“Nothing that tells us precisely how the trigger sequence works,” he said. “It’s only confirmation that pieces are moving into position. I doubt we’ll see the mechanism until it moves.”
“This kind of structure helps.”
“It’ll have to.” I heard typing on his end. “Whatever they’re planning, it’s built to execute fast. They won’t extend the exposure any longer than necessary.”
The line clicked dead.
I set the phone on the counter and continued looking at the diagram. I thought about the original mark for the podium, the one we’d moved six feet upstage into the shadow of the orchestra risers.
It was the one variable we’d successfully changed. Whether it would be enough depended on the assumption that the person holding the weapon would need at least a second to adjust when the position didn’t match the original plan.
Eamon entered from the courtyard. He took one look at my expression and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Michael?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What did he find?”
“Devereaux was inside the Orpheum on the twentieth.”
Eamon stopped pouring.
“Before we moved the mark,” I said.
He set the pot down slowly. “So, he was confirming the sightline.”
“That’s the most likely explanation.”
He carried his coffee to the table and leaned over the diagram.
“So,” he said after a moment.
“So,” I agreed.
He was quiet a little longer, following the pencil lines I’d drawn on the floor plan with his eyes. “We’ve got the shape.”
“But we’re still missing the exact mechanism.”
“We won’t have it until they move. That’s why you moved the mark when you did. Before we had confirmation. Before the picture was complete.”
“Yes.”
“Good work, Thiago.”
Eamon didn’t deliver compliments casually. I inclined my head.
He tapped the balcony on the floor plan. “I’ll be in the upper level. If Devereaux approaches a device there, I’ll see it.”
“Local law enforcement?”
“We’ve already arranged for a plainclothes officer in the house. Briefed and positioned in the third row of the house seats, left aisle.” He moved his finger to the stage-right wing. “You stay here.”
“Twelve feet from Micah’s likely position.”
“Approximately.” He looked at me. “You don’t move until he commits.”
“I understand.”
The landline phone rang in the front hall.
Luca appeared in the kitchen doorway a moment later. He’d clearly been on his way to bed; his shirt was untucked and he was carrying his watch loosely in one hand. He went to the phone and lifted the receiver.
“Yes?”
I followed to observe from a comfortable distance. Dominic joined us. Luca listened.
He covered the mouthpiece. “Dominic. It’s Celeste.”
Dominic extended his hand and took the receiver. “Yes, Celeste.”
We could hear the tone of her voice from across the room. Warm, but pointed.
Dominic listened. He smiled briefly.
“Backstage?” he asked.
I signaled for Eamon to join me.
Dominic listened for a few more seconds. “I see,” he said calmly.
He lowered the receiver and looked at me. “Celeste would like backstage access tomorrow evening.”
“For herself?” I asked.
“And a guest.”
“Name?”
Dominic returned the receiver to his ear. “Celeste,” he said, with the gentle patience of a man who had been having this kind of conversation with her for fifty years, “Thiago would like to know the name of your guest.”
He listened.
The faint smile returned. “She would prefer not to say.”
“That won’t work.”
Dominic relayed the statement. Celeste’s reply was audible across the kitchen, not the words, but the texture.
Dominic exhaled through his nose. “Celeste has supported this orchestra for three decades,” he said to me.
“She has attended more backstage gatherings than most of the musicians who perform in the concerts. If she wishes to bring a guest to the greenroom before the concert, I see no reason to refuse.”
“I can’t approve access for someone we can’t identify. Not tomorrow night.”
“She is not applying for a security clearance,” Dominic said. “She is asking for courtesy extended to a trusted friend.”
“Courtesy doesn’t change the risk profile of an unvetted individual in a restricted space.”
Celeste spoke again on the other end of the line. Dominic listened and nodded. “We will discuss it in the morning.”
He hung up.
Eamon lifted his mug. “Interesting request for the evening before a concert.”
“Yes,” I said.
Dominic tucked his shirt in. “She is, occasionally, spectacularly stubborn,” he said. “It’s one of her finer qualities.” He turned toward the hall. “Goodnight, gentlemen. I’m retiring to the study for the rest of my evening. Try to get some sleep.”
He went upstairs.
Eamon turned toward the kitchen. “I’m going to review the balcony angles again on the floor plan,” he said.
Luca turned his head and inclined it toward the courtyard. I followed. He settled into one of the wrought-iron chairs, and I sat across from him.
“You’re somewhere else,” he said.
“I’m thinking about the moment.”
“Which moment?”
“When it happens. The concert. How it will unfold.”
“I wonder if I will look away.”
I nodded.
“Is that what happened in the Army?” Luca asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Did you look away at the wrong time?”
I held his gaze for a few seconds and then looked down. Luca was patient. I exhaled and leaned forward, my hands on my knees.
“It didn’t really happen like that. There was a sequence of events.”
He waited for me to continue.
“Afghanistan. Eastern mountains. Dry air, the kind that cracks lips. Our unit was attached to a convoy escort that day. It was a routine movement.”
An image of the valley we traveled through unfolded in my mind.
“Two vehicles ahead of us hit a roadside device. A dull thump first, then dust lifting off the road in a slow gray cloud. Not large enough to destroy them, but large enough to stop the column. Standard protocol was to secure the perimeter, wait for the ordnance team, and hold position.”
“And that’s what you did?”
“Yes, for about four minutes.” I looked at my hands on the table. “There was a village about three hundred meters up the slope. Mud walls. A line of low houses climbing the hill.”
Luca leaned back slightly.
“We could see movement in it. Some people were trying to pull other people inside quickly. There were men taking positions along the upper wall.” I stopped briefly.
“They were about to set mortar tubes, sufficient to take us out. Once they had us pinned at the vehicles, the convoy would have no angle on them.”
“You were certain,” Luca said.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Pattern recognition,” I said. “I’d seen the same thing twice before in different places.”
Luca nodded once.
“I had a line up the slope. If I moved fast enough, I could get inside the village before they finished setting the second tube.” I paused. “The plan we were supposed to follow was to wait for the ordnance team. Secure the vehicles. Return fire if attacked.”
“But you’d already calculated that waiting made it worse.”
“Yes.”
He looked at me steadily. “So you left the perimeter.”
“I left the perimeter.”
I listened to the fountain running.
“I reached the first house as they were setting the second tube,” I said. “I stopped them.”
“How.”
I looked at him again. “With persuasion.”
The corner of Luca’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile.
“The convoy finished clearing the road about ten minutes later,” I said. “No mortars. Our column moved out intact.”
“You saved them.”
“I violated protocol.”
“But—“
“Protocol matters when you’re writing the report.” I straightened in my chair. “Command’s position was that I created an unauthorized exposure and introduced a variable that could have compromised the entire operation.”
“Could it have?”
I’d thought it over countless times. “If I’d been wrong about what I saw, yes. The convoy could have lost a man in a dangerous position, but I wasn’t wrong.”
Luca exhaled.
“Is that why you’re here now?” he asked finally. “With The Guardians.”
“Yes.”
“Because you moved to protect everyone.”
“Yes. And because Eamon asked me what the job of protection was, and I gave the answer they wanted to hear.”
“You would do it again,” Luca said.
“Yes,” I said. “I would.”
Luca stood. “Come with me.”
“Where?”
“The salon.”
He led me down the hallway, but stopped at the foot of the stairs. “One moment,” he said, and went up.
I heard his footsteps cross the floor above me. He came back down carrying the paper sleeve I’d seen in his room and held it up toward the lamp as he passed me.
“Iko Iko,” he said. “The Dixie Cups.”
He led me to the salon and crouched beside a cabinet beneath the tall windows, lifting a record player out with both hands.
Dominic’s voice from the doorway startled us. “I was wondering when you’d find that again.”
“You never use it,” Luca said, still crouching.
“I enjoy knowing it’s there.” Dominic moved to the chair beside the window, crossed his legs, and settled into a comfortable posture.
Eamon appeared behind him in the hallway.
“And I thought you’d gone to bed,” Luca said to Dominic.
“And miss something of consequence?”
Eamon glanced at the record player and seated himself on the piano bench without saying a word.
Luca placed the record on the turntable. He addressed the room. “My grandmother, on my mother’s side, loved this, and I found it one day while rummaging through an estate sale.” He lowered the needle, and the opening percussion drifted through the room like a warm Gulf breeze.
“My sister loves this song,” Eamon said. “When we were kids, she played it constantly.”
A rare smile animated Dominic’s face. He said nothing.
The record reached the end, and Luca lifted the needle, then set it back down at the beginning. This time he didn’t remain still. He moved with the rhythm, nothing elaborate, just a loose shift through his shoulders and hips that followed the beat.
He danced alone for about five seconds. Then he looked at Eamon and reached out, catching his wrist.
“Absolutely not,” Eamon said.
“Yes.”
“I do not dance.”
“Tonight you do.”
“I want it on record that I disagree with this entirely.”
Luca pulled him forward.
Eamon resisted momentarily, but then he gave up. He moved stiffly at first, but the room was warm and the song was simple. It didn’t take long before the tension in his shoulders relaxed. By the second chorus, he was smiling.
Dominic sang along from his chair. Softly, and perfectly on pitch.
The song ended, and Luca lowered the needle again without pausing. The opening rhythm broke through a third time, and Eamon looked at me.
“You too,” he said.
“I don’t dance.”
“Neither do I.” He took my arm.
I was awkward at first. The music demanded an unfamiliar form of movement. I did my best to follow Luca. He reached out for my hand and laughed.
The four of us moved around the salon, popping our hips and waving hands in the air, while Dominic sang. New Orleans had been dancing at much worse moments for three hundred years.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
I glanced down at the screen and immediately stopped dancing.
Michael: Devereaux purchased second wireless detonator component. This morning. Same supplier.
The song played for a few more seconds before Luca noticed my expression. He crossed the room in three steps and lifted the needle. The record kept turning, with the motor’s low hum steady beneath the silence. I turned the phone so that he could read the screen.
Tomorrow night was coming whether or not we were ready.