CHAPTER 14 #2
“Does anyone at the bank know it was made?”
“There is nothing in the system that says so.”
“Zug is where the risk vendor sits,” Luca said. “The one whose invoices say asset recovery.”
“It is the same jurisdiction, and I am not going to call that a coincidence,” Sasha said.
I made myself keep my voice down. “Say the last part again for me. Say it as a fact about them and not as a warning to us.”
Sasha turned the tablet around so I could see it. “They own the only way into that building that we would use. They have owned it since Thursday and they have not touched it since. Whatever the roster is for, it is not for going in.”
“It is for catching somebody on their way in,” I said.
“That is my reading and I will put it in writing.”
“Put it in writing on the second page, in your words rather than mine,” I said. “I want it to be yours when a lawyer reads it back out loud to a jury.”
Cassian looked at the tablet and then at Sasha for a long moment. “The approach model is dead and we do not resurrect it,” he said. “Nobody plans a route through that dock. Sasha keeps it under watch and tells me the day anything on it changes.”
“Understood,” she said, and went back to her desk, and that was the end of it, because he had not argued with her and neither had anyone else.
Luca was watching my hands rather than my face, which is his whole method. “You did not flinch at that,” he said.
“I have been reading their paperwork for six years and it always says asset recovery,” I said. “A thing that has never surprised me is not going to start now.”
That was not the entire truth and he probably knew it.
What was underneath it was a shape I had been turning over since the middle of the night, a shape with the wrong side out, and it was not ready to be said in a room with four professionals in it.
So I put it back where I keep things and asked the next question instead.
Cassian turned the paper around on the table so that it faced me.
He did it with the burned right hand and squared the top edge against the edge of the table before he let go of it.
Rian came off the screen wall and stood behind my chair and stayed there.
Luca closed his mouth and kept it closed, which from him is a donation of blood.
Matteo took the marker out of his shirt pocket and held it out and waited until I had taken it.
Cassian waited until every one of them had finished. “You have the room. Tell us what you want first and we will build backwards from it.”
I stood up, because standing is a position I take rather than a rest, and I worked them until the overheads had been on so long the room had no hour in it.
We took the route diagram off the whiteboard twice and put it back up wrong twice.
Nobody talked over me and nobody softened anything for me either, and I noticed the second thing far more than the first.
“Which door do you want,” Cassian said, “if that dock is closed to us?”
“I want a door that somebody else opens for me.”
“Say more than that.”
“I will, when I have got more than that to say.”
He looked at me for a moment longer than the answer needed. Then he wrote the word door on the board in block capitals and drew nothing next to it, and left it there for the rest of the afternoon.
On the screen wall the camera over the dock ramp showed a street that had been the same flat gray since first light, with no rain in it and no sun coming. The coffee scaled down to something that tasted of the machine’s own pipes.
The service elevator on fifty-nine is keyed and takes its twelve floors in ninety seconds.
Cassian turned the key and the car took our weight and settled on it before it moved at all.
There is no chime in that elevator. There is an interlock that knocks under the floor and a seal that lets go of the door frame with a sound like a jar opening, and then seventy-one, and then the mantrap, which takes one body at a time and will not open the second door until the first one is shut.
The long room was lit at one end only. It was early evening and the vault was doing the thing it does, which is to be quieter than any room that size has a right to be.
I went and took a shower and ran the water hotter than was sensible until the mirror had disappeared.
I stood in it long past the point of being clean, and I said the sentence to the tile twice, and it came out both times exactly the way I meant it.
When I came out they were all four in the long room, arranged the way they arrange themselves when they want it understood that nobody has been waiting.
Cassian was at the end of the table with his cuffs done.
Rian was against the wall by the corridor.
Luca had a glass of water he was not drinking and Matteo was in the chair nearest the door, at the distance he always keeps, which is exactly far enough to see all of it.
The gray key was against my sternum on its bootlace. I took the brass casing out of my pocket and closed my hand around it and let them see me do it. My mouth shaped the first three words before I gave them any air, which is a thing I have done since law school and have never managed to stop.
“I want all four of you in the room tonight. I want Cassian to run the order. I want Rian and Luca to have me, I want Matteo to sit where I can see him and not touch me, and I want to be holding the casing from the first minute to the last.”
The room did not move. Rian’s jaw worked once and he kept his hands exactly where they already were. Luca set the glass down on the table without once looking at where he was putting it. Cassian’s burned right hand opened and closed at his side, slowly, and I do not believe he knows he does it.
“And nobody asks me why about any of it in the morning.”
“You said it in order,” Luca said, “so we will do it in order, and I will not ask you a single thing tomorrow that I have not asked you tonight.”
“I have got no argument in me,” Rian said. “I would not use one on you if I had.”
Matteo did not say anything. He looked at me from the chair and kept looking, and he let me watch him keep looking. That was his answer, and I took it.
Cassian repeated it back to me in the exact order I had said it, and then he asked whether I wanted the lamp on or off.