Chapter 17 #2
The accusation has survived the marriage, the identified observer, and every fact showing both delegations were targeted. He believes I staged the shooting to escape his daughter. Giving me the travel file would reveal routes he assumes I still want to steal.
"Then anything he does with the documents you conceal belongs to you."
"Threats won't alter my answer."
"You mistook responsibility for a threat." I end the call before anger makes me order retaliation my people would have to carry out tonight.
The patriarch's daughter calls back on a separate channel less than a minute later.
Her face fills the screen now. She has moved into a corridor beyond her father's room, leaving the door closed behind her.
"He won't release the file while he believes the shooting was yours," she says. "The identities were divided between customs, rail crews, vessel access, and bonded freight. I can reconstruct more of them from the local authorization records."
"Can you do that without alerting him?"
"I can begin. If I find another identity, you'll receive it before he does.
" She asks for the transit image. I send it through the protected channel, along with the time stamps from both gates.
Her attention fixes on the screen when she sees the man alter his appearance beneath a system belonging to her family.
"He always believed rules were for people less clever than he thought he was," she says.
"Find the file."
"I intend to."
The call closes.
I return to the score message. The sender used relays in three countries, none of which narrows his location for a strike. The image metadata has been stripped. Compression marks show it passed through at least one editing program before the app received it.
The relays and stripped metadata leave me with no location or person my men can pursue.
Not knowing how he obtained the photograph makes both guarded gates feel useless. Stone and glass cannot protect Nora from a camera we cannot locate.
I order every vehicle changed before morning.
Nora's routes will be rebuilt with departure windows known only to the driver after she enters the car.
The miniature-golf venue joins the compromised-location list. Staff access at the residence will be reviewed again, with personal devices kept beyond the interior checkpoints.
"She doesn't return to the clinic," I say.
Nora answers from the doorway behind me. "She does."
I turn.
She wears loose gray trousers and one of my black sweaters, the sleeves folded above her wrists.
Her hair remains damp from the shower, and the soft domestic sight looks out of place under the hard security-room lights.
More troubling, nobody warned me she was approaching.
I have begun assuming the residence is an impenetrable wall instead of a house full of doors people can open.
"You should be asleep."
"Your side of the bed has been empty for two hours."
The security chief steps away from the console. "I'll send the new vehicle plan."
"Stay," Nora says. She walks to the screen before he can leave, looking first at the photograph, then the numbers under it. "Is that the real score?"
"Yes."
"How did he get it?"
"We don't know yet." I show her the flat through the recorded body-camera feed. She watches the empty rooms without speaking. Her arms fold beneath her chest when the transit image appears.
"You found him."
"We found where he was this morning."
"That's closer than yesterday."
"He also demonstrated access to our private movements."
She reads the message again. Her arms unfold and both hands grip the edge of the console. When she looks up, fear has sharpened into anger. "You can't answer this by taking away everything outside the house."
"I can remove you from the places he expects."
"For how long?"
I can't tell her when the restrictions would end. Not until he is found, every port identity is exposed, and nobody can stand beyond a window and photograph her.
I say none of it. Nora waits through my silence without looking away.
"I'll miss tomorrow if you can't clear the route in time," she says. "I won't abandon my job for the rest of this search. We wrote the difference between protection and confinement into the contract."
"A contract doesn't make you safe."
"Neither does pretending this house can."
The empty flat remains behind her. Her accuracy does nothing to reduce the force driving me to lock every gate.
I go to her. My hands close around her upper arms before I decide to touch her. She allows it, then steps nearer until her forehead rests against my chest.
"I need you alive," I say into her damp hair.
"Then make the route safer. Don't make my life smaller."
My first impulse is to refuse. The next is to assign a small army until her clinic becomes a fortified building. Either response would place my fear above the life she asked me to preserve.
I look toward the security chief. "Clear one route by noon. Vary every approach. She returns only after he confirms it."
Nora's arms move around my waist. Neither of us smiles.
A man watched us through glass, left a warm apartment before my team arrived and then crossed a station under a name his own family refuses to provide.
Money hasn't located him. Guards haven't kept his eyes away from my wife. The home I built to make danger stop at two gates contains a screen carrying proof that he has entered our private days.
The message waits above the photograph of Nora smiling at me, unaware a stranger had framed her through glass.
Forty-one to forty-four.
Does he know how to lose yet?
The empty flat proves he expected pursuit.