CHAPTER 4 #3
At the end of the tour she opens a door on the upper hall — we have climbed one short interior stair from the Great Room to floor forty-six, where the bedrooms live.
"The guest suite," she says. "Your room.
The door locks from the inside. The window does not open.
" She pauses. "Ms. Quinn. The penthouse is, for the next seventy-two hours minimum, the safest building in this city.
Outside it, you would already be dead by tonight.
I tell you that not to frighten you. I tell you that so you do not waste the seventy-two hours pretending I am lying. "
"I know you're not lying," I say.
"Bien," she says. She nods once. "Dinner at seven. Mr. Vance will want to speak to you in the morning. Henrik is in the hall if you need anything. The kitchen is yours."
"Adrienne — "
She stops in the door.
"Atticus."
"Yes."
"Did he go to him?"
She holds my eyes for one beat.
"He went to him at thirteen-hundred. The email went out at thirteen-oh-three.
I had it at thirteen-oh-four. Mr. Vance had it at fourteen-thirty-one.
The fact that you are in this room and not in a black bag at the bottom of the harbor is because I picked up the phone and Mr. Vance came down the corridor at fifteen-hundred. Atticus is no longer on the team."
"Is he alive."
"He is alive," Adrienne says, "for now. That is Mr. Vance's call to make, not mine."
She closes the door.
---
The guest suite is cream walls and a queen four-poster and a fireplace banked low. Gas. A small writing desk under a small window. A bath I have not been into. A cream wool blanket folded at the end of the bed. The window does not open.
I sit on the edge of the bed in my dove-gray wool trousers and my cream silk blouse with the rain-dark hem.
I unbutton the second button of the blouse.
I slide the USB-C stick out from under the wire of my bra at the left ribs.
I lift the corner of the mattress at the head of the bed and slide the stick in along the box-spring seam, two inches deep, where any sweep of a hand under the edge would not feel it.
Somewhere below me, in a room I do not see, on a console I do not know, a small green light on a feed marked GUEST SUITE 45 goes dark for one second and comes back without recording the second.
I do not know that. I do not need to.
I pull the brass pencil from my right pocket. I turn the cap. On. Off. On. Off.
I say, aloud, to the empty cream room:
"Mr. Vance, you have made a mistake. You have brought an auditor into your house."
I sit a long moment. The cap is on, off, on, off under my thumb.
"And I have come."
The rain outside is the only weather there is.
---
Julian poured himself a measure of Hennessy Paradis.
He did not drink it. He set the glass on the teak desk of his office on floor thirty-five, beside the green-shaded library lamp, beside the leather corner of the ledger he had not opened today and would not open.
The city through the window was rain-streaked granite at dusk, the harbor a slate plate, the cold pressing on the glass from the outside as it had pressed on glass under his hand in every winter for five hundred years.
He had brought a forensic auditor into his house, and not for the variance.
He had brought her for the way she read ledgers.
He had heard her speak to her junior at thirteen-hundred — Henrik's grace, the parabolic feed from the bullpen he had agreed to in 2019 and used twice in five years until this week, when he had used it twice in three days.
Print and walk, Pip. The line had been in his head for the two hours between then and Adrienne's call, when Adrienne had said his name in the clipped Parisian-French way she only ever used to wake him.
He had not chosen the auditor for what she would find. He had chosen her because she was the kind of person who would look.
And now the kind of person who would look was alone in the guest suite of his penthouse, the USB-C stick under the mattress (he had seen the small motion of her hand on the surveillance feed and he had reached over with his left hand and turned off the feed at that moment, because there was a way of looking at her that he was not going to permit himself yet, and possibly not at all), and Konstantin Voss was alive and seventy-six years invested in keeping her from looking, and Julian Vance, who had not been audited in five centuries — not by a council notary, not by a mortal regulator, not by his own seconds — was going to do the audit himself, and the auditor was a forensic surgeon with a chestnut nape and a brass pencil and a freckle at the corner of her jaw, and he had wanted to put his mouth on it the first time she had said screaming red flag at his board, and the brand under the cuff of his shirt was, at this moment, the temperature of a tomb.
He pressed the inside of his left forearm with his right palm. The silver wheel under the wool of his sleeve did not warm. It had not warmed in five hundred years. He had not asked it to warm.
He was, he was, he was — he set the Hennessy back on the desk untouched.
He was going to keep her alive.
The rest he would not yet decide.