CHAPTER 24 #2
The fire snapped once at the south wall.
The cut-crystal tumblers on the carafe did not move.
Konstantin watched Julian's mouth at the corner where, in mortals he had known and in vampires he had killed, the small pre-tell of an answer always rose.
Julian's mouth did not move. The pale gray eyes held on Konstantin without darkening, without widening, without the small change in pupil he had been watching for at his throat at the council table for one hundred and forty-two years.
"You will not have my seat," Julian said. "You will not have her."
Konstantin touched the corners of his mouth with the pad of his right thumb — a small dry-press, the gesture he had been making before every lie he had told for six centuries, a gesture he allowed himself because the truth was that he did not lie often enough for any living counterparty to have catalogued it.
He did not lie now, in fact. He let the gesture pass anyway. The gesture was the courtesy.
"Then I will take Marcus Hale first," he said. "As a courtesy to the audit chain you've built. We will see what your mortal-evidence looks like when its custodian is dead."
The pale gray eyes did not move from his face. The cold off Julian Cyrus Vance dropped the room temperature by perhaps half a degree; the fire at the south wall registered the drop and burnt with the slightly more visible flame a low fire produced when the air around it cooled.
"If you touch Marcus Hale," Julian said, "you will be hunted to ground."
Konstantin permitted himself the small slow smile he had earned through six centuries of being correctly assessed by men he had then outlasted.
"I have been hunted before, Julian. I have outlasted hunters. I will outlast you. Tomorrow morning's vote will be moot by tomorrow's nightfall."
He rose. He moved his right hand from the marble, and as the hand left the stone the black opal's small dark-red glint went out, and the matte of the marble was matte again, and the fire's low red was only the fire's low red and not a thing thrown into the room by his ring.
He walked the four paces to the door. He paused at the door with his left hand on the brass of the latch.
He did not turn fully. He turned the head three-quarters back, the silver-blond hair past the shoulder catching the fire's low red as the hair fell across the left shoulder of the black brocade jacket.
"The auditor is very impressive," he said. "I will be disappointed when I have to be done with her. Quietly, I hope. She has earned that much."
He did not wait for Julian Cyrus Vance to answer. He went out.
---
Atticus was in the corridor at two paces clear, the phone in the left hand, the right hand at the breast pocket of the tweed.
Adrienne Roux stood three paces past Atticus, the black pearls at her throat catching the corridor light, the pale gray-blue eyes flat.
Sebastian Crowe stood at the threshold of the small parlor at one pace's remove, the right hand at the hip where the Sig P229 lived under the suit.
Henrik Brann stood at Sebastian's left shoulder, the platinum-blond head still, the eyes ice.
None of them had moved or spoken. None of them would.
Konstantin nodded.
Atticus dialed.
The line connected at eleven thirty-two.
Konstantin did not wait for confirmation of the connection.
He walked the length of the corridor toward the staircase.
He heard, behind him, the soft academic murmur of Atticus's voice giving the contractor in Helmsmouth the address of the Wren-Hale Forensic Group at 200 Fitzroy Street, fourth floor, the office of Marcus Hale, and the operational window of fourteen hundred.
He did not turn. He did not need to hear the words.
He had drafted them himself the night before.
He went down to his suite and waited.
---
At fourteen forty-two his phone, on the small ebonized table beside the cooled coffee, vibrated once.
Atticus had set the contractor's confirmation to come through Atticus's encrypted handle and forward to Konstantin's device with the single character D.
Konstantin read the D. He set the phone face-down on the marble.
He thought of Marcus Hale, whom he had never met.
He had read Marcus Hale's quarterlies. He had read the engagement letter Marcus Hale had signed with Eliza Quinn on the Monday afternoon of November the eighteenth, the small careful signature at the bottom of the page in a fountain pen Marcus Hale had used since the late 1990s.
The pen, like the man, had been a careful instrument. The pen, like the man, was now done.
He did not feel anything in particular about it.
Marcus Hale had been the custodian of the audit chain, and the custodian of a thing one wished destroyed was destroyed first. It was procedure.
He had no quarrel with Marcus Hale. He had only the procedural necessity, and the procedural necessity was now satisfied.
---
At sixteen hundred the water-taxi he kept on the council retainer — a thirty-foot black launch with a closed cabin — was waiting at the Tessellate's east pier.
Konstantin walked the crushed-shell path to the pier with the Tatar saber at his hip and Atticus at one pace behind his left shoulder and the cold of the December afternoon settling into the brocade of his jacket. The harbor chop was gray and uniform.
He boarded. He sat in the cabin's port-side bench. Atticus sat opposite. The captain put the launch out. The Tessellate fell behind, and by a mile out the white granite of the mansion against the black slate of the roof was nothing.
The seat was already lost. The vote was at eleven the next morning and he would not attend it; his absence would by protocol delay the vote until Monday, and Monday's vote would go six-two-one against him whether he was in the chamber or not.
Seventy-six years of architecture would be unwound in the next ten days by Adrienne Roux and the auditor and the London chambers, and the Polish bearer bond serial 4719-22-X-PL would be entered into the council register as evidence and into the mortal register as a stolen instrument, and the whole thing would be done.
He thought of the auditor.
The auditor would testify against him in mortal evidence even after the seat-strip.
The clause-four vote on Friday would refer the mortal exposure to the SEC and to the Department of Justice; the auditor's testimony would be the spine of every filing.
He must kill her tonight or tomorrow night.
The apartment on Hawthorne Avenue would be defended by Sebastian Crowe's people in numbers he could not match.
The Vance Tower lobby was held by Henrik Brann with three permanent men and a rotating eight.
The Wren-Hale office was now, after the contractor, full of Helmsmouth Metro detectives.
The penthouse, then. The penthouse was on the forty-fifth and forty-sixth floors of Vance Tower, accessed by one private elevator, biometric, five enrolled palms. He could not bribe the doorman; the doorman had been Julian Cyrus Vance's since 1981 and had stood through the 1993, 2002, and 2014 attempts without taking a dollar from anyone but Julian. The doorman was a closed door.
He thought longer. He let the harbor go past the cabin window.