CHAPTER 24 #3
If the doorman was a closed door, then the door was Julian Cyrus Vance himself.
The frontal assault was the answer because it was the only assault that bypassed the auditor entirely.
He did not need to kill the auditor first. He needed to kill Julian Cyrus Vance, and the auditor's testimony would be valueless to the council because the council would not seat a stripped seat against a dead monarch's empire; the council would seat Konstantin's own ally into Julian's vacancy by the seventy-two-hour rule and the audit would be archived and Konstantin would be on the council until the next century closed.
He would need a team of eight. He would need silver-tipped ammunition for Sebastian Crowe and Henrik Brann.
He would need the saber for Julian Cyrus Vance personally.
He would not let a junior soldier put a round into Julian Cyrus Vance; he would do it himself with the Tatar blade at the throat, as he should have done in 1948 when he had first taken the bond out of the dead Polish banker's case and had thought about who in the American council might have such an architecture to lay it on.
He recalculated as the launch crossed the cold middle of the harbor.
He would prefer Sunday, before the council could convene a clause-four emergency vote; he would settle for Monday if the ammunition required the extra hours.
The Helmsmouth supplier he had used in 2014 was dead.
The New York supplier he kept on retainer would need eight hours to fulfill the silver-tipped order at the volume he required.
He was, by eighteen hundred, certain he would die in the attack.
The calculation was clean. Julian Cyrus Vance had three centuries on him in continuous governance of an empire, and the small difference in continuity of command was the small difference that would, in a knife-room, decide the room.
Julian would have Sebastian at his left.
Konstantin would not have anyone at his left of equivalent calibre.
He was, however, more certain that Julian would die first.
The auditor was in his head.
She had stood behind Julian's chair yesterday morning in the convocation chamber in the black wool dress, and she had not flinched when she had seen Atticus at the staff side of the long mahogany table, and she had not flinched when Julian had risen and walked the three paces to her and kissed her at the council's witnessing length, and she had not flinched at the diction — she is mine; the council will note it.
She had set her face the way she had set her face her whole career. She had read the room.
He had read her. He had read her wrong. He had read a careful instrument, and he had received a woman who would, by tomorrow's nightfall, have her brass mechanical pencil on a black marble table beside Reginald Hawkes's Mont Blanc and Helene Marchetti's cobalt enamel nursing pin and her own audit-hash chain projected on a twenty-by-thirty wall behind her in tight monospace at ninety-nine-point-four percent confidence interval, and she would say, in the forensic register she went to when she was frightened, the precise unit of his destruction.
He would not let her say it.
He turned the black opal of the signet on his right index finger inward, so the stone sat in the pit of his palm and not on the dorsum of his hand, and he closed the hand.
The pad of his thumb pressed the stone. The stone was cold in the closed hand.
The harbor was cold against the cabin window.
The contractor's confirmation text — the single character D — was face-down on the bench beside him under his right thigh.
The launch ran. The lights of Helmsmouth came up across the dark water and the lights of the financial district came up beyond the lights of the docks and the granite spike of Vance Tower stood among the lights at the harbor edge with its forty-fifth and forty-sixth floors lit at the southeast and southwest corners against the dark — the auditor's lights, Julian Cyrus Vance's lights, the lights of a cage Konstantin Voss had not entered in twenty-three years and would enter, by his calculation, in less than forty-eight hours, by a frontal assault he would not survive.
He opened the closed hand. The black opal had warmed against his palm. He looked at it.
"Wren," he said.
"Yes, darling."
"The New York supplier. Silver-tipped, nine millimetre, two hundred rounds. Silver-tipped forty-five A. C. P., one hundred rounds. Have it at the Helmsmouth office by oh-three-hundred Sunday."
"Yes, darling."
"Eight men, the Boston roster. The ones I used in 2014. The two Boston men who survived. Six fresh contractors from the European desk. The brief is Vance Tower lobby through floor thirty-five, frontal."
"Yes, darling."
"The Tatar saber to be at my hip."
"Yes, darling."
"Sunday night."
"Sunday night."
He turned the black opal back outward on his finger so the stone sat on the dorsum of the hand again.
The stone was warm now. He set the right hand on the bench beside his thigh, palm down, the signet up, the opal catching the small cold light from the cabin's running lamp and throwing a small dark-red glint against the dark of the cabin's varnished wood — a small glint that held there, alone, the only thing in the cabin that did not move, the auditor in his head.