Chapter 7 #2
The security guard came around the corner of the container stack at a pace that said he had been watching me for longer than I had been watching the warehouse.
He was large – not my size, but close – and he was wearing the dark jacket and earpiece of a man who was professionally employed to be in this exact place at this exact time.
He did not shout. He did not speak. He walked directly at me and his hand was reaching for my arm.
I moved.
The ribs objected. The ribs objected with a white-hot line of pain that ran from my left side to my spine and I moved anyway because the alternative was standing still while a man with an earpiece put his hands on me and asked questions I could not answer.
I went left – between the containers, the gap narrow enough that my shoulders brushed both sides, the corrugated steel cold against my jacket.
Behind me, boots on concrete. He was following.
I ran. The running was bad. Every stride sent the pain through my side like a blade turning, and I could feel the ribs – the cracked ones, the ones the doctor had said would take six weeks and it had been four – grinding against each other with the deep agony of bone that has not finished healing being asked to do the work of bone that has.
I ran along the container row, turned right at the end, and hit the sea wall.
The sea wall was four feet high. I went over it without thinking – hands on the wet stone, the vault of my body over the edge, the drop to the harbour path below.
The landing sent the pain through me in a single bright wave and something tore – not the ribs, the skin.
My forearm caught the wall’s edge on the way over.
The stone was rough, barnacled, and it opened a gash from my elbow to my wrist that I felt as heat before I felt as pain.
I kept moving. The harbour path ran along the waterfront back to the Hook.
Three hundred yards. I covered them at a pace that was not running and was not walking and was the compromised gait of a man whose body was sending him urgent messages about the inadvisability of what he was doing, and I ignored every message because the alternative was worse.
The Hook’s kitchen door. I got through it. I locked it behind me. I stood in the dark kitchen with my hand on the counter and my ribs shrieking and blood running down my right forearm onto the floor.
I pressed a bar towel against the cut. The towel was white. It turned red.
Morven found me twenty minutes later. She came in through the front – she had a key, she had always had a key – and she found me sitting on a bar stool in the dark with the bloody towel pressed against my arm and the map still spread on the bar and my breathing doing the controlled thing it did when I would not let it do the uncontrolled thing.
She did not speak. She looked at the towel. She looked at my face. She crossed to the bar, took the first aid kit from the shelf where it had lived for fifteen years, and she opened it on the bar beside the map and she began to clean the wound.
Her hands were steady. Dancer’s hands. The hands of a woman who controlled every muscle in her body as a matter of professional discipline, applied now to the task of cleaning gravel out of a gash in a man’s forearm while he sat on a bar stool and breathed through his teeth.
“You need stitches,” she said.
“No hospital.”
“Al–”
“No hospital. Hospital means questions. Questions mean records. Records mean a man with an earpiece can find out that Alastair Rae was on the dock road tonight and connect that to the Syndicate’s interest in the warehouses.”
She looked at me. The looking was not agreement.
It was the assessment of a woman deciding whether to override a man’s decision about his own body.
She decided not to. She cleaned the wound.
She closed it with butterfly strips from the kit – four of them, precise, the white adhesive bright against the blood – and she wrapped it in gauze and she taped the gauze and she did all of this without speaking because the silence was its own conversation: I am angry.
I am here. I am not going to say the thing I want to say because saying it will not change what you did and will only make us both feel worse.
“How many?” she said.
“One. Security. Professional. Earpiece.”
“He followed you?”
“He tried.”
She put the first aid kit away. She stood behind the bar and looked at me and her face carried the expression of a woman who loved a man who did stupid, brave things with a damaged body and who would continue doing them because he did not know another way.
“Lachlan needs to know,” she said.
“I’m going to the study now.”
“You’re going to the study with a bandaged arm and cracked ribs and an explanation that starts with ‘I went to the dock road alone at dusk.’”
“Aye.”
She almost smiled. The almost-smile was worse than the anger – it was the acknowledgement that she knew me, and the knowing included the parts that frightened her, and the frightening parts were not going away.
Lachlan’s study. That evening.
I stood by the desk and laid it out. The map. The property acquisitions. The planning committee. The harbour master lunches. I laid it out the way I laid everything out for Lachlan – in order, with evidence, without editorialising. He listened. He looked at the map. He looked at it for a long time.
“He’s not after the ports,” Lachlan said. His voice was low, careful. “Those are a distraction.”
I waited.
“He’s after the Ledger.”
The study was cold. The fire had been lit but the heat had not reached the corners of the room. The map sat between us with its three red dots and its Ordnance Survey contours and the weight of a city’s geography reduced to paper and ink.
“The properties are leverage,” Lachlan said. “He’s creating the conditions under which the Syndicate’s operational model becomes untenable. If the routes are disrupted, the Ledger’s guarantee network fails. If the guarantee network fails, the debts default. And if the debts default–”
“The Ledger loses its authority.”
“Yes.” He looked at me. “And a Ledger without authority is a book. A book can be acquired.”
I understood. Mackie was not going to steal the Ledger. He was going to make it worthless and then offer to buy what remained. It was a corporate strategy applied to a criminal institution, and it was elegant in a way that made my ribs ache more than the cracking had.
“How long?” I said.
“If the planning approvals go through? Six months. Perhaps less.”
Fergus arrived at the Hook at eleven that night.
He came in through the back, the way he always came – through the kitchen entrance, past the bins, up the back stairs – because Fergus had spent five years as McInnis’s man and was now spending his first months as ours, and men in transition used back doors.
He was thin. He had always been thin, but the thinness had changed since the Wager. It was sharper now. The thinness of a man who slept badly and ate when he remembered and lived with the knowledge that the side he had chosen was the side that would have to prove itself.
He sat across from me in the Hook’s back room. The room smelled of old carpet and the ghost of a hundred years of spilled lager. Fergus held his coffee in both hands and did not drink it.
“Mackie has someone,” he said. “Inside. Not a plant – a recruit. Someone already in the Syndicate’s orbit. Someone with direct knowledge of the vault.”
“The Iron Vault?”
“He knows where the Ledger is kept. He knows the access protocol. He knows the code system.” Fergus looked at his coffee.
“The leak hasn’t happened yet. Mackie is patient.
He’ll wait until the Ledger’s position is weak enough that accessing it matters.
But the channel is there. The person is identified. ”
“Who?”
Fergus shook his head. “I don’t know. My source wouldn’t give a name.
Only that it’s someone with interior access.
Someone who has been inside the vault.” He looked at his coffee again.
His hands were wrapped around the mug and the knuckles were white and I did not know whether that was cold or tension or both.
“Mackie’s patient. He won’t move on the vault until the Ledger’s position is weak enough that accessing it matters.
But the channel is built. The person is identified. The recruitment is done.”
The back room was silent. The Hook creaked around us – the building’s old joints shifting in the cold, the sound of a pub that had been standing since before either of us was born.
Somewhere above us, the bar sign swung in the wind off the Clyde, the hinges groaning in their rhythmic, familiar way.
I had heard that sound every night for fifteen years. It was the sound of home.
I looked at Fergus and he looked at me and we sat with the weight of what he had just said.
Someone inside. Someone who knew the vault. Someone who had been recruited by a man whose strategy was to make the Ledger worthless and then acquire it.
I put my coffee down. The mug made a small sound against the wooden table.
“Does Lachlan know?”
“You’re the first person I’ve told.”
I would tell Lachlan in the morning. Tonight I would sit in the Hook and think.
The Hook smelled of old wood and cold beer and the salt air that came through the gaps in the window frames, and it was the closest thing to a home I had outside of Crag Manor, and now a man I had never met was drawing a line around it on a planning map.
My ribs ached. The bone, remembering.