Chapter 6
Bower arrived twenty minutes late to breakfast.
He stood at the buffet table with a full plate and addressed the room generally, explaining that he’d had a late call with the Toronto office, that the time difference on certain accounts created these situations, that he was sorry for the delay. He said this to no one in particular and to everyone simultaneously, his voice carrying that practiced ease that had nothing beneath it.
A man genuinely running late doesn’t narrate it. He eats quickly and says sorry once to the person beside him.
A man managing a specific timeline does exactly this.
She noted it and ate her eggs.
The morning session was Toronto supply chain restructuring. Lachlan ran it from the head of the table with the same controlled precision he brought to everything — questions sharp, responses absorbed and catalogued, no performance of authority because the authority was simply present. He asked Bower directly about the Toronto property accounts twenty minutes in.
“Clean. Audited last quarter.”
“Who ran the audit?”
“Marsden’s firm. Same as always.”
“I want the raw files.”
Bower’s pause was exactly one second too long. “I’ll have them pulled today.” The recovery was smooth — the voice didn’t waver, the body didn’t shift. But the pause was there, and it had a shape. A man with nothing to hide pauses for zero seconds because the answer is simple.
A man with something to hide pauses for the fraction of a moment it takes to calculate whether the thing being asked for will expose the thing he’s hiding, and whether there’s a way to be compliant and protective simultaneously.
She saw it. She did not look at Bower afterward, which was more useful than looking.
After the lunch break she walked to the east wing to retrieve the notebook she’d left in her room — a true errand, which she’d planned would be a true errand for exactly this reason. She moved through the corridor and stopped at the junction where the east wing split from a service passage.
Bower’s voice, coming from around the corner, low and deliberate.
She caught fragments. “No, not yet.” Then a pause for the other side of the call. Then: “The window tonight or it’s gone.” Then silence, the kind that comes when someone realizes they might be audible and stops.
She walked back to the main hall through a different route.
The afternoon session ran ninety minutes. She sat three chairs from Reyes and counted: eleven times in ninety minutes he checked his watch. Not the phone — the watch. A man checking messages reaches for the phone. A man counting toward a fixed point reaches for the watch because it gives him the exact thing he needs, which is how much time is left.
Faulk kept his jacket on throughout the session, despite the room being warm enough that two other men had taken theirs off. He shifted his weight to the right twice while seated, with the involuntary small adjustment of someone managing pressure from the left side — something pressing against his ribs under the fabric.
The two serving staff from the morning had been replaced by afternoon. She had noticed the originals: a young woman with a red hair tie, a heavyset man with a limp. The afternoon pair moved differently. More aware of where they were standing. They positioned themselves near exits rather than near service access, and when Lachlan moved to refill his glass at the sideboard, the nearer one tracked the movement with his eyes two beats too long.
She went to Lachlan’s room at four o’clock. Prout — his primary security, compact and professional — answered the knock.
“I need five minutes.”
“He’s preparing for dinner.”
“Tell him it’s the kind of thing that doesn’t wait for dinner.”
Prout closed the door. Opened it again thirty seconds later and stood aside.
Lachlan was at the writing desk, jacket off, a glass of water by his right hand. He looked at her with the same quality of attention she’d come to rely on — not reassuring, but absolutely present.
“Sit down. Talk.”
She sat. She talked.
She laid it out in sequence: Reyes counting down to a specific hour on his watch. Bower’s phone call fragment — “the window tonight or it’s gone.” Two serving staff replaced between sessions, moving with the geographic awareness of people who had learned the floor plan deliberately, positioning themselves near exits. A weapons case in the locked east corridor storage room, accessed within the last twenty-four hours.
“The storage room’s been locked since we arrived.”
“The combination is 1964. The lock has a grease pattern on four keys.” A pause. “I got in last night.”
He looked at her. Not surprise — something more controlled than surprise, but in the same neighborhood.
“I didn’t touch the case. But based on floor contact points and dimensions, it’s carrying weight consistent with at least four long firearms.”
Silence. He picked up his glass of water and set it down again without drinking.
She reached into the inner pocket of her jacket and set a phone on the writing desk. Small, prepaid, purchased at a shop on St. Denis two days before leaving Montreal. “Not connected to anything registered. I activated it last night.”
He looked at the phone. Looked at her. “I want you in my corridor.”
“I’ll be more useful in my own room.”
“I’m not asking for tactical reasons.”
She met that directly — let herself look at him for a moment, the closest thing she’d seen to unguarded on his face, and felt the weight of what it cost him to say it. “I know. But I need to be where I can see the east corridor. And I need what’s in that storage room to stay where it is until I know exactly when they’re going to move.”
“Don’t do anything without telling me first.”
She stood. She picked up her notebook.
“You came here expecting this,” he said.
“I came here prepared for it. There’s a difference.”
She walked to the door. Stopped. “Use the phone. Before they reach your room.”
She didn’t wait for an answer.
Dinner at seven thirty. The wine was poured generously — she touched her glass once and left it, noting that two other guests did the same, which meant the generosity was deliberate, which confirmed a certain kind of planning. Bower made three jokes, too loudly successful. At 9:47pm Reyes excused himself, explaining nothing, and did not return to the table.
She waited four minutes by the clock on the wall. Then she folded her napkin beside her plate and told Carver she had a headache.
“Go,” he said. It was not unkind.
She went.
The top of the east corridor staircase was wrong before she reached it.
Dark when it shouldn’t be. The wall sconces were on a timer, eleven o’clock, and it was not yet eleven. Both lights in the stretch between her room and the storage room were dead — not flickering, not dimmed, but completely absent. Two bulbs don’t go simultaneously by accident.
May you like
She stood at the top of the stairs and felt the specific sensation she had learned to recognize as information.
Somewhere below the house, a door was waiting to open.
