Chapter 3
Luca brought the keyboard in four minutes.
He also brought a monitor, an isolated laptop, and a folding chair, and he set the whole arrangement up on the long reading table against the north wall of the study without saying a word.
Luca never said many words. He had been with Dante since Luca was twenty-two and Dante was nineteen.
Anna sat down.
She did not roll up her sleeves. She did not crack her knuckles. She did not do any of the small performances the four specialists had done over the past eleven hours.
She placed her hands on the keyboard and began to type.
The sound filled the room immediately. It was not the hesitant rhythm of someone searching. It was a continuous, even cascade — the way rain sounds when it has committed to falling.
The woman from Tel Aviv rose from her chair and walked around the table to stand behind her. The man from Zurich followed. Within two minutes all four specialists were standing in a semicircle, watching the monitor.
The man from Zurich muttered something in German. It sounded like a prayer.
Dante remained in his chair.
He did not need to see the screen. He was watching her face.
She did not change expression. Her eyes moved in small, quick arcs. Her lips were slightly parted. Every few seconds she tilted her head half a degree to the left, as if the code were speaking to her and she were listening for a particular note.
Six minutes in, she stopped typing.
The specialists stiffened.
Then her fingers moved again — slower now, more deliberate, laying something down the way a person lays down a key before turning it.
At twelve minutes, the red light on the matte cube went dark.
A new light, cold white, came on in its place.
The woman from Tel Aviv exhaled a word that was not quite a word.
At fourteen minutes, lines of text began to scroll on the monitor. Columns. Dates. Account numbers. Routing codes. Transaction amounts in six currencies.
Dante stood up.
He walked around the desk, passed Marco, and stopped behind Anna’s shoulder.
Marco did not follow him.
Marco had gone very still beside the whiskey cart. His face, which had been flushed with argument half an hour earlier, was now the color of candle wax.
Dante read the first screen. Then the second.
The names of shell companies he recognized. Dates that corresponded to shipments he had authorized. And interleaved among them, dates and amounts he did not recognize at all — transactions that had moved through accounts he had never approved.
“Mrs. Carter.”
Her hands stopped.
“How much more is in there?”
“A great deal, Mr. Moretti.” Her voice was level. “The outer shell is open. That took fifteen minutes because I know the shell. The core is a different problem. It is layered. Each layer is keyed to a different variable. Some of the variables are time-based. I will need to work slowly. If I rush, the drive will burn itself.”
“How long?”
“Days. Possibly a week. Possibly less, if what I find early makes the rest easier.”
Dante did not answer immediately. He was looking at one particular line — an account number ending in four digits that he had seen before and could not yet place.
“Take the time you need.”
Behind him, Marco cleared his throat.
“Boss. I have to make a call. The men at the warehouse are waiting for word.”
Dante did not turn.
“Go.”
Marco went.
The study door closed behind him with a quiet click that sounded, to Anna, exactly like a lock.
The specialists were sent home at midnight.
The man from Zurich tried to protest. The woman from Tel Aviv took him by the elbow and walked him out without a word. All four left with envelopes thick enough to buy their silence twice over.
Sophie had been carried upstairs by one of the housekeepers an hour earlier. She had fallen asleep in the hallway with the cloth doll pressed to her cheek.
At ten past midnight, Dante asked Anna to come with him to the private library on the second floor.
It was a smaller room than the study. Two chairs, one lamp, a fireplace that was never lit.
He closed the door behind her and did not offer her a seat.
He stood with his back to the cold hearth and crossed his arms.
“Two questions, Mrs. Carter.”
Anna remained standing. Her hands were clasped loosely in front of her apron. She had not changed out of her uniform.
“Yes, Mr. Moretti.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Anna Carter. That part is true.”
“That is not the answer.”
“I know.”
He waited.
She did not continue.
“Second question,” he said. “Why are you in my house?”
Anna looked at the dark fireplace for a moment. When she looked back at him, her eyes were steadier than any employee’s had a right to be.
“If you want to know who took your shipment, Mr. Moretti, let me keep working on the device. The answers you are asking me for will not help you tonight. The device will.”
“That is also not an answer.”
“No,” she said. “It is a trade.”
Dante almost smiled. He did not.
Instead he walked once around the small room, running the back of his hand along the spines of books he had not opened in years. He stopped at the window. Outside, the garden lamps burned low. A single light moved slowly along the perimeter wall — one of his men walking the night rounds.
“You understand,” he said without turning, “that I could ask these questions in a different way. In a different room. With different company.”
“I understand.”
“Yet you do not seem afraid.”
“I am very afraid, Mr. Moretti. I am not afraid of what you are describing.”
That answer landed. He let it sit for several seconds before he turned around.
“Why not?”
“Because what I am afraid of is already here.” She held his eyes. “You are not it.”
He studied her face. There was nothing performative in it. There was nothing he could use.
“Keep working,” he said. “You will sleep in the staff wing as you have been. Your daughter will stay with you. You will have the keyboard, the monitor, and the isolated laptop. You will not leave the grounds without my permission. You will not place a call that is not on a line we have cleared.”
He paused.
“If I decide that your silence is more expensive than your work, we will have this conversation again.”
“Understood.”
“Go.”
Anna went.
Dante waited until the sound of her footsteps had faded along the corridor. Then he opened the door and called down the stairwell, once, quietly.
“Luca.”
Luca appeared at the bottom of the stairs within six seconds. He had not been sleeping. Luca did not sleep when the house was awake.
Dante came down three steps and stopped.
“The woman in the staff wing. Mrs. Carter. From this moment, I want to know where she is, who she speaks to, what she writes, what she reads, whether she opens the window at night, whether the child dreams.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Quietly, Luca. She is not to know.”
“She will not know.”
“And Luca.”
“Yes, boss.”
“The same for Marco.”
May you like
Luca did not blink. He simply nodded once and turned toward the dark hallway.
And Dante stood alone on the stairs, listening to a house that had, in the space of a single evening, become unfamiliar to him.
