PART 9:

Three from numbers he didn’t recognize. Two from the wedding coordinator whose problems had become spectacularly irrelevant. He silenced it. Marcus appeared. Cord’s contact, you want me in there? Yes, he’s going to send a message. You monitor every word. Gabriel pushed off the wall. Then I need a vehicle and two men who aren’t on anyone’s secondary list.

People we’ve had longer than 14 months. Marcus thought about it. Reyes and Park, both 12-year tenure. Get them ready. Gabriel started down the hall. And get me Declan’s schedule for today. Where he is, who he’s with. Already pulled it. He’s at his townhouse as of an hour ago. Meeting with the Farrow legal team this afternoon.

So, he’s sitting very still and acting very normal. Yes. Good. Gabriel reached the stairs. Um that tells  me he doesn’t know she’s alive yet. Cord’s message only went to Pruitt. Pruitt is a layer down from Declan. The chain hasn’t completed. So, we have a window. Small one.

Gabriel started down the stairs. The northern hub, I need to know who’s stationed there. Full personnel roster, last 48 hours. Marcus was already on his phone. What’s up? The problem with the northern hub, which Gabriel understood fully by the time Rowan had transmitted the building schematic to his phone and he’d looked at it twice, was not its security.

He’d built the security himself four years ago when the hub had been established as the primary redundancy point for the distribution network. He knew every entrance and every camera position and every personnel rotation. He could walk into that building in his sleep. The problem was that someone else knew all of that, too, because he’d built it in consultation with two people.

His head of infrastructure, who was now on a list of the compromised, and his uncle, who had personally approved the final security design, and who had, Gabriel understood this now in the full cold architecture of it, ensured that the hub’s security structure included a specific back access point that didn’t appear on any of the official schematics and that routed through the building’s eastern service corridor directly to the server >> room where the physical hardware lived.

A back door. Built into his own facility by his own uncle. 14 months before the plan formally began. He called Rowan. “The eastern service corridor at the hub,” he said, “is it on the schematic you sent?” A pause. “No.” “It exists. My uncle had it built. Which means if the Farrow organization already has people in position at the hub.

“They’re already inside.” she said. The fever was in her voice, not in the shaking way, but in the flattened, over-controlled way. “They’ve been inside waiting.” Gabriel stopped walking. He was in the estate’s equipment garage, Reyes and Park waiting near a black SUV, Marcus just off his shoulder. The fluorescent light overhead hummed at a frequency that matched something in his skull.

He thought about the timeline, 21 hours to the automatic execution trigger, 15 minutes from the estate to the hub. A building he knew better than anyone except his uncle, who had made sure it contained a room Gabriel didn’t know about. “The authorization code.”  he said. “If I get to the physical hardware, can you walk me through the override remotely?” “Yes, but Gabriel.

” A pause. “If they’re already inside the building, they know the override is the only remaining option. They’ll be waiting for exactly that approach.” “I know.” “Which means walking in there.” “I know.” he said again, not cutting her off, just completing the sentence she was building toward because he’d already completed it himself and was past the point of needing to hear it.

He looked at Reyes and Park and at the SUV and at the garage doors and thought about his uncle in his townhouse sitting very still and acting very normal while the clock ran down on a mechanism he’d buried in the settlement layer of Gabriel’s own financial architecture. He thought about Rowan’s voice. “I missed it.

” “Gabriel, I’m sorry.” She had held this for 8 months. Had assembled 41 audio files and 14 months of transaction records and had missed one line of code nested in a routine EU infrastructure update. And the one thing she’d missed was the thing the entire scheme had been built around. And she had looked at him and said, “I’m sorry.

” with more weight in two words than most people managed in full confessions. He thought about that. Then he thought about 21 hours and a dead man trigger and a back door in his own building and the specific arithmetic of what happened to the entire Veil network if he reached the 21st hour without reaching the hardware. He opened the passenger door of the SUV.

Marcus, he said, stay here. Keep Cord contained. Keep Rowan’s location locked. No outbound communication from the estate that I haven’t approved. He looked at Marcus directly. If Declan calls, answer it. Be normal. You don’t know anything. Marcus nodded. No questions. Gabriel got in the vehicle. Sir, Reyes said from the driver’s seat.

He was 40, former military, with the kind of face that hadn’t moved much since about 2009. Location, northern hub, industrial district. Gabriel closed the door. Take the river route. Slower, but it keeps us off the cameras on Mercer Street. He paused. And Reyes, there are going to be people inside the building who aren’t ours.

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