PART 8:

The entire scheme only needed one thing, for Gabriel to be unable to send the authorization code at the 72-hour mark. And there were two ways to achieve that. The first was the original plan, a wedding, a kill window, Gabriel dead before the deadline. The second was what they’d shifted to when the original plan fractured. Keep him occupied.

Keep him reactive. The 48-hour phone call wasn’t a threat about the warehouse. It was a distraction from the clock. “Can you disable it?” he said. “I need the master decryption key for the settlement layer. Without it, I can rebuild around the trigger, but I can’t remove it.” She was already typing. “The key is on a separate system, isolated, physical hardware.

” She stopped typing. “It’s at the northern distribution hub.” “Which is where?” “Industrial district, 15 minutes from the docks.” She looked at him. “Which is also where the warehouse is.” He pressed two fingers against his mouth and stood there for a moment. Outside the window, the estate was quiet now. The clearing out complete.

The property contracted to the people who’d been vetted by a woman who’d been quietly vetting everyone for 8 months while she bled in the background. “If I send the authorization code from here,” he said, “buys us another 72 hours.” “You can’t.” She said it without inflection. “The authorization requires biometric confirmation from the system’s registered administrator.

The registered administrator for the settlement layer is” She stopped. “Who?” She turned the laptop back toward herself, typed something, looked at the screen for a moment, then she looked at him, and something in her expression was different. Not the flat professional containment she usually wore, but something that moved underneath it.

Something that recognized it was about to deliver a blow and had no way to cushion it. “The registered administrator is your uncle,” she said. “He had himself added to the settlement layer architecture 8 months ago. I missed it. It was embedded in a routine infrastructure update, and I” She stopped. “I missed it.

” The room was very quiet. “He’s the only one who can send the authorization,” she said. “Or it has to be overridden from the physical hardware at the northern hub in person. She closed her eyes for 1 second, opened them. I missed it. Gabriel, I’m sorry. He’d never heard her say that before. Not in 4 years. He had no framework for it.

He turned and left the room. But, he went to the room where they’d put Cord, and he opened the door, and he stood in the doorway and looked at Cord sitting in the chair where Marcus had left him. And he thought about what he was about to do, and decided he could afford to think about it for exactly as long as it took to close the door behind him.

He closed the door. “The settlement layer administrator,” Gabriel said. “Did you know?” Cord looked at him. Something in Cord’s face shifted. Not guilt, which Gabriel might have been able to use, but something worse. Resignation. The specific expression of a man who had just heard the last piece fall into place and understood that the structure was complete and that he was on the wrong side of it.

“I knew there was a fail-safe,” Cord said. “I didn’t know the specifics.” “But you knew the wedding mattered to the timeline. Not as a kill window, as a deadline.” A pause. “I knew the whole plan depended on you being unable to respond within a specific window.” He looked at the floor. “I told myself that meant the assassination.

I didn’t think past that.” “You didn’t want to think past it.” Cord said nothing. Gabriel crossed the room in four steps and took Cord by the collar and pulled him out of the chair. Not with anger. Anger was a fuel he couldn’t afford to burn right now. But with the specific, controlled force of a man doing what the situation required.

Cord’s hands came up instinctively, and Gabriel said, very quietly, “Don’t.” And Cord’s hands went back down. “The intermediary,” Gabriel said. “You said you didn’t meet anyone from the Farrow organization directly until month three. Who did you meet? A man named Pruitt. He ran logistics coordination for the Eastern.

I know who Pruitt is. Gabriel released him, stepped back. Can you reach him? Cord stared. You want me to contact him? I want you to tell him that Rowan Hart didn’t make it. That she died at the estate from the wound. That I don’t have complete evidence. That I’m in disarray. Gabriel watched Cord’s face process this. Can you do that convincingly? A long pause.

And if I do? Then you have one opportunity to be useful before I decide what your situation looks like on the other side of the next 20 hours. Gabriel held his gaze. One opportunity. After that, the math changes and I’m not doing it in your favor. Cord looked at the floor. Then at Gabriel. Then he nodded once.

Set it up, Gabriel said. Marcus will be outside that door. You make the call in front of him. He left Cord and went back into the hallway and stood with his back against the wall and breathed. The estate was quiet around him. His phone had 11 missed calls. Six from the Farrow organization’s public liaison number.

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