Chapter 74 Planning The End

Chapter 74 Planning The End
The coalition met on Thursday.

Not at the estate. A neutral location, a building in the commercial district that Dante's family had owned for thirty years and used for exactly this kind of thing, a room on the third floor with no windows facing the street and one entrance and the particular atmosphere of a space that had absorbed many significant conversations and kept all of them.

I wasn't there.

I sat in the library and read and thought and let Biscuit walk across my book at intervals and waited for Dante to come back.

He came back at four.

He came straight to the library which told me something had shifted in the shape of things and he needed to talk it through and he had decided I was the person to talk it through with, which was itself something I still wasn't entirely used to and intended to never take for granted.

He sat at the reading desk and looked at me.

"Three fronts," he said. "Simultaneous. Viktor's compound outside the city, his primary holding in the eastern district, and his transit route through the port." He paused. "The coalition holds on all three. The question is timing."

I looked at him. "What's the problem with the timing."

"Viktor's compound," he said. "We don't have precise intelligence on the internal layout. We know the perimeter. We know the approach routes. We don't know where he positions himself inside it when he's operating from there." He paused. "Which matters because the compound is where I intend to be."

I held his gaze. "You're leading the compound operation yourself."

"Yes," he said.

I didn't argue with that because arguing would have wasted time we didn't have and because I had learned by now that there were decisions he made that were not open for negotiation and this was one of them. He was going to lead it himself because Viktor was his to end and everyone in the coalition understood that and so did I.

"Tell me what you know about the compound," I said.

He told me.

I listened and something started moving at the back of my mind, something quiet and insistent, the specific feeling of a piece of information pressing toward the surface that had been sitting below it for a long time.

I let him finish.

Then I said "The car."

He looked at me. "What car."

"In the alley," I said. "The night. There was a second car. Not Dante's car. A different one parked at the far end of the alley facing out. Dark. I saw it when I turned around before I ran and I registered it and then I ran and I never thought about it again because there was considerably more immediate things to think about."

He was very still.

"The plates," he said.

"I don't remember the plates," I said. "But I remember the car. The make. The color. A specific dent in the rear panel on the driver's side." I looked at him steadily. "And I remember the man who got out of it. He wasn't one of yours. He was there to watch. He stood at the end of the alley and watched and then he got back in the car when things moved and he left."

Dante was completely still.

"Viktor's man," I said. "Viktor had someone watching that night. Someone who wasn't part of the operation, just watching. Which means Viktor knew what was happening in that alley before your people had finished cleaning it up." I paused. "Which means his inside source wasn't just the accountant. He had someone else. Someone closer."

The library was completely quiet.

Dante looked at me for a long moment.

Then he picked up his phone and made one call. Short and precise. When he ended it he set the phone down and looked at me with an expression I recognized as the specific one he wore when something had changed the shape of a problem he had been working on.

"The man in the car," he said. "Can you describe him."

I described him.

Dante was quiet for a moment.

Then he said a name quietly. Not to me. To himself. Just a name said in the flat certain tone of a man who had just identified the last piece of something he had been looking for.

"You know him," I said.

"I know him," he said.

"He's still close to you," I said.

"Not after tonight," he said.

He stood up from the reading desk and I stood up from the armchair and we were facing each other in the library in the late afternoon light and the shape of the next few days was sitting between us fully assembled for the first time.

"You may be the most important person in this operation," he said quietly. "You never fired a shot and you may be the most important person in it."

I looked at him. "Bring yourself back," I said.

He held my gaze.

"Always," he said.

I crossed the room and put both hands on his face and looked at him directly and he looked back at me and for one long moment the library held us and the afternoon held the library and it was just the two of us and the thing we had built together and the thing that was about to end.

"All of you," I said. "Bring all of you back."

He covered my hands with his.

"All of me," he said.

I believed him.

I had to.