Marcus had spent three years reading. It had been replaced by something colder. You should have left it alone. Raymon said low private. Not quite a threat in any language that could be quoted, but not quite not one either.
Marcus looked at him for a long moment. I flagged it to you in August. Marcus said in writing, "You told me it was a formatting error. I documented that, too." Raymond stared at him. Marcus stepped past him and walked toward the door.
Behind him, he heard Director Obie's voice saying, "Raymond, I don't believe you're supposed to be on this floor right now." And then Raymond's voice saying something Marcus didn't catch. And then footsteps that went in a different direction. In the corridor, Priya appeared at his elbow like she'd materialized from the wall. Car downstairs in 10 minutes," she said quietly. "She wants to debrief off site." "Okay," Marcus said.
His hands, he noticed, were completely steady. His heart was doing something complicated, but his hands were steady, and he kept moving forward because the next thing was the next thing. And he had always been a man who knew what to do with that. The elevator opened. He stepped in.
He exhaled. For the first time in 3 weeks, it felt like air went all the way down. The car Pria had arranged was already at the curb when Marcus walked out of the building at 11:22 a. M. He got in.
The driver didn't speak, which suited him. He sat with his jacket folded across his lap, the encrypted drive still in the inside pocket, and watched the city move past the window without really seeing it. His mind was doing the thing it did after high pressure situations cataloging. Reviewing checking for gaps the way you check a parachute after you've already jumped and are wondering if you packed it right. Raymon's face in the doorway.
You should have left it alone. The cold replacement of the lukewarm. That was the tell Marcus had been waiting for without knowing he was waiting for it. The when when the performance drops because the stakes got too real to maintain it. Raymond had walked onto a floor he had no business being on and delivered something that was as close to a threat as a man who'd spent 11 years being professionally invisible could bring himself to make.
And what that told Marcus was not that Raymond was dangerous. It was that Raymond was scared. Scared men made mistakes. Scared men who had been careful for a long time made the biggest ones. The car stopped at a restaurant four blocks from the office.
Not the kind of place that executives usually went for meetings, which was presumably the point. Small Italian lunch crowd. The kind of neighborhood spot where nobody was going to recognize Amelia Whitmore as anything other than a woman eating lunch. Priya was already at a table near the back when Marcus came in. Amelia arrived 4 minutes later.