As long as he gets to decide when and where he holds all of it. So, we take that away from him. We give him exactly what he wants, a chance to get close, and we make sure that when he reaches for it, you're the one who closes the hand. For a long moment, Alvarez waited. The lawman's caution warring with the plain truth that Henry was right, that a man like Whitlock would never be caught being careful, only being confident.
"If we do this," Alvarez said slowly, "we do it my way. My people, my positions, my call on when it ends. You don't improvise. The second it goes sideways, you do exactly what I tell you and nothing else. " "Understood," Henry said. They built it carefully over the next 2 hours in the low voices of people who knew that a single wrong detail could get someone hurt.
The plan turned on the one thing Simon could not resist, the belief that Leia still belonged to him, that she could be drawn back if only he applied the right pressure. She would message him. She would tell him she wanted to talk alone one last time somewhere away from Henry and away from the cameras and the crowds, somewhere a man like Simon would feel safe being himself. The hospital had an old wing on its top floor, a stretch of corridor closed for renovation, lit only by the work lamps the contractors had left behind. Alvarez walked it twice, placing his people two officers in the stairwell, one in a supply room with the door cracked, himself in an alcove where he could see the length of the hall.
It was a controlled space with a single way in. If Simon came, he would come up one corridor and there would be no leaving it except past the people waiting for him. Denise insisted on having a part in it. When Henry tried gently to tell her she should wait downstairs where it was safe, she refused with a fierceness that surprised all of them. "I will not sit in a waiting room while the two of you clean up a a I helped make," she said.
"Give me something to do. Please. Let me be useful for once instead of sorry. " It was Alvarez who saw how to use her, and the more he turned it over, the more he understood that she was not a liability at all, but the one piece that might make the whole thing work. Simon trusted almost no one, but he had trusted Denise once. She had been on his side openly for the better part of 2 years.
If anything could pull a careful man past his own caution and into a darkened corridor, it would be the voice of the woman who had vouched for him from the start. So, they gave her the part that mattered most. She would call Simon herself before Leia's message had time to cool, and she would tell him that her daughter had finally come to her senses, that she Denise had talked sense into the girl the way she always had, that Leia was waiting and frightened and ready to come home if only he would be gentle with her. A mother's blessing offered to a man who had always believed he deserved one. It was nearly 9:00 in the evening when they set it in motion.
Leia sent the message first. She sat on the edge of Henry's bed to do it, and her thumbs hovered over the screen for a long time before she could make herself type. Henry put his hand over her free one and held it while she wrote. "I can't keep doing this," she sent. "I'm tired of being afraid.