Several people at the front tables glanced up. Marcus Hale' eyes tracked him from the moment he stepped onto the stage. Thomas reached Evelyn and leaned slightly forward as though whispering something in her ear. In the same motion, with his right hand angled away from the audience’s view, he pressed the auto-injector against the inside of her left wrist, a position Dr. Reeves had identified as optimal for speed and concealment, and administered the dose in under three seconds.
He straightened, set the note card on the podium surface, as though that had been the purpose of the interruption, and stepped back. Evelyn continued speaking without breaking the sentence she had been in the middle of. Thomas walked back down the stage steps and across the room to his position in the corner. His heart was doing something loud in his chest, but his face was doing nothing at all.
He had learned that separation a long time ago in places where the cost of letting those two things converge was too high to consider. What he hadn't seen, because he was focused on Evelyn’s hands and then on the movement across the room, was Derek Walsh standing near the rear bar with his phone angled toward the stage. Derek had been watching Thomas for three weeks, and tonight he had captured eight seconds of footage Thomas approaching the stage, leaning close to Evelyn, his right hand moving in a way that wasn’t consistent with delivering a note card. By the time Thomas was back in his corner, Derek had already sent the clip to Marcus Hale' personal number.
Marcus looked at his phone. He looked at Evelyn, who was finishing her remarks to a room that had noticed nothing. Then he looked toward the corner where Thomas stood, and for the first time in six weeks of indirect observation, the two men made direct eye contact across a crowded room. Marcus smiled very slightly and looked away.
Thomas understood what that smile meant. The call from Ron Bridges came on Monday morning at 8:43, while Thomas was asleep after his Sunday night shift. The message said to come in at 2:00 in the afternoon, rather than the usual 11:00, not unusual on its own, except that it specified the HR office on the sixth floor, rather than the facilities locker room. Thomas lay in bed for a moment after reading it, then got up, made coffee, and called Evelyn’s direct line.
She answered on the second ring, which meant she was already aware. Derek Walsh sent footage to Marcus, she said before Thomas could speak. Marcus took it to the board this morning. He’s requesting a formal review of my leadership capacity citing health concerns, and he’s using the gala incident as the trigger.