Silas read the Graham leak over cold eggs.
He had not intended them to go cold. Mrs. Henley had served them at seven forty-five scrambled, soft, with the smoked salmon he preferred on Sundays. The newspaper lay folded beside his plate. He had opened it expecting the usual: a Labour reshuffle, a football scandal, a minor royal’s indiscretion. Instead, page four held a headline that stopped his fork halfway to his mouth.
He set the fork down.
Warren Castellano’s byline. The Washington Post. Eighteen million dollars. São Paulo. Panama routing. Graham’s signature reproduced in photographic clarity on a docunt that should have been ashes six years ago.
Silas read it once. Then again. Then a third ti, slower, his eyes tracing each paragraph the way a surgeon traced a wound not with shock, but with professional curiosity about the instrunt that made the cut.
By the fourth read, he felt it. The shiver.
Not in his hands his hands were steady, cutting salmon that had gone cold. The shiver was behind his ribs. A coldness that spread when he recognized the pattern in the evidence. The tadata stripping. The relay chains that hopped from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, dissolving origin like fog in sunlight. The precision that left no fingerprints because the system was designed to erase them.
He had seen this before. In Halloway’s report. The Luna leak routing patterns. The sa skeletal structure, stripped and modified but unmistakable to a man who had commissioned the original design.
But Silas kept his mind open. He was too old, too cold, too aware of his own capacity for error to jump at the first shadow. What if Dayo had acquired these tools? What if the young man from — no, from everywhere now had penetrated Michael’s systems, stolen his thods, turned his own weapon back on him? It was possible. The interface Dayo used, whatever it truly was, might reach further than Silas had estimated.
Or what if there was a third player? Soone neither he nor Michael had accounted for, watching from a deeper shadow.
He pushed the plate away and called Halloway.
"Expand the investigation," he said. "Two parallel tracks. I want both running simultaneously."
"Specify," Halloway said. The man’s voice was nicotine and mathematics.
"Track One: Michael Stern. Forty-eight hours surrounding the Luna leak, and again surrounding the Graham leak. Digital movents. Financial transactions. VPN logs. Physical location data. I want to know if he breathed differently during those windows."
"And Track Two?"
"Dayo. Jason Dayo. His technical operator Felix , based in Austin. Determine his reach. Could he replicate what we’re seeing? Could he have penetrated Michael’s infrastructure and stolen the tools? The Los Angeles framing in the article is that Dayo claiming credit, or is soone hanging him with his own rope?"
Halloway was quiet for two seconds. Then: "That’s a wide net."
"Cast it anyway."
Silas hung up. He walked to his window and pressed his forehead against the cool glass. The Thas moved below, gray and indifferent. He watched a barge push upstream against the current and thought about Michael.
Twenty-three years. Not a friendship Silas did not have friends. But a partnership of sorts. The younger man had built systems that made Silas untouchable. Had carried briefcases through customs. Had buried problems so cleanly that even Silas sotis forgot where they were planted. In return, Silas had given him money, status, and the illusion that he mattered.
But illusions cracked. And servants who believed themselves indispensable beca dangerous.
The shiver ca again. This ti Silas let it move through him. Cold recognition that the walls he had built might have a door he had not installed.
He did not call the other bosses. Not Graham not yet, not while the man was radioactive and unpredictable. Not Isobel, who would calculate her own advantage. Not Leonard, who would try to flee to Singapore before the second wave hit. This investigation belonged to Silas alone. Sharing it ant trusting, and trusting ant vulnerability.
Mrs. Henley cleared the cold eggs at nine-fifteen. She did not ask why they were uneaten. She had worked for Silas for eleven years and understood that so mornings, the food was simply a prop.
At ten-thirty, Halloway called back.
"Preliminary findings on Track One," he said. "Michael Stern’s digital footprint in the forty-eight hours surrounding both leaks is... clean."
"Define clean."
"No irregular VPN access. No unusual financial transactions. No location anomalies. He was in his Los Angeles office for both periods. Ordered food delivered. Reviewed Nigerian artist profiles during the Luna window. Standard work patterns."
Silas stared at the river. "That’s not clean, Halloway. That’s prepared."
"Explain."
"Innocent n have ssy footprints. They check their email at odd hours. They visit websites they shouldn’t. They leave digital debris." Silas turned from the window. "Michael’s footprint is identical for both leaks. Sa restaurant orders. Sa work activity. Sa sleep schedule. It’s a pattern drawn with a ruler. And rulers are for people who know they’re being watched."
Halloway considered this. "You’re suggesting he anticipated surveillance."
"I’m suggesting he rehearsed." Silas sat back at his table, though the dishes were gone. "Continue Track One. But dig deeper. Not at what he did — at what he didn’t do. Forty-three minutes of radio silence after eting Dayo. The dead phone. The unaccounted window in West Hollywood. Find the gaps in his perfection."
"And Track Two?"
"Dayo." Silas paused. "Dayo bluffed about having files. We confird it he had nothing when he confronted Michael. Now evidence appears wrapped in tadata pointing to Los Angeles. Either he acquired the files after that eting, which would require capabilities we haven’t seen, or soone is manufacturing his bluff into reality."
"Which do you believe?"
Silas looked at the newspaper still open on his table. Graham’s na in black ink. The byline that started it all.
"I believe," Silas said carefully, "that the most dangerous enemy is the one who makes you look at the wrong man. Whether that’s Michael framing Dayo, or Dayo framing Michael, or a third player framing both — I need to know before I move."
"Tiline?"
"Forty-eight hours. I need answers before Graham does sothing desperate. He’s already called my line once this morning. I didn’t answer."
Halloway hung up without farewell. He was not a man for social lubrication.
Silas sat alone in his townhouse. The Thas moved. The Cézanne on his east wall — apples and a jug, purchased the sa year as Graham’s — suddenly seed like a warning. Permanence was an illusion. Wealth was a target. And trust was a luxury that n like Silas could not afford.
He walked to his study and unlocked a drawer he had not opened in three years. Inside was a file. Paper, not digital. The original copy of Michael’s employnt agreent, signed in 2001 when the man was twenty-nine and hungry. Silas read it now with different eyes.
*Employee agrees to maintain strict confidentiality regarding all operational procedures, client information, and proprietary thodologies developed during or prior to engagent.*
Prior to engagent. That clause had seed standard then. Now it read like a loophole wide enough to drive eighteen million dollars through.
Silas closed the file. He made a decision.
He would feed Michael just enough rope to see which beam he chose to hang from. A false piece of intelligence about Dayo’s travel schedule. Sothing plausible, verifiable, and entirely fabricated. If Michael acted on it — if he moved, communicated, or adjusted his behavior — Silas would know.
And if he didn’t? If he slled the trap and stepped around it?
Then Silas would know sothing else. That the servant who had been too careful was careful enough to be guilty.
He drafted the ssage on paper. Handwritten. No digital trail. He would deliver it through Mrs. Henley’s nephew, a courier who asked no questions and rembered nothing.
The shiver ca one last ti as he wrote. He ignored it. Cold was just information. And Silas had spent thirty years learning to act on information without feeling anything at all.
He sealed the envelope and rang for Mrs. Henley.
Outside, the London afternoon was gray and ordinary. Sowhere in Los Angeles, Michael Stern was probably eating Thai food at his desk, his digital footprint as clean as a whistle. Sowhere in Lagos or Austin or wherever his plane had taken him, Dayo was moving through a war he hadn’t started but couldn’t escape.
And sowhere in between, a man nad Graham Whitfield was staring at a Cézanne watercolor and realizing that the man who buried his secrets had kept the receipts.
Silas placed the envelope on the table and waited for the courier.
The walls were still standing. But he was beginning to hear the beams creak.
He felt a bit scared he was not going to deceive himself after all for soone of power like himself and the others to be targeted it ant nothing good after all he had too much to loose so he didn’t want to risk all he has now.
He just sigh hoping this solves the issue to give him space to breath and think.
(A/N: Shaless author asking for Golden Ticket 🎟 it doubles during this period so if I get up to ten one extra Chapter )
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