The overhead light in the bedroom was dimmed to a warm glow, making the thin strip of moonlight coming through the gap in the curtains barely visible. Dimitri stood at the window, his fingers hooked around the edge of the fabric, watching the street below. It was too early for Dave to arrive with the phone, but he couldn't stop looking.
They had turned off the lights in the lab before coming upstairs, because the guards watching it from outside would wonder why they were working late and might report the anomaly.
Mattie was on the bed, her back against the headboard, and she was talking to Petrov in a low voice. It was the kind of murmured conversation that filled silence without requiring attention, and Dimitri mostly tuned it out. Petrov sometimes responded in Russian, forgetting that Mattie didn't speak it or understand it, which he did when he was either completely plastered or anxious, and in this case, it was probably both.
Dimitri was anxious as well, his mind running one failure scenario after another, each one worse than the last.
Dave getting caught in the surveillance room because someone in there was resistant to thralling and compulsion. An alarm getting triggered. Losham waking up and finding one of the Eight in his bedroom. The contact number had been deleted. The guards around the lab noticed the Eight approaching and sounded an alert before Dave could thrall them.
He ran through them one at a time, assigning probabilities, identifying mitigation strategies, and discarding the ones that had no mitigation because there was nothing to be gained from contemplating total failure.
The street below was empty, as it usually was at this hour. Curfew was in effect, and it applied to all of the human population of the island and most of the immortal population as well. Senior commanders and patrolling guards were naturally exempt, and Dimitri noticed when those in charge of watching the lab made their rounds, even though they were doing their best to stay out of sight. They didn't want to announce their presence.
Dimitri had timed them.
"You should sit down," Mattie said. "It's too early for Dave to return. They are probably still at the surveillance office."
He turned to look at her. "I don't want to miss them. I need to go down and open the door before they buzz the intercom."
She arched a brow. "Why? By the time they reach the front door, they'll have thralled all the guards watching the lab. They can buzz in all they want."
"I'd rather be careful."
Petrov took a drink from his flask and said something in Russian that Dimitri didn't bother translating because it would only start an argument. It was something along the lines of letting him be.
Dimitri checked his watch. Zero zero forty. The clan's call to Losham had been scheduled for midnight. Allowing thirty minutes for the call, Losham should have been off the phone ten minutes ago. He probably hadn't gone to bed right away, and Dave still had to wait for him to fall asleep, enter the house, take the phone, and then make his way to the lab. He shouldn't expect the Eight for at least another twenty minutes.
Zero one hundred was the target, but it might take longer.
"Losham is probably having a drink after the phone call," Mattie said.
Petrov nodded. "That's what I would have done. He needs to calm down before he can fall asleep."
"Dave planted a suggestion in Losham's mind earlier today that he needs to go to sleep earlier," Dimitri reminded them. "He's under a lot of stress, and he needs his beauty sleep."
Mattie chuckled. "Do you think he's concerned with looking good?"
"He is, but it was just an expression. Losham is smart, and he knows that even immortals need sleep to function well the next day. Lord Navuh wanted Zhao to make the enhanced soldiers sleepless, but Zhao pushed back, saying that it wasn't possible. I've read the report, and we even discussed it with Losham, so he's well aware of it."
"According to the many medical studies I've read, stress produces insomnia," Petrov said. "Losham might have trouble falling asleep despite Dave's mental nudging."
"Thank you, Konstantin." Dimitri cast him a glare. "That's very helpful and reassuring."
"I'm not here to reassure you, my friend. I'm here as the voice of reason."
"You're too drunk to claim that status." Dimitri turned back to his vigil next to the window.
"My state of inebriation has nothing to do with my reasoning capacities, and you know it."
He was right, to a degree, but Dimitri had no patience for arguing the point.
Zero zero fifty. Ten minutes.
Dimitri shifted his weight from one foot to the other as a patrol passed at the far end of the street. The two warriors weren't part of the detail around the lab. They were just patrolling the area and walking with the unhurried gait of men who didn't expect trouble. They turned the corner and disappeared.
"Let's go over what we're going to say again," Mattie suggested.
They had rehearsed it that afternoon, going through the script like actors preparing for a performance. Petrov had been skeptical about scripting every word, arguing that rigid preparation would make them sound rehearsed and therefore suspicious. Dimitri had countered that they would be so anxious that their reasoning capacity would be diminished and their presentation would suffer. This was too important to screw up.
