“One. Security. Professional. Earpiece.”
“He followed you?”
“He tried.”
She put the first aid kit away. She stood behind the bar and looked at me and her face carried the expression of a woman who loved a man who did stupid, brave things with a damaged body and who would continue doing them because he did not know another way.
“Lachlan needs to know,” she said.
“I’m going to the study now.”
“You’re going to the study with a bandaged arm and cracked ribs and an explanation that starts with ‘I went to the dock road alone at dusk.’”
“Aye.”
She almost smiled. The almost-smile was worse than the anger – it was the acknowledgement that she knew me, and the knowing included the parts that frightened her, and the frightening parts were not going away.
Lachlan’s study. That evening.
I stood by the desk and laid it out. The map. The property acquisitions. The planning committee. The harbour master lunches. I laid it out the way I laid everything out for Lachlan – in order, with evidence, without editorialising. He listened. He looked at the map. He looked at it for a long time.
“He’s not after the ports,” Lachlan said. His voice was low, careful. “Those are a distraction.”
I waited.
“He’s after the Ledger.”
The study was cold. The fire had been lit but the heat had not reached the corners of the room. The map sat between us with its three red dots and its Ordnance Survey contours and the weight of a city’s geography reduced to paper and ink.
“The properties are leverage,” Lachlan said. “He’s creating the conditions under which the Syndicate’s operational model becomes untenable. If the routes are disrupted, the Ledger’sguarantee network fails. If the guarantee network fails, the debts default. And if the debts default–”
“The Ledger loses its authority.”
“Yes.” He looked at me. “And a Ledger without authority is a book. A book can be acquired.”
I understood. Mackie was not going to steal the Ledger. He was going to make it worthless and then offer to buy what remained. It was a corporate strategy applied to a criminal institution, and it was elegant in a way that made my ribs ache more than the cracking had.
“How long?” I said.
“If the planning approvals go through? Six months. Perhaps less.”
Fergus arrived at the Hook at eleven that night. He came in through the back, the way he always came – through the kitchen entrance, past the bins, up the back stairs – because Fergus had spent five years as McInnis’s man and was now spending his first months as ours, and men in transition used back doors.
He was thin. He had always been thin, but the thinness had changed since the Wager. It was sharper now. The thinness of a man who slept badly and ate when he remembered and lived with the knowledge that the side he had chosen was the side that would have to prove itself.
He sat across from me in the Hook’s back room. The room smelled of old carpet and the ghost of a hundred years of spilled lager. Fergus held his coffee in both hands and did not drink it.
“Mackie has someone,” he said. “Inside. Not a plant – a recruit. Someone already in the Syndicate’s orbit. Someone with direct knowledge of the vault.”
“The Iron Vault?”
“He knows where the Ledger is kept. He knows the access protocol. He knows the code system.” Fergus looked at his coffee. “The leak hasn’t happened yet. Mackie is patient. He’ll wait until the Ledger’s position is weak enough that accessing it matters. But the channel is there. The person is identified.”
“Who?”
Fergus shook his head. “I don’t know. My source wouldn’t give a name. Only that it’s someone with interior access. Someone who has been inside the vault.” He looked at his coffee again. His hands were wrapped around the mug and the knuckles were white and I did not know whether that was cold or tension or both. “Mackie’s patient. He won’t move on the vault until the Ledger’s position is weak enough that accessing it matters. But the channel is built. The person is identified. The recruitment is done.”
The back room was silent. The Hook creaked around us – the building’s old joints shifting in the cold, the sound of a pub that had been standing since before either of us was born. Somewhere above us, the bar sign swung in the wind off the Clyde, the hinges groaning in their rhythmic, familiar way. I had heard that sound every night for fifteen years. It was the sound of home.
