Rona’s pen scratched on paper. The vault was cold. The Ledger was open and the light from the desk lamp was warm and the combination – warm light, cold room, the scratch of a pen – was oddly calming.
“Some of these initials match known Syndicate contacts,” Rona said. “JG – James Garrick. HM – Helen MacLeod. Both of them appear in the current operational records. But others don’t match anyone in the current system.” She paused. “The ones that don’t match are older. They pre-date the current administration. They go back twenty years.”
She looked at me. Her face was doing the thing it did when she had found a pattern and the pattern was larger than she had anticipated – the widening of the eyes, the stillness of the mouth, a forensic accountant who has discovered that the data set is deeper than the surface suggested.
“I need to talk to Cillian,” she said.
Cillian went pale.
I had brought Rona to the accounts room – upstairs, in the casino building, the room that smelled of old filing cabinets and the faint sweetness of the peppermints Cillian kept in his desk drawer. Cillian was at his desk when we arrived. Rona placed her notebook on his desk – open, covered in annotations, the initials and numbers copied out in her precise handwriting.
Cillian looked at the notebook. He looked at Rona. He looked at me. His face lost its colour in a way that was very informative – the pallor of a man who recognised what he was looking at and understood the weight of it.
“Where did you find these?” he said.
“The financial index margins. Every entry. Going back to the nineteen-nineties.”
Cillian sat down. He had been standing when we entered. He sat down slowly, with the careful movement of a man who needed the chair because his legs were not cooperating with his composure.
“The marginal notations are Lachlan’s system,” Cillian said. His voice was quiet. “His personal tracking system. Not Syndicate administration – Lachlan’s own records. He’s been maintaining them since he took over from his father, and his father maintained them before that.”
“What do they track?” Rona said.
Cillian looked at me. The look was a question:how much do I say?I nodded. Rona had earned this.
“Each set of initials corresponds to a person who has, at some point, expressed interest in acquiring the Ledger,” Cillian said. “The number is Lachlan’s assessment of the threat level. One is lowest. Seven is highest.”
Nobody spoke.
“The Ledger has been a target before,” Cillian said. “Three times, in the years I’ve been here. Twice before Lachlan’s time – his father handled both. Once since Lachlan took over, four years ago. A man from Edinburgh – a property developer – made an approach through an intermediary. The approach was declined. The developer pursued it. Lachlan dealt with it.” Cillian paused. “The developer’s name was James Garrick. JG. Threat level four.”
“And the older initials?” Rona said.
“The same pattern. Different names. Different decades. The same fight. Someone discovers the Ledger exists. Someone decides they want it. The Syndicate protects it. The cycle repeats.” Cillian looked at the notebook. “Lachlan tracks the cycle because the cycle is the Syndicate’s deepest vulnerability. The Ledger is the reason the Syndicate works. And the Ledger is the reason the Syndicate will always be a target.”
Rona was writing. Her pen moved in quick, tight strokes. She was building the map – the twenty-year map of people who had tried to acquire the Ledger and the triad’s response to each attempt. The map was the history of a fight that Rona was now part of, and the being-part-of was visible in the way she wrote – faster, harder, with the urgency of a woman who had stopped being an observer and become a participant.
“One more thing,” she said.
She turned to the last page of her notebook. She had written a single notation there, circled in red.
R.C. – 3.
“These initials,” she said. “They appear in the marginal notations. The entry is dated four months before the Winter Wager.”
Cillian looked at the initials. He looked at Rona. He understood.
“R.C.,” Rona said. Her voice was very level. “Rona Caine.”
The accounts room was quiet. The peppermint smell hung in the air. The filing cabinets stood in their rows. And on the desk between three people was a notation that said: someone had known Rona was coming four months before she arrived.
Rona closed the notebook. She picked it up. She held it against her chest.
“Where is Lachlan?” she said.
“The study,” I said.
She left. The door closed behind her. I stood in the accounts room with Cillian and we looked at each other and we both understood what was about to happen in the study upstairs – a confrontation that would test the architecture of everything we had built.
