“You’ll be protected.”
“I know. Ewan told me.” Her voice carried the faintest edge of warmth – the warmth of a sister who trusted her brother’s people to stand between her and the threat. “Four days, Lachlan. Build the plan.”
I put the phone down. I looked at the window. The Clyde was grey. The cranes were still. Four days.
I picked up the pen. I began to build.
CHAPTER 26
The Plan and the Price
MORVEN
The plan is agreed by eleven. By noon they have all drifted apart to their work. I go to the studio.
The studio is on the manor’s upper floor – a long room with a bare wood floor and a mirror along one wall and a barre that Lachlan’s mother installed thirty years ago for a dance class she attended twice and abandoned. The room had been empty for decades before I arrived. I claimed it in my second week at Crag Manor, cleaned it, oiled the floor, hung a speaker on the wall. The room smelled of wood and dust and the cold that came through the single window at the north end.
The plan was this: Rona would build the false Ledger. Al would manage the physical security of the Merchant Villas operation – perimeter, exits, contingency extraction. Ewan would serve as Catriona’s handler – communication, timing, the choreography of her entry and departure. Lachlan and I would attend the dinner as guests – our presence at the Merchant Villas would not be unusual; we had attended Mackie eventsbefore. Our function was the visible front while the invisible operation ran beneath.
The plan was agreed. The plan was sound. The plan occupied the minds of five people who knew how to execute it and required nothing from me until Wednesday.
So I danced.
I put on the music – no ballet, not today; a deeper choice, a cello piece that Isobel had used for warm-ups at St.Jude’s, the vibration of the instrument carried through a phone speaker and filling the studio with the sound of a thing being drawn slowly across strings. I stood at the barre. I placed my hands. I felt the wood – smooth, worn, cold from the room’s temperature, warm from my palms within seconds. I began.
The dancing was not performance. It was not preparation. It was the mechanism by which I processed the things my conscious mind could not yet hold – the information about FOCR, the knowledge that Duncan had been the secondary source, the planning application on the manor, the fact that in four days a woman I had met three days ago would walk into a room carrying a forged document that would determine the future of every person I loved.
I danced and the dance did my thinking. The body moved and the mind followed and in the movement was the truth that language could not yet carry: I was afraid. Not of the plan. Not of Mackie. Not of the buyer or the government unit or the legal mechanisms being deployed against us. I was afraid that the plan would succeed and the threat would end and the four of us – Lachlan, Al, Ewan, and me – would be left standing in a quiet house with nothing to fight and no external pressure to hold us together and the question I had been avoiding would arrive and demand an answer.
The music played. The barre held me. I danced until the fear was in my muscles instead of my mind.
Lachlan appeared in the doorway.
He stood there for a moment – leaning against the frame, his glasses off, his sleeves rolled to the elbow. He watched me move. The watching was not assessment. It was the quiet attention of a man who understood that the woman in front of him was working through a problem with her body and that the problem was not the kind he could solve with strategy.
I stopped. I stood at the barre. The music continued.
“I want this to be over,” he said.
“So do I.”
“I’d like to live very quietly for approximately two weeks after.”
“You’d last four days.”
He considered. “Four and a half.”
The exchange was the thing we did – the verbal architecture of two people who communicated in precision and understatement and the dry, compressed humour that was the Morven-Lachlan dialect. The dialect had been built in the months since the Wager. It was ours. Nobody else spoke it.
He came into the studio. He closed the door. The music was still playing – the cello, the slow draw across strings, the sound filling the room with a resonance that was not urgency but depth.
“Tell me what you want,” I said.
He told me. The telling was precise, because Lachlan was always precise, and the precision was the intimacy – a man who knew his own needs and was unashamed of naming them. He told me in the quiet voice he used only in private, the voice thatwas not the strategist’s or the operator’s but the man’s, and the man wanted the woman who was standing at the barre with sweat on her collarbones and the fear still in her muscles.
I gave it.
He came to the barre. He stood behind me and his hands found my hips – the same hands that had held strategy documents and the gold pen and the Ledger, now on the damp cotton of my dance clothes, his thumbs finding the ridges of my hip bones beneath the fabric. In the mirror I could see both of us: his face behind my shoulder, his eyes on my reflection, watching me watching him.
