The secondary authority moved at six in the evening.
Not against them directly. That would have been simpler, and simpler was not the way he operated, the way Aiden had understood from the moment he read the node architecture and recognized the logic behind it. He moved the way he had always moved, through the infrastructure, through the institutional channels that were still available to him, through the specific levers of a system that had not been fully dismantled because the parts of it that were still standing were the parts that had been his rather than the father's.
