POV: Aria
It was Matteo.
Just Matteo, no one behind him, the door open only wide enough for him to step through, and he looked at my face and at the phone in my hand and read something in both that made him close the door immediately and cross the room without speaking.
I showed him the message.
He read it. His jaw set. He took out his own phone without a word and made a call that lasted forty seconds and when it ended he looked at the window and said: "Where is Reyes."
"East approach," I said. "He should be. He's not."
Matteo opened the door. He said something to the first guard, Caruso, in a low voice I couldn't hear from where I stood, and Caruso went down the stairs at a pace that was not running but was close to it, and Matteo came back inside and closed the door again.
We stood in the room and waited.
Three minutes. Then Caruso's voice came through on Matteo's radio, flat and certain.
"Reyes is gone. Car on the south side went with him."
Matteo looked at the wall. Not at me. At the wall, at a specific point on it that had nothing on it, the kind of looking that means the person is seeing something internal.
"How long was the window," I said.
"The handover was at six," he said. "It's seven-twenty now. Eighty minutes."
"Eighty minutes of my location going to Victor."
"Yes," he said.
I sat down. The coffee had gone cold and I looked at it and I thought about Reyes, who I had catalogued at six as the one with the old injury, the weight on the left side, and I thought about how you look at someone and build a picture of them and the picture you build is only ever what they're willing to show.
"Was he yours before tonight," I said.
"I thought so," Matteo said. "Eighteen months. Good record. No flags."
"Victor got to him the same way he got to Enzo," I said. "Before anyone was looking."
He nodded once.
I looked at the cold coffee. "What did he send. In eighty minutes. What does Victor know now that he didn't know last night."
"The location of this building," Matteo said. "That you're here. That the handover protocol exists, which tells him the rotation schedule."
"Which tells him when the gaps are," I said.
"Yes."
I stood up again. I couldn't stay still. I moved to the window and looked at the south side where Reyes and the car had been, and the street was ordinary at this hour, people moving through it with no knowledge of what had just shifted in the room above them.
Eighty minutes was enough. Victor was systematic and careful. Eighty minutes of confirmed location, confirmed routine, confirmed security gaps was everything he needed to plan something specific and I did not know yet what specific meant in this context but I knew it was not good and I knew it was coming before tonight.
"We need to move," I said.
"Yes," Matteo said.
"Not just me. Sofia. Mika. Wherever Dez is."
"Already in motion," he said. "I made the calls before I came up."
I looked at him.
"I sent you the message," he said. "About Reyes."
I stared at him. "That was you."
"I saw him leave on the external camera," he said. "I was two floors down. I sent the message before I came up because I needed you ready when I walked in."
The unknown number. Five words, lower case, no punctuation. I had been running a list in my head since the bridge, since the first message that told me not to open the trunk, assigning the unknown number to a contact inside Victor's operation, someone positioned to help, someone with access I couldn't identify.
It had been Matteo. Not all of them. But this one.
"The others," I said. "The messages before. Were any of those you."
"No," he said. "Only tonight."
I held his eyes. He held mine. I had no way to verify that and he knew I had no way to verify it and he said it anyway, which was either the truth or the most efficient lie available, and I had been in rooms with Matteo long enough to know the difference was not always visible.
I decided to believe it. Not because I was certain but because the alternative, that he had been running both sides of my information channel for weeks, was a version of the situation I simply couldn't operate inside.
I filed the decision and the uncertainty that came with it and moved forward.
"Victor has eighty minutes of location data and a rotation schedule," I said. "What does he do with that."
Matteo was quiet for long enough that I knew he had an answer and was deciding how to give it.
"Victor doesn't move on individuals," he said. "That's not his method. He moves on systems. He finds the point where a system is weakest, usually the thing the system is trying to protect, and he applies pressure there."
"The thing the system is protecting," I said.
Matteo looked at me.
I understood.
The photographs. The six cars on the service road. The guards. Every visible choice Matteo had made in the last forty-eight hours that confirmed to anyone watching what mattered to him. Victor hadn't been gathering data about my location. He had been gathering data about what Matteo would do to protect it.
"He's not coming for me," I said slowly. "He's coming for what happens to you when he does."
Matteo said nothing.
"He wants you to move first," I said. "Publicly. Visibly. In a way that uses enough of your resources and reveals enough of your position that he can map your full capability and respond to it."
"Yes," Matteo said.
"Then we don't let you move first," I said.
He looked at me. "What we do instead requires you to be somewhere I can't guarantee your safety."
"You haven't been able to guarantee my safety since the parking structure," I said. "That hasn't stopped either of us yet."
His phone vibrated on the table. He looked at the screen.
His face changed. Not much. Just enough.
"What," I said.
He turned the screen to face me and I read the message and the message was not from Victor and was not from Luca and was not from any number I had ever seen before.
It was from Enzo.
And it contained a plan.