I had to take two different cabs and one tram car to get there and I was switching routes. It was a habit at this point…maybe born from paranoia.
I finally arrived there…and met Remy there. Remy Adler. He sat there under the single lamp that was dim, on a chair, his feet kicked up on the table, nursing a glass of drink and looking insufferably relaxed for a man who had spent the last six hours running perimeter surveillance on a Russian oligarch's hotel floor. He was twenty-eight, French-Algerian, and had a very nice build. He had a very nice, very well sculpted jaw. He had those lazy, half-lidded eyes.
We were not a thing. Let me be very clear about that. We were colleagues. Professionals. People who occasionally, under extreme stress, stood close enough to each other that the proximity became a little inconvenient.
That was all.
He looked up when I walked in, and the slow smile that crossed his face was the specific one I had categorized and filed under: do not acknowledge.
"You're late," he said.
"What do you mean? I'm exactly on time," I said, shifting a chair out, putting it across him, and sitting on it. "The book is clean. There are no tracking devices. At least, none that I could detect. But then, I'll still need you to tech-sweep it before delivery."
"I've already arranged for it," he nodded and the black case on the floor near his feet. "Drop it inside there. Sweep will run in thirty minutes."
I leaned forward and slid the book across the table. He caught it without looking.
"The vodka thing," he said. "Tell me that wasn't improvised."
"It was fully improvised."
"Of course it was." He shook his head, but he was still smiling, which was the most annoying possible response. "One of these days your improvising is going to get us both killed."
"And yet, here we are. Alive. With the book in our hand." I reached over and took his glass, drank from it without asking. He watched me do it with an expression that was somewhere between irritation and amusement, which was basically his permanent setting around me. "You're welcome, by the way."
"I didn't say thank you."
"You were thinking it." I quipped back with a tiny head tilt.
He opened his mouth to say something, then he closed it and looked away. Smart man.
We sat in that comfortable, charged silence that I refused to examine too closely while the tech team swept the book in the case. Remy had a way of being quiet but then, the silence never felt awkward. It always felt like he was simply choosing not to say the thing he was actually thinking. Which, with most people, would have been fine. With Remy, it was occasionally maddening because I was usually fairly certain I knew exactly what he wasn't saying.
But I wasn't going to say it either. So we were even.
When the sweep came back clean, I bagged the book properly and leaned back in my chair. My job was done cleanly. Simple. That was me. Then the door opened.
Callum Gray didn't knock before entering, but then again, when did he ever knock? He never knocked. The Librarian's head of operations was forty-something, former intelligence, and had the energy of a man who had personally caused several international incidents and felt only mildly apologetic about them. He carried a tablet in one hand and a sealed dossier in the other, and his expression was the specific brand of neutral that meant someone's night was about to get significantly more complicated.
He looked at me. Only me. He only acknowledged Remy with a small nod, but me? He kept looking at me like someone who…God, no.
"Good work on Volkov," he said, setting the dossier on the table. "The Librarian wants you on something new. Tonight."
Damn it. I said so.
I looked at the dossier, but I didn't touch it yet.
"How new?" I asked.
"It was briefed forty minutes ago. It's Milan-based."
I glanced at Remy. He had gone very still, which meant he already knew. Which meant this had been in motion before I even walked through the door.
I looked back at Callum, my chest thudding for some reason for the first time. "Who's the target?"
He tapped the dossier once with two fingers.
"Caius Vale," he said. "CEO of ValeTech. He is thirty-three. He controls a tech empire worth somewhere north of four billion. The board of his company is sitting on classified legacy files, and someone very interested in those files is willing to pay very generously to have them extracted." He paused. "Quietly. Without Vale knowing you were ever there."
I was still staring at Callum calmly. That kind of calm that even though I'm alarmed and feel scared already, I couldn't let it show. I did not touch that dossier. At least, not yet. I looked at Callum quietly and calmly as I had practiced this art for years and he looked at me quietly, watching the way my pulse unconsciously picked up.
Caius Vale.
I had heard that name before. Many of us in this business and even in this room had heard it too. You don't operate in the upper corridors of corporate espionage without hearing the name Vale at least a dozen times. The tech billionaire. Milan-based man. The man who built something from almost nothing and somehow made that story sound boring because the result was so staggeringly large. The kind of man whose name preceded him into every room he had never even entered.
"Legacy files," I repeated. "What kind of legacy?"
"The kind of legacy we don't have to ask about because they pay us not to talk about it," Callum said, and this was a very particular way of saying it was none of our business and he wasn't going to be answering my question directly while still answering my question.