The message from Richard arrived on a Tuesday morning, routed through the eastern administrative office's secondary correspondence channel rather than the direct line he had been using before his departure. The routing was deliberate. It told me, before I had read a word, that what was inside was not the kind of information he wanted attached to his official posting's communication record.
I read it in the study with Darius beside me and Eli in the doorway, which was the configuration we had settled into for intelligence that was significant enough to require immediate joint processing.
Richard's communication was precise, as everything he produced was precise, and it was also the longest message he had ever sent me. Four pages, handwritten, in the careful script of a man who had organized his thoughts completely before committing them to paper and was not going to revise once he began.
