Chapter 74: Mission Failed
"Casey, I'm in position next door. Starting audio now."
Simon pressed the cigar box against the wall and held it there. The case wasn't a cigar box — it was shaped like one, sized like one, and contained a single prop cigar that was actually a compact thermal monocular. The box itself was a contact microphone: pressed against a wall, it picked up vibrations and converted them into audio transmitted directly to the team's earpieces.
"Received," Casey said. "You're more reliable than Bartowski on his best day."
"I'm still on comms," Chuck said.
Casey made a sound that expressed nothing and conveyed complete dismissal.
Simon raised the thermal monocular and pointed it at the adjoining wall. The heat signatures resolved into shapes: four people in the room. One prone under the desk — Chuck, almost certainly. One with the silhouette of a woman, standing near the room's primary light source. Hayes, seated. A fourth figure near the door.
He listened.
The woman and Hayes were discussing the decryption timeline. Hayes was asking about compensation. Then the woman's hand moved, and there was a suppressed shot, and the fourth figure dropped.
"Casey," Simon said quietly. "Situation's changed. Hayes is being taken. Armed escort."
"The chip's not in the vault." Chuck's voice, compressed and urgent. "It's on Hayes's keychain. I could see it clearly. And I got a look at the Fulcrum operative's face."
"Chuck, stop talking," Simon said. "She's coming back into the room."
A beat.
"What?" Chuck said, and then the sound of someone moving — scraping, shifting — and then a voice that was not any of theirs:
"I thought I heard you say Fulcrum."
Simon was already packing the equipment. "Casey. Chuck's been compromised. Hayes went toward the front hall. Notify Sarah."
"On it. You take Hayes."
"Moving."
He stepped out of the room into the corridor and immediately saw Hayes — moving fast, not quite running, the specific pace of someone who had been told to relocate and was relocating — with Bryce fifteen feet behind him, closing.
Simon started toward them.
"Simon."
He stopped.
Meg was in the corridor, coming from the direction of the main hall, holding a champagne glass and looking at him with the expression she used when she'd been waiting and had questions about the waiting.
"You were gone a long time," she said.
Simon shifted his expression into something lighter and crossed toward her. "Sorry. I went looking for Chuck. I was worried about him after the — the incident with the bottle."
"Where is he?"
"Didn't find him. I'm going to check the back of the property."
Meg looked at him for a moment with the perceptive attention that had stopped surprising him and never quite stopped being felt.
"Go," she said. "I'll be in the main hall."
He kissed her, moved past her, and walked quickly toward the rear corridor.
He heard the explosion before he cleared the back door.
Not a car bomb — smaller than that, sharper, the sound of something compressed and directed. He came through the door into the rear garden and found Sarah on the ground, Chuck kneeling beside her, the smoke of whatever had happened still visible twenty feet away near the garden wall.
"Sarah?" Simon crossed to them.
"She needs an ambulance," Chuck said. He sounded slightly removed from the situation, the way people sounded when something had happened faster than they could integrate it.
Simon was already on his phone — 911, brief and precise, location and nature of injury, estimated response time confirmed.
He ended the call and looked at the ground around Sarah. A handgun was on the grass three feet away — not hers, not Chuck's, not positioned where someone drops a weapon voluntarily.
He picked it up without breaking stride, checked the chamber, and tucked it under his jacket.
"I'll be back in two minutes," he said to Chuck. "Don't move her."
He found a service gate in the garden wall, went through it, crossed the parking area to where Casey's surveillance van was parked two blocks down, and handed the weapon through the window.
Casey looked at it. Looked at Simon. "Where did—"
"Scene," Simon said. "Don't want it found there."
He went back to the party.
The sirens were audible by the time he found Meg in the main hall. The crowd had migrated toward the windows and the rear terrace, the collective awareness of something having happened outside pulling people in that direction.
Simon came up beside her and took her hand.
"There was a car that exploded in the rear," she said. "Someone's hurt."
"I know," Simon said. "I think we should go."
Meg turned from the window. "Yes. Absolutely." She looked at him more carefully. "Are you alright?"
"Fine," he said. "Just ready to be somewhere quieter."
They got the Mustang from the valet, and Simon drove them to his house, and they watched a film until late, and he was careful to be present for all of it rather than somewhere else in his head — because Meg had given him the evening the way she'd given him the corridor earlier, and that deserved the equivalent in return.
School the next morning.
He found Veronica near the front entrance with Logan beside her. Not dramatically — just beside her, in the specific proximity that people occupied when they'd stopped pretending the proximity was incidental.
Logan saw Simon first. The look he sent across the parking lot was the one he defaulted to — a combination of assessment and provocation that was probably automatic by now.
Simon returned a middle finger with the same detached pleasantness he'd use to wave at a neighbor.
"Both of you," Veronica said, appearing between them. "Enough."
"I was provoked," Simon said.
"He was provoked," Logan said simultaneously.
Veronica looked at both of them with the expression of a woman who had expected exactly this and was tired of it in advance.
"Since you're apparently capable of being in the same city block," she said, "I'm suggesting a double date. Christmas. The four of us."
"I can't," Simon said.
"Why?"
"Mia's on her own this Christmas. Dom's gone, Letty's gone — she shouldn't be alone. I'm spending it with her." He paused. "I might also go to Miami."
Meg, who had appeared at Simon's elbow, said: "Miami? You didn't mention that."
"My parents' platform is in the Gulf. Close enough to Miami that I can reach them by helicopter from there." Simon shrugged. "I wanted to surprise them. They said they can't make it home. I figured I'd go to them instead."
Meg was quiet for a moment, processing something that had clearly landed in a specific place.
"So the double date is off," Veronica said, less as a question than as a confirmation of a pattern.
"For Christmas, yes," Simon said. "Suggest another date and I'll actually consider it."
Logan opened his mouth.
"Not you," Simon said pleasantly. "I was talking to Veronica."
Logan closed his mouth.
Veronica looked at both of them for a moment with the expression she used when she was deciding whether something was worth the effort of pursuing.
She decided it wasn't. For now.
"New Year's," she said. "Consider it a standing suggestion."
"Noted," Simon said.
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