He was in the study when the alert came through.
Marcus's system was precise by design — a mirror notification arrived within sixty seconds of any activity on the monitored devices, flagged by type, timestamped, delivered to a secondary application that existed on Adrian's phone as something unremarkable. He had checked it twice that evening already, the way you checked a thing you were trying not to check too often, and both times there had been nothing. The third time, at nine fifty-four, there was something.
He read Julian's original message first. Then Elena's reply.
He read it twice, which was his habit, and then he set the phone face-down on the desk and sat for a moment with his hands flat on the surface in front of him and looked at the middle distance the way he looked at thing
