Chapter 15: In Pencil
681 Words
Cornelius wrote in pencil — so the one who hears everything wouldn't hear.
A dark room on a floor that wasn't in the building's plans. A large window, a sleeping megacity beyond it, lights below. On the desk — an old paper notebook and a pencil. Beside them a glass of dark wine he'd barely touched. The wine was for his hands, not his throat: his hands sometimes needed something to keep them busy.
A message surfaced in his lenses. He read it. The corners of his mouth lifted. He dismissed it.
"He knows there'll be a spy," Cornelius said quietly, to himself. "He's preparing." A pause. "But he doesn't know about the second one."
He made a gesture. A private channel — not the kind that runs through the system, but the kind that runs past it, by the quiet illegal routes only a very few people on the planet can afford. A blurred face surfaced in his lenses against a black background. Vance.
"Yes," Vance said.
"The team knows there's a spy among them. They don't know who." Cornelius turned the pencil over in his fingers. "Tell Mehta to be open about it. Have him offer to help with the metal himself. Have him make no secret of his interest."
"Make him obvious," Vance said.
"Obvious. So they watch him. And not the second one."
Silence. In it, two men understood each other so well they could have done without speaking at all.
"And if Mehta does get a sample of the metal?" Vance asked.
"Then we get the thing all of this is for. The metal — in my hands. The rest is set dressing."
A pause.
"And the second one won't turn?"
"No. Because he thinks he's doing the right thing."
That was the best breed of agent. The bought kind haggles, breaks, and in the end sells you too. The convinced kind never haggles: he carries your cause as his own and dies for it with a clean heart, never once understanding whose will he served.
"A classic," Vance said.
"Classics work."
The channel went dark. No goodbye — just blackness. It was colder that way, and the cold between the two of them was a form of respect.
Cornelius turned back to the notebook. Took up the pencil. Wrote four words, one beneath the other, in the large, calm letters of a man who never hurries.
RHYS.
MEHTA.
OLENA.
MAX.
He looked at them for a long time.
Two of them worked for him: one knowing it, the other not. Rhys carried his cause as his own and had no idea whose will he was doing. Mehta knew everything and wanted too much. Olena was going in with a game of her own in her head — too smart to be convenient, but useful for exactly that inconvenience. And the fourth…
Cornelius slowly drew a circle around one name.
MAX.
Off to the side he added one word.
THREAT.
In his life he had won four hundred negotiations because he could see danger where others saw nothing. This man was danger. Buying him wouldn't work — Cornelius had already grasped that. Breaking him had been tried — and lost. That left the third option. But the third would come later. Haste ruins everything.
He closed the notebook. Put it in a drawer. Locked it.
"This will be interesting," he said quietly, to himself.
And he looked out the window — at the sleeping planet, the calmest, the most well-fed, the happiest in human history, decorated for the centennial of the first portal. At eight billion people sleeping under a gaze that loved them. Who would wake in the morning without an alarm, in warm light, with the kindest words of comfort ready and waiting — and would never know that this night, on a floor with no number, in pencil on paper, it had already been decided which of their finest had been sold in advance.
Beyond the glass the lights burned quietly. Somewhere among them slept a man whose name had just been circled.
- Writer
