Chapter 8
1128 Words
I decided that I would give myself an hour.
I spent a lot of it standing at the window in the room that they put me in, looking at the compound go through its morning routine below. Two men walking together across the yard. A vehicle is backing up heading eastward at the east gate. Two women I didn't recognize were carrying crates towards the supply building. It was a whole body that learned to walk without its head, and I don't yet know if that was Raze's or my father's or just what happens when a structure is constructed well enough that it outlasts the man that made it.
In that hour I reflected a great deal on my father.
At Silas' request, I went.
It was a debrief room, and its scent was of old paper and burnt coffee.
Silas was already there. I could see from his sitting that he was not fresh-tired, but the tired that has been sitting with him for hours. His jacket was off. His sleeves were rolled up. On the table were three folders and a fourth one at the far end, as if he had read it and didn't want it near him anymore.
Raze came in two minutes after me.
He didn't say why. He sat to my left but didn't say anything, and I didn't say anything to him.
"Close the door," Silas said.
I closed it.
Silas opened the first folder without preamble. He was not a man who built up to things.
Your father did not die of a heart attack," he said.
I had been aware of that. Not because I was told, but because of the way his men were standing at the funeral — the ones who've been with him the longest, the ones who should be weeping or close to it, standing too still, watching the perimeter rather than the grave. I read that and filed it and just have not looked at it directly until now.
"Poisoned," I said.
Silas looked at me. "Yes."
"Slowly?"
"Over eight to twelve weeks. Something introduced in small amounts. Cumulative." He paused. "It would have looked like a man declining. Not a man being killed."
I held that. Kept my hands flat on the table.
"Regular access," I said. "Someone with regular access to him."
"Someone inside," Silas said. "Yes."
It was very still in the room. I was aware of Raze to my left the way you are aware of a wall that is keeping something in. Present. Not intervening. Just there.
"Do you know who?" I asked.
"No." Silas's jaw shifted. "Not yet. We have a probable timeline. We have a list of people with the access and opportunity." He placed a second folder in front of me. "We don't have a name."
I opened it. It was written in Silas's script, but it was not printed. Eleven names. I could identify 10 of them. On the eleventh, it was someone I didn't know.
"This one," I said.
"Brought in by your father eight months before he died. Low-level placement, east wing administration. Scheduling and correspondence. Who came in, who went out." Silas was watching me. "He left the compound ten days after the death. We have not located him."
"Delacroix," I read.
"That's how he was logged."
I shut the folder. When Silas had uttered the word "poisoned," the coldness I had felt in my chest persisted. I wasn't going to say that I was feeling grief. Grief was for later, when it could be in a private place, when it didn't matter what my face did. What I had in my chest at this moment had to remain in my chest.
"You said a name," I said. "On the phone, before I came. You said there was a name."
Silas remained silent for a while. Not hesitating. Measuring.
"Not of the person responsible," he said. "Of the one who likely commissioned it."
"Tell me."
He said the name.
It didn't matter to me. Two syllables, flat, a name for no particular person. I flipped it over, and there was nothing on the back. No face. No context. This was the first time that word cropped up in any of my father's conversations.
I turned to Raze.
His jaw was clenched. Small movement. I would have missed it if I hadn't been looking at his face. I was always watching his face, though, and I didn't miss it, but I was watching his face.
"You know that name," I said.
He didn't answer immediately.
"Raze."
"I know of him," he said. Precise, not evasive—the way Raze gave information, exactly the amount he'd decided on. "He doesn't operate locally. Different level entirely."
"What level?"
"The kind that doesn't commission something without a reason," Raze said, "and doesn't commission it without a plan for what comes after."
The cold spread.
"My father had something he wanted," I said. "And my father said no."
Neither of them made any sound. That was confirmation.
I peered back down at the folder. At eleven, there were names and one unknown man that had been around my father every day for eight months. Try a death that looks like nothing and has been patiently built over weeks and given in small doses.
My father had known. That's what was dropping now, this time slowly, like a large object drops when it finally releases. He had been aware of the threat that was there. He sent for me 3 weeks prior to the end.
And I had not come.
I pressed that down. Down at the spot, I store the things that might break me if I let them. I held my face still and my hands flat on the table, and then I looked at Silas.
“What is it that you need from me?” I said.
For a good ten seconds, Silas studied me. Then he looked at Raze, and there was a look in that, something with history to it, between those two, that they were not sure how to get you to.
"Everything," Silas said. All the things that your father had given you. And all the things that your father didn't tell you that he was giving you.
The room held that.
A door slammed shut in the compound outside. The sound was very commonplace.
I studied the fourth folder, which was on the far end of the table. The one Silas had left and turned away from.
"What's in that one?" I said.
Silas did not want to get up and pick it up. He gazed at me without flinching.
"That one," he said, "is what he left for you specifically. And I think you should read it alone."
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