Richard Vance had built his entire life on the principle that information was the only currency that mattered.
Which was why, at six o'clock on a Thursday morning, sitting alone with the city still grey beyond the windows, the silence from Wexbridge's reporting channel felt less like an administrative delay and more like the opening notes of something going badly wrong.
The quarterly compliance summary always arrived on the second Thursday. It had arrived on the second Thursday for fourteen months. Richard had learned across fifteen years that the absence of an expected thing was frequently more informative than its presence.
He called Preston.
"You're calling early," Preston said, and something in it — a half-second's hesitation that had never been there before — made Richard's instin
