“Faster.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ariana finally looks up. “Hargrove has had twelve months. We’ve had two days. We’re going to spend the next week catching up.” She picks up her tea, looks at it, sets it down again.
Isobel has not moved. She has been listening with the stillness of a woman who is not surprised. She knew. Or had suspected. She catches my eye briefly, then looks back at the garden.
Alistair turns to the phone. “Brodie. You heard her. The comms layer, the second device, the Vellcottt accounts before they go cold.”
A pause.
“Mr Ravenscroft.”
“Yes.”
“Hargrove is significantly more dangerous than Mikhail was. Than Elena was.”
Alistair's hand on the table goes very still.
“The man is mostly a digital ghost. He’s brilliant at hiding but at the same time he seems to be everywhere. I don’t have a handle on him yet.”
I hear the discomfort in Brodie’s voice. He’s not used to not knowing.
“I don’t even have a picture. He’s confounded my identification system because he has an automated profile that changes every few minutes. I don’t know his nationality. I can’t even tell you his eye color.”
“You’ll get it,” says Alistair.
Brodie sounds unsure. Something about Hargrove has spooked him.
The kitchen is silent, apart from Reacher whining in a dream. Alistair takes a breath and ends the call, then turns to his brother.
“Christopher.”
Christopher lifts his head, eyes screwed up like a child bracing for a scolding.
“You are going to write down everything you can remember about every conversation at that table. Every name. Every detail. With Henderson. Today.”
“Yes.”
Alistair reaches across the table and puts his hand on Christopher's shoulder. He leaves it there for a moment longer than I expect. Christopher closes his eyes.
The question arrives in my mouth fully formed. “Why don't we just pay him?”
Everyone turns to look at me.
“Hargrove. He says he is owed half. Half of what was Mikhail's is not nothing, but it's not Alex's life. We have the money. Why don't we just pay him?”
Alistair turns his body to face me fully. He puts his cup down. “Men like Hargrove are not paid off. You give them what they ask for and they ask for more. You give them more and the requests change shape. Once they have their claws in, they make demands for access. For influence. For the next favor and the next, until the day they ask for something you cannot give andtell you that you should have thought of that before you gave them the first thing.”
His voice is very level.
“By that point they are inside. We will have spent a year paying them not to do something they were always going to do anyway, because the only thing men like that respect is the demonstration that they cannot have what they want.”
Isobel nods grimly. “Hargrove and his associates will haunt us forever. We’ll never be safe. Sometimes a dead body is the only way to put a proper end to things like this.”
CHAPTER 27
Sweep
