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I notice things. Pike runs his thumb across his lower lip when he lies. Vaughn counts the rounds in the barrel of his gun before going to bed. Hargreaves injects insulin at precisely twenty-two hundred and makes someone else dispose of the needle. Rook tests the lock of his panic room twice before bed. Morgan changes his guards’ shifts whenever he can’t sleep.

I make notes of everything in my head. The only paper I keep concerns a dock on the Croatian coast.

My parents retired there six years before the invasion because my mother wanted sea air and my father wanted somewhere no one knew he had once worn socks with sandals in public. I warned them that Croatia also had cameras. He said evidence required witnesses willing to testify.

For the first three months, I tell myself international communications will return. For the next six, I tell myself they may have evacuated inland.

Then a radio operator in Dover hears from a fishing cooperative running people and supplies through the Adriatic. Names cost antibiotics, a location costs fuel, so I start trading.

The radio operator wants antibiotics for his wife, the fuel officer wants his brother transferred out of Morgan’s infantry, and the captain wants a winter berth for his daughter and her children. None asks for anything unreasonable by current standards. But it’s still almost impossible to achieve.

I arrange them one at a time. The antibiotics come from Hargreaves and the transfer order from Morgan. Vaughn owns the warehouses at the berth, but he likes red wine, and Pike’s men recovered six bottles from a hotel cellar outside Reading. I complete each task without allowing any of them to see my agenda.

It is the most complicated operation I have managed since the government ceased to exist. No ammunition changes hands, no territory is won, and no one dies arranging it. Pretty remarkable in the current climate.

One favor puts a boat at my disposal, another secures enough diesel for the crossing, and a third buys a place at a service quay outside Zadar, where two British pensioners are known to collect drinking water every fourth morning.

One boat. One crossing. One dock. One date.

I arrange them over eight months, and in month seventeen the boat is ready.

So is Morgan’s operation against Pike.

Pike controls the Thames crossing east of the city and takes a percentage of every supply shipment that reaches London by water. Morgan intends to send forty soldiers across the estuary before dawn, seize Pike’s depot and remove the obstacle. If he succeeds, Pike will lose food, ammunition, and the men who maintain his private prison.

The depot also contains Pike’s prison records, and I need those records.

There’s one vessel capable of carrying Morgan’s soldiers without showing up on Pike’s radar. The one I secured for my parents. I have enough fuel to bring them. I have enough fuel to give it to Morgan for his soldiers. I don’t have enough fuel for both.

I fold the piece of paper with the coordinates in my breast pocket and watch the boat go to war.

Morgan’s men take the depot with nine casualties. They return with crates of ammunition and food, as well as a lockbox I requested as payment. It doesn’t have useless money, and it doesn’t have locations. It has names. Crimes. Punishments.

Ration theft. Cellar.

Desertion. Cellar.

Refusal of personal service. Cellar.

It confirms what I suspected from snippets overheard during private conversations where I’m overlooked. Pike keeps an infected man chained beneath the old palace and starves him until someone disappoints him, then lowers the offender into reach. The chain is attached to an electric winch, the release switch is inside a locked cabinet, and Pike carries the key on a cord around his neck. But there’s a manual override.

Of course, I have to confirm the information. During a power inspection beneath the palace, I examine the winch myself, measure the chain, count the bolts, test the manual catch. Then I put everything back.

At the beginning of month nineteen, I take out my list.

Edwin Vaughn. Wine.

Anthony Hargreaves. Insulin.

Michael Rook. Panic room.

Duncan Morgan. Exhaust system.

Gareth Pike. Cellar.

I schedule the meetings for the same night.

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