Page 27 of Under Her Protection

At two in the morning she woke, as she sometimes did, and could not go back to sleep. She got up. She went to the window in her robe and opened the curtain an inch. In the courtyard below, at the lodge, a single light. A figure in a dark jacket stood at the lodge door speaking quietly to Beaumont's night man. Leo. Still here. Still working.

Vivienne watched her for half a minute longer than she had meant to. She enjoyed the strong curve of Leo’s shoulders and stole a glance at her big hands. Long fingers.

Then she let the curtain fall and went back to bed. Claudel had eleven years with the firm. A request like that was not made without a reason. By morning she intended to have it.

6

By Friday Leo had been in the residence four days, and she had the shape of it.

She had slept not that many of the last seventy-two hours, which was not unusual for a new engagement. She had run the cameras. She had audited the internal access logs. She had walked every staircase, every service corridor, every door that locked and every door that did not. She had pulled the names off the housekeeping rota and the names off the grounds maintenance roster and the names of the three drivers Strauss Industrie kept on retainer, and she had given all of those names to Avery, and Avery, at Blackthorn, was running them.

She had, with Beaumont's slow and increasingly less reluctant help, put a new camera on the north rooftop corner and two new motion sensors on the garden wall. She had pulled a dead zone out of the basement service corridor and put a pressure mat in the kitchen pantry that Madame Guérin had objected to and then, within forty-eight hours, stopped objecting to. She had rewritten the staff rota so that no one but Guérin was in the residence after twenty-one hundred without a Blackthorn body in the same wing. She had done all of this, and she had slept six hours.

On Thursday evening she had caught herself staring at a blank wall for ninety seconds at the end of a routine sweep, and she had recognized it for what it was, which was fatigue, and she had taken a cold shower and gone back to work.

She had a shape now. She did not yet have a name. That was about to change.

On Friday morning Leo pulled up at HQ at eight, let the elevator recognize her, and walked into the small glass-walled room at the back of the third floor that Dominique had stood up for them forty-eight hours ago. STRAUSS in matte black on the door. No other signage.

Avery was already there.

She was at the long table with three screens open, her hair tucked behind her ears, a cup of coffee gone cold at her elbow. She did not look up when Leo came in. She gestured at the chair.

"Sit."

"I am sitting."

"Not yet you are not."

Leo sat.

Avery turned one of the screens. An org chart. Strauss Industrie's executive tier, the names Leo had read on Tuesday evening, with three names now ringed in red.

"Blanchet," Avery said. "Claudel. And this one." She tapped. "Renaud. Senior analyst. Worked on the Bellini deal team. Was on the distribution for the June memo."

"Martel was Claudel's invite."

"Yes. I have confirmed."

"So Claudel is either in this or being played."

"Agreed."

"Renaud."

"Renaud is interesting."

Avery brought up a second window. A timeline. Dates. Access logs.

"Renaud printed the June memo twice. Both times on the pool printer in her floor's corner office. The second print was at seven-forty-two in the evening, after her shift. She logged out of the system at six. Someone with her credentials printed again at seven-forty-two."

"Someone."

"Or her."

"Camera on the printer?"

"I have the footage."