All Chapters of His Forbidden Guard : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

The flight landed at six forty-one.He had looked at the arrivals board twice in the preceding hour. Not from anxiety. From the specific habit of a person who preferred to locate events on a timeline before they arrived, who had learned that knowing the number gave you something to stand next to while the thing itself was still approaching.Six forty-one.Terminal Four's arrivals hall had the particular quality of a space that existed only in the register of transit, that was neither departure nor arrival but the suspended condition between them, the specific atmospheric quality of a place where people were always just finishing one thing and not yet begun with the next. He had chosen his position at the edge of the corridor where it opened into the hall, not at the barrier with the families and their signs, not in the rows of seats with their institutional quality of accumulated waiting, but at the margin, where he could see without being immediately in the field of what he was waiti

The room they were given was on the fourteenth floor.It was a federal room, which meant it had the specific quality of a space designed to be neutral in the particular institutional sense of neutrality that was not the absence of character but the deliberate suppression of it, the careful removal of anything that might suggest a perspective or produce a comfort. It had a long table and chairs that were adequate without being more than adequate and windows that looked out over a section of the city that was also adequate, that provided the evidence of a world continuing its business outside the glass without offering anything specific about that world. It had recording equipment that was present and visible, which was its own specific statement, the statement of a room that did not pretend to be other than what it was.Leonard had arrived first.He had come ahead of the others by twenty minutes, in the specific way of someone who needed the room before the room was occupied, who neede

They came in and they introduced themselves and the introductions had the particular quality of introductions in federal rooms, which was the quality of a formality that served a practical function, that established the record of who was present and in what capacity, that said this is now official in the specific register of a thing becoming official.Leonard watched them look at the folders on the table.He watched the assessment run, the specific professional inventory of three people who processed evidence for a living and who were, in the first seconds of being in the room, already running the preliminary assessment of what was in front of them and what it was likely to represent and what the day was going to become.The one who sat at the head of the table was a woman somewhere in her mid-forties who had the specific quality of someone whose attention was comprehensive and whose face had been trained, over a long career, to give very little of that comprehensiveness away. She sat

Grimstone looked at him for a long moment.Then he looked back at the door.They stood.Forty minutes later, Roarke came out of the room.He came out in the specific quality of a person who has said the true thing in the official room where the true thing needed to be said, who has put into the record the account of what actually happened, who has given the shape of it in the language that the record required, and is now in the particular condition of that, which had its own specific weight that was different from the prior weight, that was not lighter but was differently distributed, that was the weight of a thing no longer only inside you.He came out and he stopped in the corridor.He looked at Leonard.He looked at Grimstone.He said nothing.Grimstone looked at him.After a moment, he said: "All right?"Roarke said: "All right."The specific quality of two people using adequacy as the honest answer, not fine, not better, but all right, which was the accurate word, which was the w

And she was laughing now, her head tilting back, her hand on the arm of a silver-haired man, the laugh open and easy and entirely real, and she was forty feet away from the person who knew exactly what she was, and she had absolutely no idea.Good, Daveson told himself. That is the plan. That is precisely what the plan requires.He looked at the tattoo on her wrist when her sleeve moved. The small black cat. Both wrists, the articles had said. There it was. Real, like everything else. Real and forty feet away.He looked away from it. He returned to the room.He had been in position for forty minutes when the feeling changed again.Not Lissa this time. A different shift. A different quality of attention moving through the crowd, and Daveson tracked it back to its source the way he'd been trained to track disturbances, not to the thing itself but to the reaction of the room around the thing, which was often more legible than the thing itself.The staircase.A man coming down it.He came