The Chief Justice turned his cold, unblinking slate-gray eyes forty-five degrees to his right:
And then… his gaze locked onto the four-inch antique solid-titanium transponder key resting in my hand.
And then… his eyes dropped to the five-year-old boy standing beside my knee, who stared back at him while clutching a battered die-cast red toy truck.
The linen napkin in Arthur Vance’s fingers did not fall, but the muscle beneath his left cheekbone gave a single, violent, microscopic twitch:
TICK.
“Where is Marcus…?” Arthur whispered.
The velvet cello was gone.
The word was paper-thin. It was the dry, whistling rasp of an ancient water pump sucking air in an empty cistern:
“Where is the transport truck?”
“Marcus Sterling is in federal transport chains at the MDC in Brooklyn, Uncle Arthur,” I answered softly.
My voice had no microphone.
Yet it filled that twenty-foot concrete vault with forty decibels of pure, unyielding, polar diamond:
