Chapter 19: What Reyes Did

The safehouse on Pratt Street went dark on a Thursday.

Marcus learned about it the way he learned about most failures — through absence. Delia's morning check-in came through on schedule, two clicks on the secondary handset, but the afternoon confirmation from the Pratt Street relay didn't. He waited forty minutes past the window, which was twenty minutes longer than protocol allowed and twenty minutes shorter than his instinct wanted. Then he pulled the route.

He did it quietly. He told Vasquez he was doing a routine assessment of the southern transfer corridor in light of the Baltimore operation's costs. Vasquez looked at him over the document she was annotating and said nothing, which meant she believed him, or meant she didn't and had decided to let him work. With Vasquez, the two were often operationally identical.