He looked at her and thanked her quietly.
She introduced herself, and he gave her his name. She asked how he was enjoying the evening. He looked at her with a directness that surprised her and said that the food was very good, and that the chandeliers reminded him of something he had once seen in a government building in Abuja when he was a young man working his first real job—before everything changed.
He said those last three words simply, without drama, then looked back at his plate.
Sera set her pen down slowly on the tablecloth.
Baron had noticed the journalist sitting beside Dio, but he was not worried. He had managed press relationships for fifteen years and knew which stories got written and which ones were quietly killed before they became problems.
His PR director, Nola, was in the room.
He turned back to his main table and accepted congratulations from a Swiss banker who had just arrived. The evening was going exactly as planned.
The orchestra shifted smoothly into a brighter, faster piece, and conversation rose with it.
Across the room, one of Baron’s junior partners, a man named Sulo, had been watching Baron’s table for the last fifteen minutes rather than paying attention to his own dinner. Sulo was thirty-eight. He had worked at Rexton Group for four years, and he had a wife, two young children, and a mortgage that depended entirely on Rexton Group continuing to operate exactly as it always had.
He had reached for his water glass three times in the last ten minutes without actually drinking from it.
He was watching Baron’s face.
Sulo had heard something eighteen months earlier that he was not meant to hear. He had been walking back from the printer room late on a Tuesday afternoon when a door in the corridor had been left slightly open. Two voices were clearly audible inside. Two names had been spoken alongside a set of numbers. One of the names was Vel.
At the time, Sulo had told himself he had not heard enough to know what it meant.
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