I answered and hit speaker without asking, sharing the call with the room.
“Farrow.”
“Price,” I said.
He hesitated and then asked, “Status?”
“Safehouse secure. We had a watcher across the street. Confirmed presence, and he held position for perhaps five minutes before walking the front of the house and turning thecorner toward Charles. No contact or gestures. He carried no phone or weapons that we could see.”
“Description?”
“White. Mid-forties. Average build. Dark coat.”
“Could any of you identify him?”
“Cabot recognized him from the August Harcourt gathering on the Vineyard. He can’t tie him directly to the family. There’s no name either.”
A pause on the line.
“Understood. Anything else?”
Dane’s gaze met mine from across the room. We held it for two seconds before each looking away. It hadn’t been about Eamon.
“One more thing, a Harcourt family member,” Dane said. “The matriarch steered Cabot away from him. His name is Henry Harcourt Benton. He’s Pierce Harcourt’s nephew. He was also at the August gathering. Public records are slim to nonexistent. Cabot has found nothing over the past fourteen months.”
A longer pause.
“Are you concluding that he’s involved?”
“Two people drew Cabot’s attention last August. Both because they appeared to operate in the shadows. One of them showed up today at the curb. We don’t know what it means, but want to know.”
“Fair.”
“We should be quiet when we look at Henry,” Dane said from the corner. “We don’t know what he is yet. If he’s nothing, we don’t want to make him into something. If he’s something, we don’t want him to know we’re looking.”
“Agreed,” Eamon said. “We work him through public records and whatever Wiley’s been collecting. Nothing that goes near him directly yet.”
“Understood,” I said.
“Eamon, what was the delay?” Dane asked.
A breath on the line.
“We had a channel flag. It happened roughly the same time you would have been arriving. We restricted comms response to two details until we could verify.”
“Verify what?”
“That we weren’t feeding someone live data.”
Cabot’s hands tightened on his knees. I looked at Dane.
“We had reason to believe someone temporarily intercepted our communications,” Eamon said. “Neither confirmed nor ruled out.”
“Any directives?” Dane asked.
“The standard. Minimize your exposure. No unnecessary movements. If you go somewhere, don’t use direct routes. Always prefer known runners from The Guardians.”
Wiley made a small, frustrated sound under his breath. “I can’t work like this. I want to be on my laptop. I want to be looking at the chatter from the last forty-eight hours. I want to know whether the vocabulary shifted again in the last two hours, because if it did, that tells us they moved when we moved.”