The Vex Files

She was already there when he arrived. This was intentional.

Vesper had learned, in the particular school she had attended — the one with no name, no address, and no graduation ceremony — that the first person to arrive owns the room. The second merely enters it. Senator Cornelius Ward — architect of the Family Integrity and Decency Act, champion of American virtue — entered the Lantern Club at precisely nine-fourteen, fourteen minutes late, and found her already three sips into a Vesper Martini she had chosen with the same deliberate care she applied to everything.

She did not look up immediately. She let him have a moment with the reality of her — the dark hair, the pale column of her throat, the way the amber light caught the ink on her arms like gilded marginalia in a very old, very dangerous book. Then she looked up. “Senator.” Her voice was the temperature of the room. “You’re late.”

The rain had been falling since nine.

Vesper Vex stood at the periphery of the Deveraux Pharmaceuticals campus and watched the last of the security rotation complete its circuit. Twelve minutes between passes. She had counted three rotations from the shadow of the car park across the street — an umbrella above her, a cigarette between two gloved fingers, a woman waiting for a cab, to anyone who looked. No one looked.

The western service entrance had a keypad and a camera with a blind spot at the lower left corner; she had the schematics memorized, courtesy of a contact who owed her considerably more than schematics. The keypad accepted the override on the second attempt. The door opened the way the best entrances always did: quietly, and completely. Sub-level three was where they kept him.