The call from Silas lasted forty-seven seconds. Michael counted. When the line went dead, he sat in his office chair for a full minute and stared at the phone. The message was clear: stand down, shut up and wait for instructions. The kind of language you used with a dog that had snapped at a guest. Not a colleague or a partner. An asset. A thing that fetched and returned and knew better than to bite this was how he had always been talked down to by his so called bosses.
Michael stood up and walked to the wall where a painting hung. Abstract, meaningless swirls in beige and gold that some interior designer had chosen to convey calm. He lifted it off the hook and set it on the floor. Behind it was a safe, old-fashioned, mechanical, the kind of thing you couldn't hack with a laptop because it had no electronics. He turned the dial left, right, left again, feeling the clicks in his fingertips like Braille. The door opened with a soft clunk.
