She was in the operations room when the call came in. She had not been invited. She had followed Diego through the corridor in the late afternoon for reasons she had not fully articulated even to herself, something about the specific quality of the activity in the house that afternoon, the way the movement had a different texture, people moving with the compressed urgency of something happening rather than the routine urgency of things being managed.
Diego had not told her to leave. Diego's form of permission was the absence of prohibition.
She stood near the window and watched the room function without her. Four of the Madrid lieutenants, two of them on phones, a map on the central table that had been updated twice in the last hour. The room had the specific atmosphere of a situation developing faster than response could organize itself.
Then Ranon's phone rang.
