Elias had been doing this work for fifteen years.
In that time he had taken requests that other people in his profession had turned down, not because they lacked the skill but because they lacked the nerve, and he had completed every single one of them without exception, without delay, and without leaving anything behind that could be traced back to the person who had hired him.
His record was not a matter of pride in the way that younger people in his line of work talked about pride. It was simply a fact, the same way the weather was a fact or the distance between two cities was a fact. You hired Elias and the thing you needed done got done. That was all there was to it.
He was sixty-three years old.
He did not look like it, which was one of several advantages his particular path through the ascendant rank had given him, and he did not act it in the ways that people who had spent sixty-three years accumulating damage and exhaustion tended to act.
