A Shorter List

She called a meeting for the next morning and she changed the location twice, which told the crew everything before she said a word. Crews read a planner the way sailors read a sky. This time it was a launderette, closed, the keys borrowed from a man who owed her a favour so old it had grandchildren. The machines stood in two rows like patient white animals. Nadia had got there forty minutes early, alone, and had spent the forty minutes deciding how much to say, and had arrived, the way she usually did, at the truth — but a managed truth, the truth handed over in the order that did the least damage. They came in one at a time, the way she'd taught them. Pilar first, then Marek, then Bram, and then the two who had not been in the carpet-showroom room: Aune, who climbed, narrow and calm and somewhere in her fifties, and Theo, who did money, young, soft-spoken, a man who could make a number disappear and reappear cleaner in another country. Five people. One of them, possibly, had killed the sixth. "There's no easy way in," Nadia said, "so here it is. Our inside man is dead. The radio's calling it a body in a car park off Calder Street. I've confirmed it. It's him." Nobody said anything for a moment, and she watched the nobody-saying-anything the way she had watched the wall in the showroom. Bram's jaw tightened. Pilar swore softly and looked at the floor. Marek did not move at all, which was simply Marek. Aune closed her eyes briefly, the way climbers do before a hard pitch. And Theo — Theo said, "Then the job's dead," fast, almost relieved, and that was interesting, she filed it, because relief is a tell and so is its opposite. "The job's not dead," Nadia said. "The plan is. There's a difference and the difference is the only thing keeping us out of a great deal of trouble, so listen. Eleven parts needed an inside man for parts four, six and nine. We don't have one and we're not getting another in time. So we are not doing eleven parts. We are doing six." "Six," said Marek. The first word he'd spent all morning. "Six. A shorter list. It's uglier, it's faster, and it does not need anyone on the inside, because the eleven-day window is still open and a window is a window whether or not you have a friend holding it." She let it sit. "But before I walk the six, one thing, and I want every face in the room while I say it. Our inside man is dead four days into a job only the people in this building knew the shape of. That is either the worst luck I've had in nineteen years, or it is not luck. I don't know which yet. I'm telling you I don't know, because the day I start lying to my own crew is the day the crew should leave. But understand what it means. From this morning, the job has two halves. One half is the vault." She looked, slowly, at each of them — Bram, Pilar, Marek, Aune, and last and longest at Theo, who had been so quick to bury it. "And the other half is finding out which of you I shouldn't have called." The launderette was very quiet. Somewhere a machine she'd thought was off finished a cycle it had been holding, and clicked, and went still. "Part one," said Nadia, and reached into her bag for the new schematic, the short one, the one with six lines on it. "Pay attention. We're shorter on time than we were yesterday, and one of us already knows exactly how much shorter."