I hit the speaker button as I reached the mouth of the alley. "Karen?"
"Naomi, don't go home," Karen’s voice was frantic, breathless, competing with the hum of traffic from the highway overpass. "There’s an unmarked black sedan parked outside my driveway. They aren't process servers. They’re private security. They’re sitting on the curb waiting for me to leave with the backup drive."
"Where is the drive now?" I asked, cutting across the wet asphalt toward the bus stop on Geary.
"It’s not at the house," Karen said, her voice dropping to a trembling whisper. "I knew Hale’s people had the building access logs. When I left at five, I didn't put it in my bag. I locked the external hard drive inside the departmental evidence drop-box behind the Mission Street loading dock. But the box requires two keys to open before the ten o'clock vault collection: the intake clerk’s brass key, and the building supervisor’s electronic card."
"Who has the supervisor card tonight?"
"Arthur Vance," she said, her voice nearly cracking. "The head of field inspections. Naomi... Vance was the one who approved Victor Hale’s original caisson variance two months ago."
I stopped under the yellow glow of the streetlamp. The cold wind from the bay whipped the edge of my coat against my knees.
Arthur Vance wasn't an impartial supervisor waiting to verify the chain of custody. He was the official who had permitted the fraudulent bedrock certs in the first place. If Vance reached that loading dock drop-box before the city archivist arrived at ten o'clock, the drive containing the altered timestamps would disappear into an internal shredder before the morning sun hit the water.
"Karen," I said, turning away from the bus stop toward the taxi stand outside the St. Francis Hotel. "Stay inside your house. Lock the deadbolt, keep the lights off, and do not answer the door for anyone without a municipal badge."
"What are you going to do?"
"Henry Lin didn't leave his dossier on table twelve by accident," I said, looking down at my trench coat pocket.
When Lin had stood up to leave, he had pulled his leather portfolio shut, but his younger partner, David Chen, had deliberately pushed a heavy cream card across the damp tablecloth right next to my service tray while Victor was shouting at Marcus.
I pulled the card out into the light.
It wasn't a business card. It was a private courier slip for the Shanghai Commercial Bank escrow office on California Street, stamped with an immediate verification code and a direct mobile number written in black ink:
Room 1400. We hold the secondary foundation telemetry from the 2024 seismic survey. Call before the vault clears.
Lin had never trusted Victor Hale’s bedrock numbers from the start. He hadn't come to dinner to be convinced; he had come with his own parallel survey data, waiting to see whether Hale would lie about the city’s stop-work order to force the transfer of escrow funds.
The wager on table twelve hadn't been an insult to an ordinary server.
It had been the final test of whether anyone in the room had the courage to put the municipal record on the table before the wire went through.
I raised my arm toward an approaching yellow cab, its tires hissing over the wet streetcar rails. The taxi slowed, its brake lights painting the dark asphalt blood-red.
I opened the door, slid onto the cracked vinyl seat, and looked at my watch.
9:48 PM.
Twelve minutes before Arthur Vance cleared the drop-box on Mission Street.