The second evening bell sounded across the capital, low and final, rolling out from the palace towers in the same measured cadence it had used for decades.
Atlas stood at the gallery drains with Eli, Lara, and the swordsman. The extraction point remained quiet. No marker light. No vibration through the service conduits. No sound of boots or focus discharge from the tunnels David was supposed to use.
The palace above them had gone strangely still in the upper galleries and strangely busy in the administrative wings, the ordinary evening traffic of clerks and attendants replaced by something tighter and more deliberate.
Eli checked the time again. "He's late."
"He's past late," Lara said. She kept her eyes on the drain mouths and the service openings, weight balanced, hand near the blade at her hip. "If he was delayed by resistance he would have sent a marker. If he was dead we would have heard the alarm or the silence that follows a clean kill. This is something else."
