The call came on a Wednesday morning at nine forty-seven.
Liam was between meetings—the specific ten-minute gap he kept deliberately clear in his morning schedule, a practice he'd developed after a year of back-to-back sessions that had left him making decisions at two PM with the cognitive resources of someone who had been awake for three days. He was standing at his window with a coffee that had gone lukewarm when his personal phone rang.
Not his work line. Not the number that appeared on the Ashford Technologies website or in any public directory. The number that existed on approximately twelve phones in the world, all of them belonging to people he'd vetted personally.
Unknown caller.
He answered.
