Chapter 28: The Flash
"Thought you weren't coming in today."
Chuck was at the Nerd Herd desk with a tablet open and a coffee going cold beside it when Simon arrived, still carrying the particular physical clarity that an hour of proper training always left behind.
"Had some things to handle this morning," Simon said, clipping on his badge. "Ran long."
"What kind of things?"
"Kung fu."
Chuck stared at him. "I'm sorry?"
"I've been training at a school in Burbank for three years. Traditional curriculum." Simon read Chuck's expression. "I know. It keeps coming up."
"Is there anything you can't do?"
"Several things. I'm working on the list." Simon moved toward the floor. "What's happening today?"
Morgan materialized from the space between two display racks — a talent of his that Simon had stopped being startled by — and pointed at Simon with the intensity of a man who had just thought of the right question. "Question. Could you take Casey?"
A pause.
Chuck turned slightly away, like a man who didn't want to be associated with what was about to happen.
"Probably," Simon said. "It wouldn't be fast or clean, but yes."
"You're serious."
"Advanced combat training covers a broad range of disciplines. Casey's strong, he's disciplined, he's experienced. He's also predictable in the way that formally trained operatives tend to be predictable. That's exploitable."
Morgan looked at Chuck. Chuck studied the ceiling.
"I'm not saying I'd enjoy it," Simon added. "But you asked."
A sound came from behind them — not quite dismissive, not quite amused. Somewhere in between. Simon turned. Casey had passed within earshot on his way from the break room to the large appliance section, and was now walking away without acknowledging the conversation, which was Casey's version of participation.
"He heard that," Morgan said.
"I know," Simon said. "That's fine."
He went to work.
The afternoon was unremarkable in the way Buy More Saturdays were unremarkable — steady traffic, predictable questions, the particular combination of customer interactions that required patience more than expertise. Simon moved through it efficiently, collected his check-in XP from Chuck during a natural lull, and clocked out at five.
He was home and changed by six thirty.
The suit was new — bought that morning after the school, before the Buy More, from a men's formal shop on Ventura that had understood what he needed without requiring extensive explanation. Dark charcoal, well-fitted, the kind of thing that didn't announce itself.
He stood in front of the bathroom mirror, adjusted the tie, and looked at himself for a moment.
He looked older than eighteen. He'd always looked older than eighteen, which had been useful in some contexts and complicated in others. Tonight it would help.
He went outside.
Letty noticed him from the Toretto driveway before he'd cleared his own porch.
"Look at this," she said, to no one and everyone. She put down her beer. "Is that a tuxedo?"
"It's a suit," Simon said.
"It has a bow tie."
"It does."
Dom was sitting on the front steps with a Corona, taking in the evening with his standard economy of expression. He looked at Simon and something moved in the corner of his mouth. "Big night?"
"Art auction at the Hilton. Meg's thing." Simon checked his watch. "I'm waiting for the car."
"You hired a car?" Vince said, from somewhere in the garage doorway.
"Meg's father would shoot me if I showed up at the house," Simon said. "So she's meeting me here."
A long Lincoln Town Car turned onto the block.
It came to a stop in front of Simon's house, and Meg stepped out.
Red evening gown. Hair up. The kind of put-together that required effort and looked like it had required none.
The driveway got quiet in the way driveways got quiet when the situation called for it.
Meg looked at the assembled Toretto crew with the ease of a woman who had long since stopped being intimidated by them and had mostly just decided they were family-adjacent.
"Can I borrow him for the night?" she said.
Dom raised his beer. "Take as long as you need."
Letty said something under her breath that made Jesse laugh.
Simon pointed at all of them in a gesture that was simultaneously dismissive and fond, took Meg's hand, and got in the car.
"I was going to pick you up," he said, once they were moving.
"My dad was home." Meg's tone was completely even about this. "You being at the front door would have made the evening more dramatic than necessary."
"Understood."
"You look very good, by the way."
"You look incredible."
"I know." She smiled. "I worked for it."
They rode for a few minutes in the comfortable silence of two people who didn't need to fill space.
"This is a lot of car for an art auction," Meg said, looking at the Town Car's interior.
"It was a reasonable expense."
"Simon. It's a Saturday night in Los Angeles. We could have taken the Supra."
"You're in a floor-length gown."
"I'm flexible."
"The Town Car is already paid for." He leaned back. "Relax. Enjoy the legroom."
She shook her head but settled into the seat, which Simon took as acceptance.
The hotel was the kind of place that had a red carpet as a standard feature rather than a special occasion. The event photographers were positioned on both sides of the entrance — not press, just the social documentation that accompanied this tier of fundraiser.
Simon stepped out, offered his hand, and Meg took it. They walked the carpet at the pace of people who had nothing to prove, which was the only pace that actually worked on a red carpet.
"You're very calm for someone who said he'd be miserable tonight," Meg said quietly, smiling for a photographer without looking like she was smiling for a photographer.
"I said I'd be out of my depth," Simon said, doing the same thing. "There's a difference."
Inside, the ballroom had been arranged for the viewing portion of the auction — display cases and standing easels positioned throughout the space, artwork lit to advantage, guests moving through with the unhurried attention of people who were here to be seen appreciating things as much as to appreciate them.
A waiter materialized with a tray. Simon took two glasses of champagne, handed one to Meg, and they moved into the room.
He saw Suzy Yang across the ballroom within the first five minutes — standing with her parents, her father recognizable from the photographs Simon had seen in the consulate newsletter that Suzy had once shown him. She caught Simon's eye and gave him the short nod of two people acknowledging each other across a room without making it a production.
He'd find her later.
For now, he and Meg worked the perimeter — not systematically, just drifting in the way that let you see everything without looking like you were looking at everything. Meg knew several people; she navigated introductions with the practiced ease of someone who had grown up in rooms like this and found them familiar if not quite comfortable.
Simon smiled where smiling was appropriate, shook hands when extended, said the minimal things required to sustain each interaction, and let Meg carry the social weight, which she did without effort.
They moved through the first half of the room without incident.
Then Simon rounded a corner between two display cases and stopped.
The painting was approximately eighteen by twenty-four inches, mounted in a simple black frame. Black and white. A lotus flower — ink on paper, the brushwork confident and spare, the kind of thing that communicated restraint as a deliberate choice rather than a limitation.
And then—
Something shifted behind his eyes.
Not painful. Not gradual. Instant — the way a slide clicks into a projector. A single image, crystalline and complete: the same painting, but in a different frame. An older frame, heavier, with a hollow space in the lower left corner of the backing. Inside the hollow: a sealed cylindrical container, approximately four inches long, labeled in a way that Simon's brain — the part of his brain that now carried one percent of the most classified intelligence database ever assembled — immediately identified.
Weapons-grade material. Nuclear precursor. Hidden in plain sight inside a legitimate piece of art moving through a legitimate auction in a legitimate hotel.
The image was gone in under a second.
Simon was standing in front of the painting, champagne glass in hand, looking at a piece of art.
"Something interesting?" Meg was beside him, following his gaze.
Simon looked at the painting.
He looked at the frame.
He looked at the room around them — the waiters, the guests, the security personnel near the entrance, the auctioneer's staff moving through with clipboards.
"Beautiful piece," he said. His voice came out steady, which took some work. "The brushwork."
"You hate abstract art," Meg said.
"I'm developing a new appreciation." He took her elbow gently. "Come on — I think I saw Suzy across the room. Let's go say hello."
He steered them away from the painting with the specific unhurried pace of someone who had not just realized that a piece of nuclear material was sitting in a display case twelve feet behind him.
His mind was running fast underneath the calm surface.
The Intersect had just flashed. Not the way Chuck described his flashes — not images overlaid on his vision, not a seizure or a freeze. More like a memory surfacing. Accessed through proximity to a trigger stimulus, exactly the way the system description had said it worked.
Which meant the one percent of the database currently loaded into his head contained at least one piece of information relevant to what was in front of him.
And which meant he needed to make a decision in the next few minutes about what to do with it, without drawing attention, without alerting whoever had placed the material here, and without ruining Meg's evening more than was absolutely necessary.
He found Suzy near the east wall with a glass of sparkling water, her parents in conversation nearby with several people Simon didn't recognize.
"You look like you've seen something," Suzy said quietly, the moment he was close enough. In Cantonese, which meant only Suzy and Simon and Meg — who spoke neither — were in this conversation.
"I need to make a call," Simon said. "Five minutes. Can you—"
Suzy looked at Meg. "We'll find the dessert table," she said, switching to English seamlessly. "I've been meaning to introduce myself properly. You're Meg?"
"Yes." Meg looked between them with the perceptive attention of someone who had registered the language switch without being able to identify what it meant. "And you're Suzy. Simon's talked about you."
"Good things, I hope."
"Mostly accurate things, which I've learned to prefer."
Simon excused himself, walked to the corridor outside the ballroom, and called Chuck.
Chuck answered in three rings. "Hey — aren't you at an—"
"Listen to me," Simon said. "Are you and Casey near the Buy More?"
"We're actually — yeah, why?"
"There's a painting at this auction. Lotus flower, black and white, ink on paper, currently in a black frame. I need to know if Casey has any reason to believe there's something inside it that shouldn't be."
A pause.
A longer pause.
The sound of Casey's voice in the background, not quite audible.
Then Chuck, quieter: "Simon. How did you know about that?"
"Does it matter right now?"
"It — no, it doesn't." Chuck's voice had changed to the register he used when things were accelerating. "We've been tracking that piece for two weeks. It's supposed to be clean — our intel said the transfer was canceled."
"Your intel was wrong," Simon said. "Get Casey here. Quietly. Side entrance, not the main carpet."
"We're twenty minutes out."
"I'll keep eyes on it." Simon paused. "Chuck."
"Yeah."
"Don't tell anyone how you knew."
"...Yeah. Okay."
Simon ended the call, stood in the corridor for a moment, and composed his face back into the expression of a man having a pleasant evening.
Then he walked back into the ballroom to find Meg.
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