His name was Gerald Park. Sixty-one years old. He was Bernard Kelley's chief of operations during the four years that Kelley's protection network ran — the person who managed the logistics, who dispatched the men, who received the reports. He has a real estate license now and an office in Chestnut Hill and a life that has, to all appearances, moved on.
Gideon does not believe in the concept of moving on as it applies to this.
The research took eight weeks. He was certain at week four. He spent the remaining four weeks confirming, and then confirming the confirmation, and then checking the address eleven times in eleven different ways before he allowed himself to accept that the address was right.
He is in and out in nineteen minutes. He takes the stairs. He walks three blocks to a different car — the rental he picked up yesterday from a lot in Delaware, paid cash — and he drives it north and parks it in a lot in Germantown and walks to a second rental parked two blocks away, which he drives home.
He is in his apartment by one-twenty AM.
He sits at the kitchen table.
He opens the encrypted folder. He opens the spreadsheet. He looks at the thirteen rows with dates in the third column. He scrolls to the bottom.
He types the date. He closes the spreadsheet. He closes the folder. He closes the laptop.
The list is done.
He expected, on some level, to feel something definitive at this moment. Completion. Resolution. The specific, quiet satisfaction of a system closed. He has thought about this moment, in the abstract, for two years — the last name, the last date, the end of the thing he started in the apartment on Lehigh Avenue in his head at the age of ten and began executing at thirty-two.
He feels nothing he can name clearly.
There is something that is close to exhaustion. There is something that is close to a question. There is the specific, uncomfortable awareness that he had expected the end of the list to feel like an ending and it does not feel like an ending. It feels like a room after everyone has left — quiet, present, full of the shapes of what was there.
He gets up. He goes to the window.
The city is what it always is at this hour. Moving. Alive. Indifferent.
He stands at the window for a long time.
Then he goes to bed, and for the first time in two years he sleeps without dreaming of anything at all.