JULIAN

Marcus called at nine forty-seven.

I know this because I had been in the study since eight, going through the Whitley correspondence that Donovan had compiled, and I had the particular and practiced awareness of a man who tracked the time on calls the way he tracked everything else he tracked, with the specific and automatic precision of a person for whom attention was not a choice but a condition.

"There was a call this evening," Marcus said.

He did not say from whom. He did not need to. There was a specific and particular quality to the way Marcus said there was a call, the characteristic register of...