The Mughal piece was a pendant, sixteenth century, emerald and gold, documented provenance until 1923 and then a gap of forty years before it resurfaced in a private collection in Geneva. Felicia's contact in the auction circuit had flagged it two weeks before the invasion and she'd held it while everything else happened. When things steadied she brought it back to the table.
He read the brief she'd put together. Clean target, private residence in the Meatpacking District, owner absent from August 10 to 17 for a sailing trip documented in three separate social media accounts. Security was competent but not exceptional. The pendant was in a wall safe in the study, combination unknown, which was where he came in.
"Is it a Panel safe," he said.
"Is there another kind."
"No."
They ran it on the 12th. He on the safe, her on the exterior security, Marco on the camera loop from a parked car two blocks south. It took eleven minutes inside. The pendant went into the carry case, the safe went back to looking untouched, and they were out before the security rotation completed its second pass.
Clean. The word that meant something had gone exactly as planned and neither of them had needed to improvise or absorb anything unexpected. He'd missed clean jobs. The invasion had reminded him of the value of things going exactly as planned.
The problem surfaced four days later.
Felicia's buyer, the established one, the contact she'd used for six years, a private dealer in Antwerp who moved pieces for collectors who preferred not to appear in provenance documentation, went quiet. Not unreachable, just slow, the responses coming in at half-speed and with a quality she described to Dan as careful rather than cautious. She ran the buyer's recent activity through her own intelligence contacts and found what she was looking for in two days: the buyer had recently acquired a new primary client whose name she didn't have but whose operational preferences matched Fisk's documented acquisition patterns closely enough to not be coincidence.
She told him at the warehouse, standing at the workbench with the pendant still in its case. "He's been absorbed," she said. "Not aggressively. Quietly. It looked like a new business arrangement until you looked at who was setting the terms."
"Can you route around him."
"Yes. I have other buyers. It costs time and a margin on the price." She looked at the case. "What it actually costs is one of the cleanest channels I've maintained for six years."
He looked at her. "Fisk."
"Fisk," she confirmed.
He hadn't been targeted specifically. Fisk's consolidation was indiscriminate, absorbing the entire ecosystem rather than going after individual operators. But indiscriminate consolidation was its own kind of targeted, it made the city smaller for everyone who wasn't Fisk, and smaller cities meant fewer options and more exposure.
He updated the threat model that evening. Fisk was present now in a way he hadn't been before the invasion, the way weather was present, not aimed at you specifically but changing the conditions for everyone.
He and Felicia routed the pendant through her Paris contact. They took the margin hit. The job closed clean and the money landed and he looked at the number in the ledger and thought about what it cost to operate in a city that was becoming someone else's.
That evening they ate at the kitchen table in the 113th Street room, which had become a thing they did when neither of them had somewhere else to be, her having brought food from a place on Amsterdam that she'd mentioned once and gone back to without telling him until she arrived with the bags. He'd noted then that she'd remembered something he'd said in passing weeks earlier and had acted on it without announcement, and he'd filed it as one of the things about her that kept catching him slightly off guard despite the fact that she'd been doing this kind of thing consistently for months.
He told her about rerouting through Paris over dinner. She already knew about the margin hit; she'd made the call herself. What he told her was what he'd concluded about the Antwerp situation, about what it meant that Fisk's reach was now touching their buyers rather than just their operational territory.
She listened. When he finished she said: "It's going to keep happening. As long as we're running jobs in this city through channels that run through this city, Fisk is present in the channels."
"Yes."
"So we need either channels he hasn't touched or something that makes the touching irrelevant." She speared something with her fork. "Which is it."
He thought about it. "Both, eventually. Right now, the second one."
She looked at him. She didn't ask what the second one was. She'd learned, over the past two months, to trust that when he said eventually he meant it and when he said right now he was already working on it. He appreciated this more than he'd found words for.
He thought about this for two days. Then he opened the Panel's pending notifications and looked at the one that had been sitting there for six weeks.
The Time Heist window.
He read the brief again. Fully, this time, with the intent to act on it rather than hold it. He thought about the reward. He thought about the airfield he'd been watching in New Jersey, a disused regional strip outside Woodbridge, sixty acres, a functional hangar, listed under a shell company that had been paying its property taxes for eleven years without anyone asking questions about what the company did. He'd looked at it three times. He hadn't moved on it yet because he hadn't needed to.
He needed to now.