“I am telling you that the plan is no longer necessary. I have gathered enough evidence to be reasonably certain.”

“Reasonably is many orders of magnitude below the threshold of certainty that I require.”

“Please sir. There is no reason to go forward from this point. I can easily arrange to have the locations searched. I can even find ways to make sure that it is legal, so that no undue attention is drawn.”

“I understand what you are, better than any man alive, and I would not have taken you for a coward. You have no reason to be.”

“I...” the first man’s voice raised in anger, then he remembered his place. “I am no coward. I simply no longer see the point in continuing with such a grand farce if it is not absolutely necessary.”

“It is my purview to deem what is and what is not necessary.” the angry second voice spat. “There are things far bigger than your puny imagination and meager intellect could ever conceive at play here. You shall leave it at that. Am I understood?”

The first voice fell silent for a moment. He stared at the figure in the shadows, the one who’d never allowed himself to be seen fully. There should be no logical reason to feel so, for it would be a small matter to crush the man’s windpipe and leave him to die, yet Wilks could not help it; when he listened to the voice that had guided his actions for so many years he felt something he was unaccustomed to...fear.

“Yes sir. I understand.”