From A Producer To A Global Superstar

Chapter 483: The Fisherman

Dayo woke to the sound of Jennifer fussing through the baby monitor. Not crying, just the irritated grunts she made when she was hungry and the world was not moving fast enough. He lay in Luna’s guest room for a moment, listening to the sounds of the apartment waking up. Luna’s voice, soft and singsong, answering the fussing. The click of the bottle warmer. The creak of a cabinet.

He had slept four hours. It felt like more.

In the kitchen, Luna stood at the counter in a faded sweatshirt, holding Jennifer against her hip with one arm while she shook formula with the other. The baby saw Dayo in the doorway and made a sound that might have been recognition. Or just noise. At six months, the line was thin.

"Morning," Luna said. She didn’t turn around.

"Morning." Dayo poured coffee from the pot she had already made. It was strong and slightly burnt, the way she always made it. He sat at the small table and watched her finish the bottle test on her wrist. "You were up early."

"She was up early. I just followed orders." Luna handed Jennifer over. The baby went into his arms with the ease of practice, already reaching for the bottle. He settled into the chair and fed her, feeling the small, insistent rhythm of her swallowing.

They didn’t talk much. There was a weight between them that had nothing to do with distance and everything to do with what he was doing later. Luna knew he was meeting someone. She didn’t know who or what it would cost. She had stopped asking after the second time he told her it was safer if she didn’t know.

When the bottle was half empty, Jennifer lost interest and started batting at his chin. Luna took her back, hoisting her onto her own hip with the casual strength of a woman who had done it a thousand times. "Go get dressed," she said. "You have somewhere to be."

Dayo finished his coffee. He walked to the bedroom, dressed in clothes that didn’t look expensive, and stood in front of the mirror for a moment. The man looking back was tired around the eyes. Not the performative tired of a man who wanted sympathy. The real kind. The kind that came from holding too many pieces in the air and knowing one of them was going to drop.

He kissed Luna on the cheek before he left. She caught his hand for a second, squeezed it, and let go.

Redondo Beach smelled like salt and fried food from the restaurants opening for lunch. Dayo arrived at 8:45, walked past the breakfast crowd, and kept going to the end of the pier where the tourists thinned out. The morning was gray, the sky low and indifferent.

He pulled the burner phone from his pocket. The number Marcus had made him memorize three years ago was the only call it had ever made. Now it was a liability. He threw it in a clean arc over the railing. It hit the water without a sound and vanished.

At the end of the pier, an old man sat on a folding stool with a fishing rod propped in a holder. He wore a canvas jacket that had been washed to the color of dishwater, and a hat that shaded everything but his jaw. He looked like a hundred other retirees who came to the California coast to kill time and avoid their families.

Dayo walked to the railing beside him and leaned on it, looking down at the dark water.

"You Marcus’s boy?" the man asked. He didn’t look up. His hands were threading line through a guide with the slow precision of someone who had done it so long it was meditation.

"His nephew," Dayo said.

"Same blood. Close enough." The man tested the knot and set the rod back in its holder. "Marcus saved my brother’s life.1987. A bullet meant for him, Marcus stepped in the way. Took it in the shoulder. Could’ve killed him. Didn’t."

Dayo nodded. He had heard the story once, drunk, at a family gathering years ago. Marcus had waved it off, changed the subject, pretended it was nothing. Dayo had not known someone still owed a debt for it.

"I’ve been waiting twenty years for this call," the man said. "Longer. I thought maybe Marcus didn’t want to collect. Then he died, and I figured the debt died with him. But he told me once, if his blood ever needed something found, I was to find it. No questions."

"I need to find someone," Dayo said.

"Who?"

"Silas Vane."

The man’s hands stopped moving. For a long moment, nothing happened. The rod tip trembled in the current. A gull screamed somewhere overhead.

Then the man laughed. It was a dry, unhappy sound. "You don’t start small, do you?"

"Do you know him?"

"I know what he was. British military intelligence, back when that meant something. Not a desk man. A runner. Field work in places that don’t make the histories. Then he got old, or got smart, or got greedy, and he learned to wear a suit. Now he’s whatever pays best. Broker. Fixer. The man behind the glass."

Dayo absorbed this. It fit the fragments. The clean records. The Geneva compound that only existed when four people needed to meet. "Where does he live? The real place. Not the addresses on paper."

"A townhouse in Belgravia. London. Doesn’t appear on any property record, any tax roll, any corporate filing. He owns it through a trust inside a trust inside a dead man’s estate. That’s where he keeps his actual files. His actual self. The Geneva house is just a conference room. Belgravia is where he sleeps."

"How do you know this?"

The man looked at him for the first time. His eyes were pale blue and very clear, the eyes of someone who had seen too much and still chose to sit in the wind. "Because I was asked to find him once, years ago. By someone who wanted him dead. I found the townhouse. I found the door. I even found the alarm code. But when I looked at what was inside, I decided not to take the job. Some men are too expensive to kill. Silas Vane is one of them."

Dayo felt the cold through his jacket. "Why?"

"Because killing him would leave something alive that you don’t want chasing you. That’s not the answer you came for, though. You came because you need leverage."

"I do."

The man reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded slip of paper. He handed it over without looking at it, without looking at Dayo, like he was disposing of evidence.

"Silas has a daughter," the man said. "Edinburgh. Different name. Grew up without knowing who paid for her school, her flat, her mother’s silence. He visits twice a year. Cutouts only. Private car to Glasgow, then a hire to Edinburgh, then a walk through a park where she happens to be jogging. He watches her from a bench. Never speaks. Never touches. The other three bosses don’t know she exists. She’s the only thing he cares about that isn’t money or power."

Dayo unfolded the paper. A name. An address in Edinburgh. A date, two months away, when Silas was scheduled to make his next pilgrimage.

"Using her would be a mistake," the man said. "Not a moral mistake. A tactical one. If Silas thinks you’re near her, he won’t negotiate. He won’t threaten. He’ll burn the world and salt the ground. I’ve seen men like him lose the one thing they hide. They don’t become reasonable. They become gods of wrath."

"I’m not going to touch her," Dayo said.

"Then what good is knowing?"

Dayo folded the paper and put it in his own pocket. "The same good Michael got from knowing about mine. I don’t need to hurt her. I just need Silas to know that I know. That his ghost has a shadow. That his hidden door has a fingerprint."

The man picked up his rod and cast the line he didn’t understand what Dayo meant but it was non of his business he just wanted to pay a debt. It sailed out over the water and settled with a small slap. "Marcus was a good man," he said. "Too good for the family he was born into. I hope you’re half as good, and twice as careful."

Dayo stood up. "Thank you."

"Don’t thank me. Just don’t make me regret it."

Dayo walked back down the pier. The restaurants were busier now, the smell of grease stronger. He bought a disposable phone from a corner store, activated it with cash, and made two calls.

The first was to Max. "Stand down on Michael. New priority. I need everything on a woman in Edinburgh. Legal, financial, medical, property. Build a file. Do not touch her. Do not go near her. Just know her better than she knows herself."

Max didn’t ask why. He just said, "Name?"

Dayo gave it to him.

The second call was to Luna. She answered on the second ring, Jennifer making happy background noise.

"It’s me," Dayo said.

"Are you okay?"

"I’m coming home. I got what I needed."

The line went quiet. Then Luna said, "Hurry. She’s learning to clap and she keeps missing her hands. It’s ridiculous. You need to see it."

Dayo hung up and walked to his car. Behind him, the pier stretched into the gray water, and the old man sat fishing for things he did not intend to catch.

Dayo had come looking for a ghost. He left with a name, an address, and the knowledge that even the most careful men had something they could not afford to lose.

He just needed to decide how much of himself he was willing to spend to keep from becoming the same kind of man.