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Except where they were right now.

Which was definitely a restricted area.

Just ahead of them on Deck 3, through a maze of conduits and pipes, they could see the rig’s Central Control, the armored room where all the platform’s operations were managed and monitored—drilling, processing, storage, blowout prevention, fire suppression. According to a scene from the orientation video, a wall of monitors inside the bunker displayed feeds from cameras that pretty much covered every square inch of the structure, 24/7.

Including, apparently, the exact spot where they were standing.

“Hey!” They both turned around to see a guy in a blue vest and a bronze hard hat stepping out from behind a metal fire door. A security officer. “You guys can’t be down here.”

Ron held his hands up apologetically. “Sorry, man. It’s our first day. I guess we just got turned around.”

“Can I see your badges?”

Ron and Pete held them up.

“You guys on or off?” the bronze hat asked.

“Off,” said Pete. “Our shift ended an hour ago.”

The officer pointed toward a staircase. “Then you should be in your bunks. My advice to you is, get all the shut-eye you can.”

“Right,” said Ron. “Good tip.” He headed for the staircase, with Pete right behind him.

The second they hit the next deck, their Apple Watches lit up at exactly the same time. The same text for both of them.

DON’T GET SLOPPY

Ron glanced at Pete.

Point taken.

They both knew the consequences of disappointing Oliver Paul.

CHAPTER 69

AT MIDNIGHT, MARGARET MARPLE was still at it. Not cooking. Studying.

She was alone in the lodge’s comms room. Holmes, Poe, and Grey had already turned in. Marple had left Virginia in the kitchen to wrap and store the prepared items for the meal, which was still very much a work in progress. Final prep would happen tomorrow, leading up to the feast that evening. Gestard had confirmed his attendance in a one-word text: OUI.

The room was dark except for the large screen at one end of it. Marple had pushed aside a few tables and chairs to clear some space. She paced back and forth, glancing at the screen every few steps. The live image showed a high-angle view of a spartan prison cell with a smooth, polished floor. A lone female figure crossed the frame left to right, then back again. Back tense. Jaw set.

Agnes Matts.

Marple had recognized her right away, even though they’d met only once. On that day, five months earlier, Matts had threatened to kill Brendan Holmes on the spot, right in front of Marple. As a raging white supremacist, Matts did not approve of any sort of partnership with a Black man, to put it mildly. At the last second, Marple had managed to take her down. Matts had been locked up ever since.

Marple pointed the remote at the screen and set a tracking mark on the back of Matts’s jumpsuit. The Diogenes biometric analysis generated a series of digital readouts on the screen. Height, weight, stride length. And then, helpfully, three other measurements: 34-25-36.

Good, thought Marple. Only a digit or so off her own. Nothing a touch of padding can’t fix.

She adjusted herself to match Matts’s posture and body language—the dip of her shoulders, the angle of her head, the way her toes turned out. Marple walked back and forth, again and again, perfecting her gait, until it was a mirror image of the action on the screen.

She stopped and clicked from the live image to a recorded video segment. The room filled with the sound of loud metallic bangs as the image showed Matts pounding a metal tray against the cell wall just below the camera. “Fucking record that, you bloody assholes!” she was yelling.

Marple froze the image. “Fucking record that, you bloody assholes!” she shouted, fixing the dialect and emphasis in her brain. She rewound the scene and let it run again. And again. And again. By the tenth time, she had it locked in.

From this angle, Marple had a clear view of Matts’s face. Skin tone, eye color, the shape of her brows. She captured a screenshot and fed it back into the system. She would need that later to fine-tune her look.

Marple clicked to another recording. In this one, Matts was sitting on her bunk, muttering to herself. Marple boosted the volume. A string of obscenities poured out of the speakers. Marple listened to the tirade all the way through a half dozen times, then started freezing the video after every word, mimicking the pronunciation syllable by syllable—the open o in “cocksucker,” the rounded uh in “motherfucker,” the brittle e in “shit eater.”