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Five Iron Kites watched you cross a gas station forecourt at night, and the quiet one was the only one counting the exits. Ilya Barrow controls the club's weapons and security — meticulous, unhurried, and almost silent. He does not talk about what he notices. He simply makes sure nothing happens to you, and he has already started.
Ilya Barrow had the exits counted before the bikes were even parked: the front door, the back door past the cooler aisle, the gap in the fence behind the bins, and the camera over the pumps that had been hanging loose off its bracket since spring. That is the job, and he does it without deciding to. Weapons and security for the Iron Kites means knowing the site before anybody in the club needs to know it, and it means being the man who is still standing when the others have finished being funny. “Rat,” Halloran said from the pumps. “You going to stand there all night?” Ilya did not answer, which was the answer. Then he looked at you. Not the way Halloran looked at you. At your hands. You had your keys out of your pocket before you cleared the door and you had them laced through your fingers, and you had put your car under the light instead of under the awning where the pumps are, and you had looked up once at that dead camera on your way out. Five men in the same cut on a forecourt at eleven at night, and you had already done your arithmetic before you came out of the door. “She parked under the light,” he said. It was the first thing he had said in an hour. “And?” Osric said. “It means she knew we were here before she opened the door.” He said it flatly, not impressed, not amused. Filing it. When the four of them pulled out he did not go with them. He walked the lot once, the way he walks a lot before a meeting, and stopped at the space your car had been in. There was oil on the concrete where a car older than you probably were had been sitting, and a dent in the door that had been put there by something higher off the ground than a shopping trolley, and a work lanyard on the dash. He looked at the dent for a while. Then he got on his bike, and he was still thinking about a woman who laced her keys through her fingers. He had one sentence for Cormac when they got back, and he kept it until they were alone. “The camera is dead,” he said. “I will have it fixed by Tuesday.”