Silas walked into the main room and spoke quietly enough that Nolan barely heard. "We have an address." The men nearest him rose, and the information moved through the clubhouse without shouting.
Decker asked for a map. Pauline wanted to know whether the woman still lived there. Reyes said somebody should call ahead only after they had verified who might hear the call. Nolan watched the old brotherhood organize itself around the first clear lead it had possessed in decades, and for a moment he understood why Elias had trusted these men, even when their failures had cost him dearly.
"I'm coming," Nolan said. Silas faced him. "I know. But we're not going there to frighten an old woman with a parade of motorcycles."
"We confirm the address, we make sure she is safe, and you speak to her first. If she really has what Elias left, we'll need her account as much as the papers." Nolan nodded. He appreciated the plan because it treated Ruth Adler as a person rather than a locked cupboard of evidence. Half an hour later, ten Iron Ravens rode out through the gate, and Nolan followed in his truck with his father's vest on the back seat.
The ride north took them through a landscape that changed slowly and then all at once. Flat fields gave way to wooded rises, and the county road narrowed between stone fences built generations earlier. Nolan kept the motorcycles in sight while his truck's heater struggled against the cold. At a fuel station halfway there, he bought coffee for himself and a bottle of water he did not want to drink. He stood beside the pump looking at the riders and wondered how many of them had crossed these roads with his father.
Silas stopped at Nolan's truck while Theo, the youngest member of the group, finished refueling. "Tell me about Marcus," Silas said. Nolan gave him the details he had never thought important: the way Marcus arrived at work early but never spoke about his childhood, his rented apartment with almost no personal photographs, the evenings he cooked dinner because Nolan's refrigerator was usually empty. He admitted that Marcus had been kind during Carla's illness, sometimes dropping off groceries without being asked. The possibility that the kindness had been part of a job made Nolan angrier than anything Marcus might have stolen from him.
"Maybe he cared about you and still passed information," Silas said. "People can do both things, and that makes them dangerous in a different way from somebody who simply hates you." Nolan looked at him. "Does that excuse it?"
"No," Silas said. "It just means you won't understand every choice by calling the man a liar. He may have told himself a dozen stories about why his job was harmless." The observation stayed with Nolan as he climbed back into the truck. He had believed Marcus was one of the few people he could ask for help without paying for it, and he did not know which memory hurt more: the dinners that might have been calculated or the possibility that some of them had been genuine.