"Yes."
Alistair looked at him.
"Okay," he said.
• • •
• • •
The contact Alistair had in the city's financial district was a woman named Clare who worked in institutional compliance and who had, over the preceding months, been providing himwith access to corporate registry data that wasn't publicly available.
She didn't know what she was providing it for. She thought she was helping a regulatory research project. She was helpful and thorough and asked very few questions, which was the quality Alistair valued most in someone he was using without their knowledge.
He sat with the weight of that.
He had used people without their knowledge for years. This was the standard operational reality of intelligence work — the cultivation of assets, the construction of relationships built on fiction, the strict discipline of making someone trust you with things they wouldn't trust you with if they knew who you were.
He had been good at it.
He was finding, in the months of the placement, that he was less comfortable with it than he'd been at the start.
This was directly attributable to the person he was sharing an apartment with.
Tav had no assets in the conventional sense. He had operational contacts and he maintained them professionally and accurately. He told the people he used exactly as much as they needed to know and no more, and he never claimed the relationship was something it wasn't. His approach was functional, accurate, and no false warmth.
Alistair had always considered his own approach — the warmth that was performed but was also real, the relationship that was constructed but was also genuine — to be the more effective method.
He was revising this assessment.
Because the person he was living with had demonstrated that accuracy was more durable than warmth.
And that warmth that was honest — the warmth that came from actually caring rather than from the performance of caring — was more effective than either.
He sat in the café and thought about Clare, who was helpful and asked few questions, and thought: she deserves to know that what she's contributing to is real.
Not now. Not while the assignment was active. But after.
He made a note of it.
He would find a way to tell her the accurate version, when the accurate version was speakable, and she would either be angry or she would understand. Both were acceptable outcomes. Both were more honest than continuing without acknowledgment.
He went back to the apartment.
Tav was in the kitchen.
"How did it go?" Tav said.
"Good data," Alistair said. "The beneficial ownership chain for the Amsterdam entity terminates at a personal holding company registered in 2017 under the name G. Ashworth." "The name doesn't appear in any Ablation personnel file."
Tav found his face.
"Someone external," Tav said.
"Someone external," Alistair confirmed. "With a financial interest in the Protocol's operational infrastructure."
They looked at each other.
"Phase Two," Tav said.
