Tav remained still.
He had a position behind the secondary shelving unit at the room's east wall — not a hiding position, a holding position. The distinction mattered to him. Hiding was reactive. Holding was strategic.
He let them cross half the room.
"The drive isn't here," he said. In the dark, to their backs.
Both of them went still with the professional type of people who had been in situations like this before.
"Turn around," Tav said.
They turned.
In the amber pulse of the router's indicator he could see their faces, more or less. Younger than he'd expected. Mid-twenties. People who were good at their work but had not yet accumulated the experience to make it effortless.
"The archive materials were moved two days ago," Tav said. "Whatever your instructions specified would be here is no longer here." "I'm telling you this because it's accurate and because I want to ask you a question."
They watched him.
"Who sent you?" he said.
A pause.
"That's above your clearance level," the one on the left said.
"Is that what they told you to say?"
A longer pause.
"Yes," the one on the right said.
The one on the left studied the one on the right with the expression of surprise.
"We were told the same thing," the one on the right said. "That it was above our level." "We're contracted."
"External contractors," Tav said. "Cain's network or something else?"
"Something else," the one on the right said. His colleague was very still now, running a calculation.
"We were contacted three weeks ago. Specific instructions. Retrieve the archive materials before they could be publicly released."
"And the contact's identity?"
"We don't know. Encrypted channel. Professional infrastructure." "The payment is clean."
"It's always clean," Tav said.
He was quiet.
The amber pulse in the corner. The two people across the room who had been sent here by someone who was not Cain and was not Ablation but was interested enough in the archive's contents to field a team.
"Here's what's going to happen," Tav said. "You're going to leave this room and return to whatever staging area your instructions specified and you're going to tell your contact that the archive was not present and that the individual you encountered was not persuadable." "And you're going to note, in whatever report you file, that the individual who encountered you was not afraid of being found and did not attempt to prevent your contact from knowing this conversation occurred."
They looked at him.
"Why?" the one on the left asked.
"Because whoever sent you is watching," Tav said. "And I'd like them to know we're watching back."
