"You mapped this building."
"I map every building we're in regularly." He met Tav's eyes. "It's a habit."
Tav almost smiled.
They crossed the precinct in the shadow of the building line and found the maintenance access exactly where Alistair had said it would be: a third-floor bridge between structures, used for building services, unlocked during the hours when maintenance was scheduled which happened to include pre-dawn.
Ablation operatives positioned inside the building.
Two were expected in the main lobby. The third was on the fourteenth floor — Tav could see the lit window from the bridge, the active presence in a window at this hour.
The fourteenth floor.
Their floor.
"They're using the apartment as a forward position," Alistair said.
"Yes."
"Which makes the node inaccessible unless—"
"Unless we go through the apartment."
A pause.
"Yes," Alistair said.
They moved through the bridge and into the building's service corridor and down three floors and through the connecting passage and into the stairwell of Blackwood Heights, and up.
The fifteenth floor.
The service stairwell exit opened onto the corridor ten feet from the door to 15C.
Tav could see the light under the door.
He looked at Alistair. Alistair fixed on the door.
Neither of them said anything about what it felt like to be back here. They hadn't discussed it. Some things didn't need discussion to be acknowledged.
The operative inside would be monitoring devices, not the door — the assumption would be that approach came from below, from the main entrance, from the routes they'd secured.
Not from the service staircase.
Tav moved to the door.
Alistair was beside him.
He had his hand on the handle when Alistair touched his arm. Brief. The soft touch they'd been developing since the first morning.
Tav looked at him.
Alistair looked back. Neither of them said anything.
Tav opened the door.
The operative in the apartment — alone, monitoring devices as expected — reacted quickly. Not quickly enough.Tav and Alistair moved through the space with the same unconscious synchronization they'd been demonstrating all evening, and the operative went down without firing.
The apartment was familiar.
