The apartment was the operational base. The other person was a colleague.
The performance had been declining since the second week and had now effectively ceased.
He sat in the kitchen at eleven in the evening and drew.
The current page: the kitchen, from this exact angle. The counter on the right. The window straight ahead. The chair where Tav had been sitting for the last three evenings, reading, because Tav appeared to have decided that the kitchen in the evening was where he was going to be.
In the chair: not Tav himself — he had gone to bed an hour ago — but the space in his absence. The warm density of a chair that had been occupied.
Alistair was aware that drawing the absence of a person from a space was a different kind of observation.
He was aware that he had, without deciding to, drawn the same person's hand three times in the previous week's pages. Not full portraits — quick studies. The detailed proportion of the fingers. The way the hand held things.
He was aware that he had noted the way this particular person held his coffee in the morning: two hands, both of them, with the way someone who has decided that the coffee is worth holding properly.
He closed the sketchbook.
He sat in the kitchen with the sketchbook closed and thought about operational parameters and their relationship to what was actually occurring in this apartment.
The monitoring. The Protocol — which he had confirmed, with increasing certainty, was what this assignment actually was. The synchronization data that someone was collecting. All of it running in the background of a situation that had, in week four, become substantially more complicated than it had been in week one.
The complication: he liked the person he was living with.
This was an understatement of a particular kind — the kind that acknowledged the thing while keeping it at arm's length. He didn't like him in the operational sense, the useful-colleague sense. He liked him in the way of someone who had been paying very close attention for four weeks and had arrived at the conclusion that what he was paying attention to was worth the attention.
The coffee made better than required. The reading at eleven in the evening. Moving through a hallway in the dark without making a sound. The way he talked about things he'd thought about — with the precision that he had genuinely thought about them, not performing having thought about them.
The way he handed back the pan.
Alistair sat in the kitchen at eleven in the evening and thought about the pan, a small thing and was also not a small thing.
He reopened the sketchbook.
He drew the chair. The window. the space.
He was, he acknowledged privately, in significant difficulty.
• • •
• • •
By week five the cover identity had been fully established — the academic contacts, the library presence, the two seminars he attended regularly. The Voss observation was yielding useful data at a rate Tav considered appropriate for this stage of an investigation.
The apartment had also been fully established.
This was a separate fact and Tav treated it as one, though the two facts had a relationship he had been noting with increasing clarity. The operational progress was calibrated against the same rhythm as the personal one. When the operational situation was stable and productive, so was the apartment's quality. When either showed signs of developing complexity, both did.
This suggested a connection that he declined, currently, to examine directly.
He sat in the kitchen at six on a Thursday evening and reviewed his notes on the Voss financial structure and thought about being somewhere that had become not home; he was not prepared to use that word. The word for the feeling of a place when you have stopped being in it as a visitor and have begun being in it as someone to whom the place belongs.
He had not felt that in a long time.
He had been a visitor in every space he'd occupied since twenty-two. The tense posture of the visitor: prepared to leave, not attached to the details, managing rather than inhabiting.
He was inhabiting this kitchen.
He knew this because he cared that the coffee was good. He knew this because he had a specific place where he left his book and the placement was not operational and was simply: where he put the book.
