Ablation didn't make mistakes. Which meant Alistair Keaton was one of them.
• • •
• • •
The first night.
After the door, after the specificity of having opened it and found the person who was going to be on the other side of it, Tav conducted his standard first-night assessment of the new space: dimensions, exits, the locations of the primary observation points, the metal locks, the acoustic signature of the building.
This was automatic. He had done it in every space he'd occupied operationally since he was twentythree. The assessment ran in the background of whatever else he was doing — in this case, unpacking the single bag that he'd brought to the apartment, not the full inventory of his possessions but was the inventory he was prepared to leave behind at three hours' notice.
The apartment was well-chosen.
This was the first observation that went beyond the operational. Well-chosen for the cover identity — the correct neighborhood, the correct building quality, the appropriate distance from the university's various relevant points. But also well-chosen in a more fundamental sense. Whoever had selected it had attention to detail that went beyond the purely functional. The kitchen was good. The windows were well-positioned. The flat had something a person might genuinely want to live rather than simply be stationed.
He stood at the window at ten past midnight and studied the city below.
He had lived in eleven cities. He had occupied twenty-three separate spaces, ranging from a flat in which the heating was ambient and the windows were painted shut to a safe house that had good
natural light and a kitchen that worked and that he had left at four weeks, which was the shortest he'd stayed anywhere.
This was the first space that had been designed for him to occupy alongside someone else.
The wall between the bedrooms.
He thought about the person on the other side of it.
He had been provided with a profile and the profile had been consistent with the profile in several respects: the cover identity was coherent, the manner was consistent with the educational background, the physical presentation matched. All of these things could be produced by competent training and some people never went further than that.
But the rings. The left hand. The assessment behind the warmth.
The person on the other side of the wall was not simply implementing a cover identity.
He was — and Tav arrived at this observation carefully, having established that careful observations were important when the observation concerned someone he was going to be living with — a specific person. Not a constructed one. The construction was present, but it was the surface of something that had been there before the construction.
Tav had been in enough proximity to trained operatives to know the difference.
He stood at the window until midnight became one o'clock, and then he went to bed, and his last thought before sleep was not operational.
It was: interesting.
Very interesting indeed.
• • •
CHAPTER TWO
Tav woke at 5:12 a.m. to the smell of burning butter.
His eyes opened in the dark without transition — no disorientation, no lag, simply the clean binary of sleep and its absence, the way it always worked for him. For half a second he lay still, cataloguing the sounds reaching him through the bedroom door: the soft percussion of cabinet drawers, the particular ring of glass on marble, footsteps moving with the casual weight of someone who wasn't trying to be quiet.
He had always lived alone during assignments. It wasn't a preference so much as a structural necessity — people complicated routines, people noticed things, people created variables that accumulated until they became liabilities. He'd explained this to Ablation twice during the placement process and both times the response had been the same bureaucratic non-answer: the unit has been selected for optimal conditions.
He was beginning to revise his definition of optimal.
Another muffled sound from the kitchen. The definitive hiss of something hitting a too-hot pan.
Then, clearly: "You have got to be kidding me."
