• • •
The staircase inside the adjacent building was clean and empty. He descended two floors and arrived at the ground-level corridor and went through the east access passage and then into the building's service area and up two flights and into the structure of a building he'd mapped three days prior with the attention he brought to places that were going to matter.
The stairwell on the university's main building south face.
Second-floor landing.
And Alistair, coming up from below, stopping when he saw Tav round the corner. He assessed — rapid, certain, the professional competence fully engaged.
"You're off the roof," Alistair said.
"You're inside the building early."
"I adjusted the approach window." He said it with the composure he was prepared this explanation.
"The sight line from the north face was going to be compromised by the security rotation."
"You moved Voss's schedule."
"I adjusted the event timing by twenty minutes."
Tav watched him.
Alistair looked back.
The stairwell was lit by the institutional fluorescence of an emergency exit. From below, through the floors and walls, themuffled sound of the gala — music, voices, the general texture of a hundred people performing social grace.
"You triggered an oversight query from Ablation," Tav said.
"That's ongoing."
"Alistair."
"I know." He held the look — the warm professional surface doing its work, the assessment underneath it running continuous and careful. "I know." "Why did you come inside?"
A pause.
Something spread in Alistair's expression that Tav had been trying to name and couldn't, because it was the combination of several things simultaneously: warmth and assessment and of being seen that was rare in people who spent their lives managing what was visible.
"Because I wanted to know where you were," Alistair said.
The stairwell held them.
From somewhere in the building's eastern section, the sound of footsteps in a corridor. Not coming closer. Moving away.
"That's not an operational reason," Tav said.
"No," Alistair said. "It isn't."
They looked at each other.
And Tav, who had been running the analysis and had arrived at an answer he hadn't been ready to confirm, confirmed it.
"Alistair," he said. "Did Ablation actually assign you to Voss?"
The question arrived quietly and landed with precision.
Because it was the question that everything had been pointing toward since the first morning. Since the first check of the keycard, since the message on the burner phone, since the sketchbook and the wrist touch in the café and the way Alistairmoved through every space like someone who had learned the curriculum from the same source Tav had.
