Naomi arrived at the café faster than they expected. She sat in one motion and put her hands flat on the table.
"Tell me what's actually happening," she said.
Tav watched her.
He had been sitting at this table for eleven minutes and in that time had conducted three separate rehearsals of this conversation — the version in which he told her less than the truth, the version in which he told her the useful portion of the truth, and the version in which he told her the whole truth.
He had arrived at the same conclusion in all three rehearsals: Naomi Reyes was going to publish regardless. The question was what she published.
And more importantly: she was three steps from the real story without knowing it, and the real story released incorrectly could end several people's lives.
"We work for an intelligence organization called Ablation," Tav said.
Naomi found his face without visible surprise. "I'd arrived at that."
"The Voss assignment is real. He's been running financial instruments that fund Ablation's unsanctioned operations — operations that exist outside any oversight framework, including the UK government's." "But we didn't arrive at this café to talk about Voss."
"No," Naomi said. "You didn't."
"The Pairing Protocol," Tav said.
He watched her absorb the name.
"Ablation placed two operatives in proximity — in this city, at this university, in that apartment — and monitored their developing relationship as a research study." He kept his voice even. "We didn't know the full nature of the assignment when we arrived. We were told it was a standard operation with Voss as the primary target."
"But the primary target was you," Naomi said.
"Both of us." "The organization is studying whether engineered proximity between operatives with compatible profiles produces stable, useful attachment. They want—" He stopped. "They want to create operatives whose primary loyalty is to each other rather than to Ablation specifically. The theory being that this produces more reliable and more extreme performance."
Naomi's expression was very still.
"And does it?" she asked.
"It appears to produce attachment," Tav said. "Whether the attachment is useful to Ablation depends on whether the attached pair decides to serve Ablation's interests." "We've decided not to."
A beat.
"That's why you're at risk," she said.
"Yes."
"Because you're a successful experiment that refuses to be useful."
"Because the data Ablation has collected shows that we're—" "Deeply synchronized. Attached in ways that are operationally significant. And we're going to release information that destroys the organization's operational capacity."
Naomi was quiet.
"How long?" she said. "Have you known?"
"About the Protocol? Several weeks."
"And before that?"
He watched the table.
"I suspected something was wrong with the assignment from week two," he said. "The cover was too clean. The apartment too specifically chosen. The timeline too precise." "And the way I was—" He stopped. "The way I was responding to the situation was not consistent with a standard operation."
"You mean to Alistair."
