Where I stopped.
Voices. Low, unhurried, the half-alert cadence of a man talking to himself or to no one in particular. Coming from the east end of the ground floor, ahead of schedule, which meant Dimitri had either shortened his rotation or deviated from the pattern, both of which were inconvenient.
I had perhaps four seconds before the angle of the corridor put me in his sightline.
The coat room door was still open behind me.
I stepped back into it and pulled it to without latching it, leaving the same two-inch gap. Stood in the dark among coats that smelled of Ivan Morozov’s cologne and waited with the specific quality of stillness that was not patience but its functional equivalent, the absence of unnecessary movement while the mind ran its calculations.
Dimitri’s footsteps came closer. Paused. I heard the brief sound of a phone screen, the muted tap of a message being sent or read, and then the steps continued past. The east staircase. He was taking the east staircase, which meant he was heading up rather than continuing the ground floor circuit, which gave me a problem.
The east staircase was the faster route to the third floor.
I waited ninety seconds after his footsteps faded. Then I moved to the main staircase, a longer route, one additional corridor on the third floor, but with Dimitri now somewhere on the east side, I had no better option. I took the stairs the way I took everything in a situation like this, quickly, quietly, without looking like someone who was doing either.
The third floor corridor was empty.
Her door was where I’d left it, slightly ajar, the way she’d left it for me. I pushed it open just enough, slipped inside, and closed it behind me.
She was asleep. On her side, facing away from the door, the blanket pulled up to her shoulder. The room was dark except for the city light coming through the gap in the curtains, and in it she looked younger than she did awake. The composure that she wore like a second skin had relaxed entirely, and what was underneath it was simply a woman who was exhausted and hadn’t known, until tonight, just how drained she was.
I was not a man who wrote notes. That was another fact I was adding to the growing catalog of things I didn’t do that had stopped being true somewhere in the last week. I had no framework for what to write. The professional version was so wrong it was almost funny, and the version that said what the last several hours had actually meant was not something I had language for yet.
I found a pen on her nightstand. Tore a corner from the notepad beside it. It was small enough to tuck where only she would find it, where staff wouldn’t see it when they came in to open the curtains or collect last night’s glass.
I wrote:The Barnes. Tomorrow. Don’t wait for permission.
Paused. Added:I’ll find a way back. — J
I tucked it under the edge of her phone where it would be the first thing she touched when the alarm woke her.
Then I straightened and looked at her for a moment in the gray city light and thought several things I was not going to examine in this room at four-thirty in the morning.
The balcony door opened without sound. I stepped out into the cold, pulled it to behind me. The mechanism caught on the third try, the way she’d said it would. I went down the way I’d come up, through the garden and out through the service gate before the sky had decided what color it intended to be.
Outside, the city was doing the pale gray business of almost-dawn. I moved through the garden and out through the service gate that I had confirmed was on a separate circuit from the main security system, which was standard for staff access and a detail I had kept for exactly this situation.
In the car, I called Nikos.
He answered on the second ring, which meant he had been awake, which meant he had been waiting for exactly this call at exactly this hour.
“Well?” he said.
“Security system was upgraded since our last assessment,” I said. “New firmware on the study terminal. I couldn’t access it without triggering the alert threshold.” The lie was clean, constructed in advance, internally consistent. “I got out clean. No exposure.”
Silence.
Nikos had a specific quality of silence for different situations. This one was the silence of a man who was doing his own assessment of what he was being told and arriving at conclusions he was choosing, for now, not to share.
“The firmware upgrade,” he said finally. “When was it installed?”
“Recently. Within the last two weeks based on the version signature.”
Another silence. Shorter. “That’s inconvenient.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll need another approach to the terminal.”
