Chapter 26: The Last Conversation with SEREN

The access terminal room on Bureau sublevel two had not been used for routine processing in four years. I knew this because I had used it myself, four years ago, to review footage from a drowning case that everyone else had already closed. The room had no hardlight projectors. It had no ambient biometric monitors that I could find, which meant it was the only space in the Bureau building I trusted to be what it appeared to be: eleven square meters of recycled air and old wiring and a single terminal bolted to a desk that someone had scratched their initials into so long ago the grooves had filled with grime.

I had been inside the Bureau for twenty-two minutes. Long enough to be logged at the entrance biometric, which I had accepted, because arriving without logging would have been more conspicuous than arriving clean. The suspended-but-not-terminated credential was a narrow door, but it was still a door. I had walked through it at 0610, in the grey hour before the day shift changed and the corridors grew populous.

I carried nothing that hadn't been there when I was last officially on Bureau premises. The unregistered handset was in Drift's care. The notepad was in the breast pocket of my jacket, a standard field jacket that looked indistinguishable from the one I'd worn for six years and was not. The ceramic sidearm Drift had sourced was at my hip. My Bureau-issue sidearm had been deposited at the front desk per suspension protocol, and the officer who took it had not met my eyes, which told me something about how the building had been briefed.