Chapter 27: Solenne's Arrest and the Deposition Goes Live

The corridor outside the terminal room was the kind of busy that passes for invisible — desk officers carrying recycled-paper printouts, a maintenance tech pushing a cart with one wheel that needed oil, two junior analysts walking too fast for their shoes. Nobody looked at me. I had learned, over years of fieldwork and one very instructive tour in Jakarta, that the best camouflage is moving like you belong somewhere slightly ahead of where you are.

I took the east stairwell. The west stairwell had a functioning camera. Nobody had bothered to fix the east one in three months, which I knew because Fenwick had filed a maintenance request about it in week two of our partnership and the Bureau had not yet gotten around to caring. I was grateful, now, for institutional indifference.

The stairwell smelled of recycled air and a cleaning solvent that had been slightly wrong for as long as I'd been in this building. Twelve flights. My spine registered the descent the way it always did — a low, flat awareness lodged just left of center, like a word I couldn't stop almost remembering. I kept moving.