Chapter 12: The Man in the Briefing Room Was Sitting Down

I did not go directly to the forty-seventh floor.

That would have been the obvious move, and obvious moves in buildings like this one tend to get intercepted. Instead I went down to the thirty-second floor commissary, poured myself a coffee I didn't particularly want, and spent eleven minutes discussing FRIDAY's environmental calibration system with her in the tone of a man who finds building management genuinely fascinating. She is, as I have noted before, very good at her job. But she is also, at her core, a system built to respond to the shape of a request rather than its destination, and I have spent enough time in this building to know that the shape of curiosity, deployed with sufficient patience and dullness, can be mistaken for routine.

By the time I mentioned, almost in passing, that I'd left something in the suite on forty-seven and would it be inconvenient to pop up and retrieve it, FRIDAY had already filed me as ambient and harmless. The word 'retrieve' did most of the work. Nobody retrieves evidence. People retrieve umbrellas and reading glasses and the specific brand of antacid their wife keeps in her desk drawer.