Chapter 4: Vasquez Reads the Intelligence Report

Vasquez arrived at eleven, which meant she had been awake since before the request reached her. She carried a canvas satchel over one shoulder and set it on the worktable without looking at him, and the first thing she did was check the window seals with her thumb, working the tape at each corner until she was satisfied. It was a habit she had from the early years, when they'd lost two cells to conversations through inadequately sealed windows, and she had never stopped doing it even in facilities she herself had secured.

She was forty-four years old and had the specific posture of someone who had been carrying weight for so long that they had stopped noticing it was weight and simply recalibrated their center of gravity around it.

"You called this a debrief," she said. She still hadn't looked at him directly. She was pulling a folder from the satchel now, the Somerville checkpoint assessment he'd asked her to update.