Chapter 6: The Arithmetic of Eighteen Months

The drop was scheduled for Tuesday but he moved it to Wednesday because Tuesday Zara wanted him on the Sullivan checkpoint observation and he couldn't say no to that without a reason, and he didn't have a reason, and so he sat on the Sullivan checkpoint observation for four hours with a coffee thermos and a view of the eastern gate approach and logged the shift changes and the equipment deployment with the focused, reliable attention that made Marcus trust him, and the whole time he thought about Wednesday.

He had a system. He had built it carefully over eighteen months, the way you build anything you need to live with: incrementally, with attention to load-bearing points, making sure each piece justified the next. The system had rules. The information had to be demonstrably low-grade — route data that the Kree could reconstruct from their own patrol logs if they bothered, checkpoint observations that added texture to what their surveillance already held. Nothing operational. Nothing that moved the tactical picture in a direction it wasn't already moving. He had spent eighteen months developing an internal grading rubric for this, and he applied it with the same rigor he applied to everything, and he was aware, in the precise way a person is aware of something they cannot look at directly, that the grading rubric had been built by someone with a vested interest in passing.

The contact's name was not something he'd been given. He called her, in his own internal accounting, the Logistics Officer, because that was what she appeared to be — a mid-level Kree administrative worker who processed movement permits in the district office on Pratt Street, unremarkable in the way that the most dangerous people in any bureaucracy are unremarkable. She had approached him fourteen months before he made his first drop, which meant she had been watching him for at least that long before she spoke. He didn't think about that calculation often.