CHAPTER TWO #2
On the fifth day, Tav made a catalogue.
He did this with everything that mattered — the accumulation of observable data into a working document that could be revised as new information arrived.
It was not a habit he'd developed in Ablation's service.
He'd been doing it since before he understood what the practice was: the methodical noting of things that warranted attention.
He sat at the desk in his room with a notebook and wrote.
He'd been watching Alistair Keaton for four days.
In that time he had observed the following: Alistair woke at five and was productive until nine, at which point his focus shifted from whatever he'd been doing to the apartment's social dimension — he made coffee, he checked whether Tav was awake, he began the day's performed version of himself.
The productive hours between five and nine were the unperformed ones.
The hours in which he moved through the apartment's kitchen with the ease of someone who had stopped requiring an audience.
He was left-handed. This was noted.
He wore the same three rings every day, in the same order, and put them on the same way that never varied. This was either comfort or ritual. Tav filed it under both.
He drew people rather than places. He had several sketchbooks in a drawer in his room, which Tav had identified from the doorway on day two.
He hadn't opened them. But the sketchbooks' spines were visible and the top one showed evidence of recent use, and the wear in the binding indicated it was not the first time this volume had been opened to a particular stretch of pages.
He talked to people on his phone in a way that was not consistent with his cover identity's social profile.
The cover identity had a moderate social network — university contacts, family in a different city, professional relationships appropriate to his background. The calls Alistair made were different.
Shorter. More precisely timed. Like someone conducting encrypted check-ins rather than conversations.
He was not who he said he was.
Tav knew this. He had known it on day one. The question was what Alistair actually was, and the evidence was assembling itself into a picture that was familiar from the inside.
He was also — and this was the observation that Tav had been saving for last — someone who was good at wanting things without performing the want.
Most people broadcast their desires, even when they believed they were concealing them. The tell was different for different people but it was usually present: a held gaze, a shifted posture, a exaggerated attention that exceeded what the cover story required.
Alistair's tell was the coffee.
He made the coffee better than was required.
Every morning, for both of them, with the deliberate attention that he had decided that the standard of the coffee mattered.
There was no operational reason for this.
There was no social requirement. He made the coffee well because he had decided it was worth making well, and that decision — that commitment to doing a small thing with care — was the tell that everything else in his presentation was trying to conceal.
He wanted things. He wanted them deeply. And he wanted this apartment, this morning, this configuration of two people in a kitchen before the rest of the day arrived, to be something he brought care to.
Tav wrote all of this in the notebook.
Then he looked at what he'd written.
He had been cataloguing the observable evidence of a professional necessity for four days and had produced a document that contained the following admission, between every line: I am paying attention to this person in ways that exceed the operational requirement.
He could not determine when the excess began.
It may have begun at the door — the first morning, the door and the voice and the look of a person who was one thing and another thing simultaneously, and who met Tav's eyes with the amber eyes and the assessment running and seemed, already, to have noted something.
He closed the notebook.
He thought about professional parameters and their relationship to things that were true.
He thought: the truth is that I am going to have to do something with this catalogue. Either I file it under operational liability and maintain the distance required by that assessment, or I accept the conclusion the data is building toward and decide what that means for the situation.
He thought: both options require managing the existing evidence. The existing evidence is that I have been watching this person for four days and every day the watch requires a different kind of attention, and the kind it requires now is not the kind that belongs in a Ablation operation.
He thought: I already know what I'm going to do.
He put the notebook away.
He went to the kitchen.
Alistair was making coffee with the deliberate method.
"Good morning," Alistair said, without turning.
"Good morning," Tav said.
He sat on the barstool.
Alistair handed him a coffee.
"Sleep well?" Alistair said.
"Adequately," Tav said.
"Me too," Alistair said.
Neither of them had slept particularly well. Both of them knew this about the other. Neither of them said so.
· · ·