CHAPTER 12 #2
“I made you wait, and then I made you wait again, because the waiting is the part you keep.” He looked at the towel he had not needed. “The rest of it your body files away and loses by Friday.” He said the next part to the glass. “The waiting stays yours.”
“I said the whole order out loud before I covered your eyes.” He stopped and did not go on for a while. “You are a person who reads everything twice.” His thumb moved on the rim. “I was not going to take that away from you and then hand it back as a gift.”
My breathing had evened out well before he finished, and he kept going anyway, and he did not once ask me how I felt.
“You asked me a question before any of this and I answered it three times.” He held the glass still on his knee this time.
“The first two answers were true, and both of them were also fences.” Then he said the part he had not planned to say.
“I would rather you fired me than stopped asking me things like that.”
He stopped, and started again half a register lower. “The seventh rule was the first one I ever wrote.” The glass was empty and he still had hold of it. “I wrote it for somebody who never got to use it.”
He had written it before. I put my whole hand over the shiny part on the back of his right one and left it there, and he let me, and neither of us said anything about it.
Two knuckles came against the door frame. Matteo said my name through the gap and did not come in, and did not open the door any further either. I was dressed and out in the corridor with the blanket off the end of the bed before Cassian had his shirt done up.
The corridor is eleven meters of nothing, wool runner over concrete, doors on both sides.
Matteo stood on the far side of the strip of matte brass set into the floor at the midpoint, a laptop open along his forearm.
He is thirty-three and he does not cross that strip unless somebody asks him to.
Tonight he had not asked to be asked, and that told me the size of it before he opened his mouth.
He turned the screen so it faced me across the brass. “This is her key and it signed the chain.” He did not carry it any closer. “The first date on it is March.”
I made myself read the header line first. “A key is not a person.” My voice went quiet and stayed there.
“Keys get cloned and lifted and signed out by an assistant with the wrong access.” I said the rest of it in front of two men, which cost me something.
“You have shown me a string of characters and told me it is my friend.”
“I checked all of that before I walked down here.”
“Then tell me what the chain does not say.”
He tipped the screen back a few degrees. “It does not say who asked her for the key.” He stayed where he was. “It does not say she was paid, and it does not say she refused.”
“Show me the raw log and not your reading of it.”
Cassian said nothing at all, which was the worst part of that corridor, because he argues with me when he thinks I am wrong. Matteo brought the laptop as far as the brass strip, set it on the runner, and stepped back off it.
I sat down on the wool with the blanket round my shoulders and read it myself, line by line, the way I read anything that is going to cost somebody something.
I did not say anything. The rain came back at the window at the end of the corridor and eased and came again. Matteo held his position past the brass and Cassian stood where he had stopped.
My left hand had gone into my pocket without being sent there. My thumb found the torn corner of the card and pressed until the edge bit, and I let it bite. Nobody moved and nobody spoke and the log did not change.
The second pass was worse, because I stopped reading entries and started reading the shape they made.
Her key was not in the chain once. It was at the top of it, and then again at every place where the sequence needed a lawyer to call a thing ordinary.
Somebody had built the authorization around her, and she had let it be built around her.
Then I found the line from the night this started.
My session in the review room on thirty-nine, opened, and then closed from outside by a terminal that was not mine while I sat in front of the screen.
The terminal was on forty-one, and there is one office on forty-one that matters, and I have climbed those stairs to it for six years.
When all this began she asked me twice in one morning where my mother lives, and I answered her both times, and I thought it was the kind of question a woman asks when she remembers birthdays. I put my hand down on the runner and pressed until the wool went hard under it.
I said it out loud so it would exist in the room. “She closed my session from her own desk while I was still sitting inside it.” Then I put the laptop down. “Somebody get me a pen.”
Matteo came over the brass strip, because I had asked him for something, and held out a black rollerball with that crooked left ring finger hooked under the barrel. Cassian crouched down so he was not standing over me, which I have never seen him do for anybody else.
“I can put this in front of the other three tonight,” he said. “You do not have to be in the room while I do it.”
“I will say it,” I said. “She was mine before she was theirs.” I closed the laptop halfway and opened it again. “I am not handing that to somebody else to carry.”
He took that without arguing any part of it. “Then I will put them in the kitchen and I will not tell them why.”
“Give me the log until they are in there,” I said. “Then I will come and say it in one sentence and answer whatever they ask afterwards.”
They went, both of them, because I had asked for that as well.
I took the laptop into my room, turned the lamp back to the wall, and sat on the floor against the bolted frame of the bed.
The evidence is not the frightening part, because it is mine and authenticated and it lives where only I can reach it.
What she has is the tour. I walked her through Meridian myself with her office door shut, in a building where a shut door is a signal, because I wanted somebody senior to tell me I was not imagining it.
So she knows which counterparties I pulled and in what order.
She knows the review dies unless a token is read at the cage in sub-level two by a person on the access list.
She also knows the name of the town my mother lives in.
I struck two rules once. I marked up a typed instrument line by line and made four armed men wait while I did it, and tonight that read like a woman rearranging chairs.
Colette is fifty-four, and she taught me to read a document by reading the gaps in it, and she has been reading the gaps in me since March.
Colette had known what I found before I found it, and the only piece of my plan she did not have yet was the piece I had not written down.