6. Sergei
SERGEI
The room Tank had started calling the fishbowl had no windows and, as far as I could tell, no actual bowl-like quality to it at all, unless he meant that everyone inside could see everyone else and nobody could get out without walking past the one door.
I hadn't asked him to explain the name. Some of Tank's names did not survive close questioning, and I had learned to let them stand.
Two days after the conference room, I was back in that windowless room at seven in the morning with a paper cup of coffee going cold in my hand, watching six monitors that Ash had rigged to pull selective feeds off the fourteenth floor.
Ash had strung three of them to badge logs, two to network traffic, and one, apparently for his own amusement, to a live weather radar loop of a storm system that wasn't going to reach us for another four days.
"That one's not relevant," I said.
"That one's morale," Ash said, not looking up from his laptop. "You should try it sometime."
Tank stood by the door with his arms crossed, watching the badge feed the way other men watch television, patient and faintly amused, like he already knew how the episode ended.
He had brought his own chair in from his office, a low mesh thing that looked like it belonged in a startup break room, and he lowered himself into it with the careful economy of a much bigger man who had learned, over years, not to break furniture by accident.
"Standard threat review," he said, mostly to himself, the way he narrated things sometimes when he wanted them to be true by saying them plainly enough. "Four contractors, one anomaly, twenty-eight minutes. We watch, we log, we don't spook anybody."
"That's the idea," I said.
After Vadim's warning on the phone less than a week ago, a threat review had sounded like something closer to a countdown than a plan.
It sounded different now, sitting in a room with my two oldest allies in the company, both of them treating the whole exercise with the same flat professional interest they'd bring to a firewall audit.
Ash cross-referenced login times against VPN handshakes.
Tank cross-referenced elevator logs against stairwell door sensors that most people in the building didn't know existed. Between them they had, by midmorning, built a timeline of the fourteenth floor accurate down to the second for four names: Priya Kapoor, Tomas Rieger, Devon Okafor, Elena Marin.
I told myself I was giving all four equal attention. I did watch all four.
I clocked Priya leaving at six on the dot every evening as if her contract carried a clause about it, tracked Tomas eating lunch at his desk with headphones the size of dinner plates, noted Devon disappearing for what I assumed were smoke breaks that never seemed to leave any trace of smoke on him when he came back.
I watched Elena too, and somewhere in the second hour I noticed that I was watching her more.
I wasn't doing anything with the noticing. I was just registering it, the way you register a draft in a room and decide to deal with it later.
She had a habit, on the feed, of talking to her monitor when she thought the floor around her was empty enough not to count as an audience. She never did it loudly.
Her mouth moved in short bursts, a private commentary running under whatever spreadsheet or model she was fighting with, and every so often she tipped her head back and said something to the ceiling that the microphones weren't good enough to catch.
Ash had the audio pickup calibrated for badge readers and door chimes, not for a woman narrating her own frustration to an empty cubicle, and I never asked him to fix that.
"She talks to the computer," Tank observed, without looking away from his own screen.
"Plenty of people talk to their computers. It's not exactly a tell."
"Not like that." Tank tilted his head slightly, the closest he came to a shrug. "That's negotiating. My aunt talked to her tomato plants like that. Bargaining tone."
I filed that away and didn't answer.
At eleven, on the recorded feed from the day before, a client call went sideways in a way I recognized instantly from the sound alone, the particular cadence of a voice on the other end climbing while the voice on our end dropped lower and grew more measured.
I watched Elena's face go very still and very pleasant, the kind of stillness that costs something to maintain, and her right hand drifted to the edge of her desk.
Four taps, evenly spaced, a half-beat pause, then three more.
It wasn't fidgeting. It was a rhythm, deliberate as a metronome, repeating itself while her voice on the recording stayed level and told the client that she understood the concern and would have a revised model by end of day.
I sat forward without deciding to.
I know that rhythm. I have used some version of it since I was nine years old, folded under my father's desk in a room that doesn't exist anymore, counting under my breath while the officer's gun stayed leveled at my father across that same room, because a number that only divides by itself and by one is a number you can hold onto when nothing else in the room agrees to hold still. Two, three, five, seven.
I still do it in board meetings. I did it in Zurich, a week ago, tapping it out against my knee under a conference table while a lawyer explained, at great length, why an indemnity clause I didn't like was standard industry practice.
I have never told anyone why I do it. Ash has noticed and never asked, which is its own kind of gift.
Watching Elena run her own version of it, on a grainy security feed, at a quarter to nine in the morning, produced a feeling in my chest that I didn't have a convenient name for. It sat there for a second, uninvited, and I let it sit without picking it up to see what it was made of.
That felt safer. I went back to the badge logs.
"You good?" Ash asked, glancing over.
"Fine," I said.
"You made a face."
"I did not make a face."
"You made a very specific face," Ash said. "I've catalogued them. That one's somewhere between constipation and revelation."
"Focus on the network side."
"I am focused on the network side. That's exactly how I caught it, that monitor happens to sit right next to your face.
" He turned back to his laptop, unbothered, typing with the speed of a man who'd learned to touch-type on a keyboard with half the letters worn off.
"Speaking of which. I want to talk about Steve. "
Tank straightened in his chair with the alertness of a man who had been waiting all morning for this exact opening.
"Steve stays," Tank said.
"I haven't made an argument yet."
"I know what the argument's going to be, and Steve stays."
I looked between them. "Who is Steve?"
"The basil," Tank said, with the flat dignity of a man defending a treaty. "In the server room. Under the grow light, second rack from the door."
I had, in fact, noticed a small hydroponic setup wedged between two racks the last time I'd walked through the server room, a plastic tray of leafy green under a thin purple light, and had assumed it belonged to a vendor or was some kind of humidity experiment I hadn't been briefed on. "There is a plant in the server room."
"There is a security asset in the server room," Tank said. "It's audited. It's on the equipment list. I put it there myself."
"You put a basil plant on the physical security equipment list."
"Morale is a vulnerability surface," Tank said, entirely serious, the way he said everything, which was what made him funny without ever seeming to try.
"Guy's on a twelve-hour overnight shift, alone, staring at forty screens.
He starts cutting corners. He starts skipping the west stairwell check because his feet hurt and nobody's watching him not do it.
You give him something alive to check on, something that needs him, he does his rounds.
Steve gets watered, west stairwell gets checked.
I've got eleven months of incident data.
Fewer skipped checks since Steve went in. "
"That is not a controlled study," Ash said.
"It's a controlled basil plant," Tank said. "Best kind."
"Does it work?" I asked, mostly because I wanted to hear the answer more than I wanted to argue the premise.
"Yeah," Tank said, and something in the plainness of it, the total absence of irony, landed funnier than any joke Ash had made all morning. "Also makes good pesto around the holidays."
Ash opened his mouth, visibly reconsidered whatever he'd been about to say, and closed it again. "I have nothing. I want to be annoyed and I have nothing."
"Steve stays," I said.
"Thank you," Tank said, and settled back into his chair like a man who had just won a much larger argument than the one on the table.
We went quiet for a while after that, the three of us working our own angles of the same problem, and it was Ash who broke the silence an hour later with the particular sharpness in his voice that meant he'd found something worth interrupting for.
He waved me over without looking away from his screen, three windows of code and packet capture stacked on top of each other, a fourth showing what looked like a device manifest.
"Okay," he said. "I isolated it. The method, not the person, don't get excited.
Whoever's doing this isn't dumping data over the network at all, that's why it never tripped anything upstream.
It's a physical pull. Something plugs directly into an endpoint on the fourteenth floor, mimics a peripheral so the machine doesn't flag a new device, grabs a defined dataset, and disconnects clean.
No residual process, no log entry that isn't already explainable by normal use.
If I hadn't already known to go looking at that exact eleven forty-seven window, I'd have called this floor clean and gone home. "
"How clean?" I said.
"Clean like it was built by someone who's read our own incident response documentation and designed specifically around it.
" He scrolled, tapping a line of the capture.
"Minimal footprint. No wasted motion. It's not smash and grab, it's a scalpel.
Comparing it to some of the stuff we shipped in our first year, it's better engineered than half of what we run internally, and we run tight. "
He sat back, staring at the screen, and there was something almost admiring in the way he said it, an engineer's respect leaking through the alarm.
"Whoever built this is better than three of my junior engineers."
"I'm aware," I said.
Tank glanced over at that, reading something in my voice that I hadn't meant to put there, and didn't say anything, which from Tank was its own kind of comment.
Ash kept scrolling, chasing the thread further down into the packet data, already half-talking to himself about signature matching and whether he could pull a device fingerprint out of the residual handshake, and I let him talk without really hearing the words anymore.
I was thinking about a rhythm tapped against the edge of a desk.
I was thinking about a method that left almost nothing behind, built by someone who understood exactly what we would look for and had already accounted for it, someone patient enough to wait for the smallest possible window and precise enough to use every second of it.
I thought about the four names on Tank's timeline and the one face that kept finding its way back onto the screen in front of me even when I told myself I was watching the other three.
I should have felt something closer to alarm. A hole cut clean and quiet into my own building's defenses was exactly the kind of thing Vadim would call, not incorrectly, a liability with my family's name sitting two doors down from it.
"You don't look worried," Tank said, watching me instead of the screen. "Should you be?"
I opened my mouth for yes and what came out instead was, "Whoever did this didn't waste a single motion."
Ash stopped scrolling. Tank's eyebrows went up, just slightly. "That's not an answer," he said.
"No," I agreed. "It isn't."
It wasn't the theft that frightened me. The theft was a problem I knew how to work, a shape I could put my hands around and take apart piece by piece until it made sense.
What frightened me was how much of myself I recognized in the shape of it, how easily admiration had slid in ahead of anger and made itself comfortable there before I noticed it arrive.