22. Kat
twenty-two
Kat
The wall stops being two walls sometime around midnight.
I move a card six inches left and Naveed follows it with a line of red thread that lands exactly where I would have put it, and neither of us says anything about that. His route maps sit under my source notes. My publication timeline runs along the bottom like a spine holding the whole thing up.
"Dubai first." He taps the date. "The staged breach at the terminal. Two days later the port authority approves an escalated private security contract."
"Which nobody bid against."
"Nobody bid because the incident report scared the other bidders off." He moves his finger down. "Istanbul. Same pattern. Twelve days."
I pin the Istanbul clerk's affidavit beside it. "And the insurance revaluation lands three weeks after that. Every cargo on that manifest gets reclassified as high-risk transit."
"Which changes what can legally ride in it."
"Which is how you move a weapons load through a friendly port with paperwork that a customs officer will initial without reading."
He goes still.
I stand back, look at the whole thing, and my stomach drops like a missed step at the top of the stairs in the dark.
It is not a series of crimes. It is a machine. You break a window, you sell the alarm, you own the building. Somebody drew this on a napkin and then spent a decade building it, and it has been running in daylight for years because nobody ever laid the pieces on the same wall.
He never expected anyone to draw it. That is the whole trick. It only works if the pieces stay in separate rooms.
I sit down at the table and open the draft.
Two hours. Coffee gone cold, then replaced, then cold again. Naveed brings the second cup and sets it at my elbow without a word and goes back to the wall.
At three in the morning he reads over my shoulder. I let him. That is new too.
He is quiet for a long time.
"You left out the vendor structure."
"Yes."
"That is the strongest section."
"It's also the one with your fingerprints on it." I keep typing. "The clerk gets me most of it from the other side. It's slower. It's clean."
"Kat."
I stop typing.
"I protect sources," I tell the screen.
"I am not your source."
I turn around in the chair and look up at him, all six foot three of him standing there with red thread still on his fingers.
"No. You are worse."
Something moves across his face that I do not have a name for. His hands close and open at his sides.
He does not say thank you. He would not know how. He puts one palm on the back of my chair, brief, and goes to check the locks.
My phone lights up on the table.
My editor. At 3:04 in the morning, my editor has never once called me before six in his life.
I pick up, and the first thing I hear is her breathing like a woman deciding how to say something.
"Kat," she says. "Don't come in until we talk."
The riverfront press event has three hundred people in it and I can name maybe forty. The rest are staffers, donors, and the kind of men who wear lanyards like medals. A brass band tunes up badly near the water. Somebody's foundation is giving somebody's borough a park.
I am here because two of the donor names on the program appear on the middle tier of my wall.
Cameras everywhere. A press riser to my left, four networks, a boom mic swinging over the podium like a bored fishing rod. The air smells like river water and warm catering trays.
Naveed is thirty feet behind me at the edge of the barricade, dressed in nothing anyone would remember, reading the crowd instead of the stage. We agreed to this. I work the room. He works the room's exits. His elite team mingles with the guests.
I have my recorder in my palm, a smile on for a communications director who is explaining at length, that the foundation does not comment on partner entities.
"Of course," I tell her. "I'll just note that you declined."
Her smile tightens and she leaves.
Then someone is beside me.
He is fifty-something and pleasant. Gray suit, no watch worth stealing, a program folded in his hand like he actually read it. The kind of face you would describe to a sketch artist as normal and then have nothing else to offer.
"Beautiful spot for it." He nods at the water. "They put the benches facing the wrong way, though. You'll see. Everyone will sit looking at the parking lot."
I bite back the laugh trying to come out.
"You with the foundation?"
"I'm with almost nobody." He shifts a half step closer, enough that the ambient noise stops covering him. "You're the writer. Romero."
Everything in my body stands at attention. My hands loosen, my face impassive. Three hundred people, four cameras, a boom mic ten feet away, I can't step back, can't raise my voice, can't do a single thing a normal woman would do when a stranger uses her name like he owns a copy of it.
"That's me."
"You work very hard." Warm. Genuinely warm, which is the worst part. "People notice hard work. It's rarer than you'd think."
Get his face. Get the tie, the shoes, the shape of the ears. Get something a lens could confirm later.
There is nothing to get. He is a man made entirely out of average.
The band finds its key and applause starts near the podium, I lean in slightly to hear him, he lets me, waits for me to lean in.
"Anyway." He tucks the program under his arm. "You should get some rest, Katarina. You're wearing yourself thin."
Then, quiet, still smiling, still nothing a camera would catch:
"Your mother used to say that. Kitten, you're wearing yourself thin."
The band finds its pitch, the applause rises and I stand perfectly still.
Kitten.
Nobody has said that word out loud in twenty-three years.
Nobody living knows it. It exists in one place on this earth, and that place is a fireproof box on the top shelf of my loft, in a stack of letters written in pencil by a nine-year-old who did not know how else to talk to a woman in the ground.
Cold sweeps through me, scalp to heels, a smile still on my face sitting there like something glued.
There is a specific violence in hearing it in a stranger's mouth that no brick or shattered window ever came within a mile of.
Kitten. My mother's, in the shape of her voice, which I have kept alive for twenty-three years in exactly one place because it is the last recording of her that exists anywhere.
And this stranger has just played it back to me, he has reached past every lock I have ever set and put his fingers directly on the nine-year-old still folded up inside me, the one writing letters to a woman who could not write back.
That child has no defenses. I built all of it around her, a whole grown woman made of walls precisely so that no one would ever reach her, and a man made of nothing at all just strolled through the entire structure in a single sentence smiling and laid his hand on her.
I have to keep smiling back or I lose everything I have ever printed.
I did not know until this exact second that I was capable of wanting to hurt a person another human being as the vicious instinct rises and I envision this dickhead lying beaten at my feet.
"I'm sorry," I manage. "Do we know each other?"
"No." He watches the podium as though the ribbon-cutting is the reason he came. "I read, though. I'm a great reader. It's my only real skill."
Somebody laughs behind me at a joke I did not hear. A waiter slides past with a tray of little pastries and the smell of butter turns my stomach.
"You wrote something once." He says, and I'll quote. "I keep the porch light on in case you got lost coming back. That's very good. That's better than most of what you print now."
The floor tilts, air comes in thin and useless. My fingers have gone numb around the recorder and I feel the plastic edge of it, count the cameras, four, four cameras, a boom mic hanging ten feet over my head like a promise.
If I move he wins. If I raise my voice I become the story. Three hundred people, one shaking woman and by tomorrow I am the reporter who came unglued at a park opening, and every word I have printed dies with it.
So I stand very still. It is the hardest physical act of my entire life.
"Who are you with?"
"Nobody you'd want to be curious about." He says it kindly. That is the part that will stay with me, the kindness handing you your own coat. "I do work for people who don't enjoy being written about. They've been patient. Patience isn't a resource anyone has an unlimited supply of."
"Is that a threat?"
His eyebrows lift, honestly surprised, and he shakes his head like I have disappointed him a little.
"It's a compliment. You're tenacious. I've watched three careers try what you're doing and none of them had your stamina." He unfolds the program, tucks it under his arm. "I hope you take care of your health, Katarina. Truly. Get some sleep. Eat something that isn't from a paper bag."
The applause breaks over the podium and he steps back into it.
"They'll all sit facing the parking lot," he adds. "Watch."
Then he is gone.
Just gone, like puff, swallowed by shoulders, lanyards, the crowd surging toward the ribbon, and my legs have not yet remembered how to work.
The band gets through the whole first song before I move.
Not because I choose to stand there. Because my body has logged a report and is waiting on the response that's slow in coming.
He read the letters.
My mind keeps circling and cannot land. This man in the gray suit did not stand in my bedroom and lift the lid off a fireproof box.
He was told. Somebody photographed pages written by a nine-year-old and sent them up, they landed on a desk, and a person at that desk read a line about a porch light and decided it was useful.
Somebody with better shoes than this man read my mother's word for me over morning coffee and thought, yes, use that one.