Dayo was on level two of the parking structure, sitting in the driver's seat of a vehicle he hadn't driven anywhere today. Engine off, feet on the dash, working through a paper bag of something—yesterday's pastry, from the look of it—with the placid efficiency of a man who had decided long ago that certain operational protocols applied to other people. He was thirty years old and built like someone who'd been told many times to present differently and had arrived at a considered and permanent position on the matter.
Caden got in on the passenger side.
Dayo offered the bag without looking at him. Caden looked at it. Dayo withdrew it without remark.
Above them, the fluorescent strips did their usual thing—a flicker, a hold, a flicker. Someone's car alarm went off two levels down and died before it had properly started.
"How was it."
"Standard."
"Thirty days?"
"Thirty days."
Dayo folded the paper bag. Turned it over in his hands. He had a habit of doing things with his hands when he was keeping his face neutral, and Caden had learned, in fifteen years of reading him, to watch the hands instead of the face.
"You know I think this is wrong," Dayo said.
Not bad. Not unwise. Wrong. Dayo chose words with more precision than most people credited him for, and he never said wrong when he meant bad idea. He said wrong when he meant a specific kind of wrong—the kind that didn't improve under examination, that you arrived at the same place with regardless of how many times you reran the logic.
"You've said."
"I keep saying it in case one day it lands differently."
"It lands the same."
"Yeah." He turned the bag over one more time and then set it down on the dash. "Who's the detail?"
"Civilian. Twenty-five. No Frame. Incidental exposure—she doesn't know."
"Threat level?"
"Credible. Not yet escalated." A pause. "The file has gaps."
This was not a complaint—Caden said it the way he said things that were simply true, catalogued and set down. Dayo heard the difference. He always heard the difference.
"Gaps how."
"The behavioral profile is thin. She's more perceptive than the assessors indicated. I'll know more after Day One."
Dayo looked at him. The look was two seconds long, which, for Dayo, was a full paragraph. Then he said: "Well. That's fine then."
The flatness of it was precise. That's fine then was the specific phrase Dayo deployed when he thought something was the opposite of fine and had already decided that saying so further would accomplish nothing. Caden had heard it applied to a blown extraction in Cologne, a field fracture that had taken three months to heal, and the specific career decision Caden had made five years ago that Dayo still hadn't processed fully.
Dayo started the car.
************
The safe house was on the fifth floor of a building that had been selected for its anonymity with the same attention others gave to beauty. Mid-height. Middle district. The kind of address that appeared on no list and featured in no photograph and occupied no memory. The flat itself: a bed, a table, two chairs, a kitchen for coffee, a window that faced east. Caden unpacked in four minutes flat, the efficiency of a man who had never owned more than he could carry, and moved what he'd brought to where it needed to go.
Then he filled a glass of water at the kitchen tap and set it on the windowsill.
He had been doing this for years. At some point he had stopped examining why, because the examination produced no useful return. It was just a glass of water. It was not anything. The window faced east, and in the morning, before the light changed, he would be at the table and the glass would be on the sill, and something about that arrangement was—
It was fine. It was simply fine.
He sat at the table with the file open.
He'd read every page four times already. He read them again.
The photograph was still the surveillance frame—mid-sentence, head at forty degrees, that fractional second after a laugh. He studied the behavioral profile with the attention he gave things that were going to require adjustment. The threat assessment was clean. The operational calendar was sound. Thirty days from tonight, the arrangement came into effect, and the arrangement was correct, and the calculation was finished, and everything after that was not a thing he needed to account for.
He was not thinking about I think the lift might have a personality.
He was not thinking about it.
He closed the file, turned off the light, and lay down in the dark with the east-facing window and the glass of water on its sill catching the orange leak of the streetlight below. In the morning, before dawn, he would be in position. The assignment would begin. The thirty days would run their count. The math was sound.
He was awake for another hour.
He didn't examine why.