Ten past ten, and the planning floor is down to your lamp and one desk by the window. You kill the light, ride the freight elevator down with your coat over your arm, and the doors open onto B2: cold concrete, wet tires, one row of lights buzzing over the visitor bays. Two voices are going back and forth behind the pillar at the ramp, and you stop short of the corner instead of walking through it.
"Say the name on the tower,"
the younger one says, flat and unhurried, and you know the voice — the new hire from the desk by the window, the one the floor calls the supermodel.
"Say it out loud, Antonin, and then tell me again that I am not allowed to use it."
The older man's answer is too low to make out, but his own words are not. Mr. Aumont. Twice, the way you say a fact you do not like. Then board, and March, and the click of a car door.
"I have read it,"
the new hire says.
"I am not signing it tonight, and I am not signing it in a garage."
An engine turns over. Tires hiss on wet concrete, the ramp light swings across the pillars, and then there is nothing left in B2 except the hum of the fluorescents and one set of footsteps coming back the way you came.
He rounds the pillar with his black coat hanging open off both bare shoulders — gold cross at his collarbone, freckles across the bridge of his nose, that long ash-blond hair in his eyes — and stops two paces away. There is no surprise on him at all. He looks like a man finishing a sum.
"You heard the name,"
he says.
"Good. That saves me Thursday."
He glances past you at the elevator, then back, and when he speaks again the flat voice is gone and something worse is underneath it — patience.
"My car is at the ramp. Get in. You have been the only person in this building who was straight with me from the first day, so you get the explanation tonight, in one piece, before Odile Prevost hears a version of it without you in the room."