His response came in under a minute. Ready when you are. She put the phone in her pocket. She started walking back toward Whitmore Hall. She needed to see Tom.
She found him in the basement, the mechanical room where the HVAC units ran. He was checking something on a pressure gauge. The room was warm and loud with the sound of the building breathing. She told him about the suspension. He listened.
Then he said, "When do you need the drive?" "Tonight," she said. He nodded. She said, "Tom, there's one more thing." He waited. "The camera in the east parking lot," she said. "The one near the faculty lot.
Is it on the same secondary system? He looked at her. It is, he said. Has it been working? He said, "I adjusted the angle on it last week.
It was pointed too far left. Wasn't catching the full lot." She looked at him. She said, "When did you adjust it?" He said, "About 3 days before you walked in to ask me about it." She stood in the warm, loud basement room and looked at this man who had spent 11 years maintaining a building where he watched things go wrong and kept showing up. Anyway, she said, "You've been planning this, too." He looked at the pressure gauge. He said, "I've been waiting for someone to plan it with." That evening, she drove home in the dark.
She was calm. Her hands were steady on the wheel. The road was empty. She parked outside her apartment and sat for a moment before going in. Old habit, she went inside.
She made tea. She sat at her desk. She opened her email and sent a single encrypted message to Reeves. The message contained one attachment: a file she had been building for two months. Every wire transfer she had traced, every shell account, every date, the email chains she had gathered through sources she had developed carefully over 6 months before she ever set foot on the Hardgrove campus.
She had sent him a version of this before. He had said he needed more. She had more now. She typed, "This is everything I have. The drive from Tom will be with you tomorrow morning.
Use it." She pressed send. She sat back. The apartment was very quiet. She looked at the shoe box on the shelf that she had moved from the closet to the desk sometime in the past week without fully deciding to. She looked at it for a while.
Then she went to the window. Outside the street was empty. A single street light. Wet pavement from the earlier rain. Somewhere down the block a door closed.
She thought about James, not the way she usually thought about him, not the way that felt like a wound, the way that felt like a reason. She said out loud to nobody and to him, "I'm still here." Then she went to bed, but sleep did not come for a long time. She lay in the dark and listened to the building and thought about what happens when systems built to protect. People are hollowed out from the inside by people who speak very calmly and have very nice offices. She thought about the 40 students in that classroom who had seen everything and been ignored.
She thought about Marge Collins pressing her fingers to the bridge of her nose in a room where she thought nobody was watching. She thought about the fact that being invisible and being powerless were not the same thing. She thought about the 48 hours ahead of her. Then she thought about something else. She thought about her apartment being broken into.
She had been waiting for it. She had moved the most important things three days ago. The external hard copies, the printed records, the originals of everything she had gathered that could not be recreated from memory. She had placed them somewhere that was not her apartment and was not her car and was not her office, somewhere that would not be found by someone in a hurry, somewhere that would only matter when the time came. She had learned in the field that the thing your enemy comes for is not necessarily the thing that matters.
Sometimes what matters is what they reveal by coming for it at all. She had told Reeves this on the phone. He had said, "You're using your own apartment as bait." She had said, "I'm using the idea of what they think is in my apartment as bait." He had been quiet for a long moment. Then he had said, "You know, most people when they leave the Marines just take up running." She had said, "I run too." He had said, "Clare." She had said, "I know what I'm doing, Daniel." She had said it without hesitation because it was true. She lay in the dark and let herself rest.
Outside the street was quiet. The night passed, and sometime before morning, exactly as she had anticipated, she heard the soft and careful sound of someone trying very hard not to be heard. Her eyes opened. She was already awake. She did not move.
She lay in the dark and listened. The sound came from the front of the apartment. The door, whoever it was, knew what they were doing. No rattling, no force, just the quiet, patient work of someone who had done this before. She counted 17 seconds.
Then the lock gave. The door opened slowly. A thin beam of a flashlight crossed the ceiling. One person moving carefully toward the desk. She stayed still.
She heard the desk drawer open, the laptop being lifted. Papers moving, the sound of someone checking behind the bookshelf, looking for a hard drive, looking for files. She lay in the dark and let them look. After 4 minutes, the flashlight swept once more across the room. Then it went out.
The door closed. The lock was reset. Whoever it was had been professional enough to leave it the way they found it. She waited another full minute. Then she sat up, turned on the lamp on the nightstand, and picked up her phone.
She called Reeves. He picked up on the second ring. "They just left," she said. "Anyone hurt?" No, they took the laptop and whatever paper files were on the desk, which were printed copies of things you already have. Nothing original.
A pause. You're sure they didn't find the drive? I moved it Thursday, she said. It's been with you since Friday morning. She could hear him exhale.
Good, he said. That's good. She stood up and walked to the window. The street below was empty. No car she didn't recognize.
Whoever had come had already gone. They made a mistake tonight, she said. Breaking and entering. Breaking and entering. And it means they're scared.
She looked at the empty street. Scared people accelerate. And when you accelerate, you stop being careful. Reeves said, "Clare, I need you to know where we are. The financial records you sent are strong.
The drive from Tom is strong. I have enough to go to my supervisor tomorrow morning and request a formal warrant." She was quiet. "How long?" she asked. If everything moves the way it should, 3 to 5 days. She turned away from the window.