The service corridor was just as cold as before. Percy was already there; he slipped transmitter into her palm the moment she reached him.
"Tell me you got all of it." She murmured.
"Everything from the moment you stepped into the study." He slipped the receiver into his jacket, "The clock in that room is analogue and about eight inches from where he was sitting, the audio quality is going to be good."
"How does it get to Carmen?"
"I drive it there tonight." He said it without any visible drama.
Mira looked at him, "He told me you're useful."
"I've worked very hard to be believed by people who should never have believed me." Something shifted in his expression, fine-grained and controlled, "It has been, on balance, an unpleasant four years."
"How long have you been inside it?"
"Since the second oversight inquiry, I was brought in as the legal monitor, I understood immediately what I was being asked to do. I spent approximately three weeks deciding whether to do it and then decided against it, at which point I had to figure out what to do with what I already knew." He held her gaze.
"You stayed inside."
"Leaving looked like one thing from the outside and it was another thing in practice." He wasn't defensive, "I stayed because I was already in possession of information that made me a liability if I walked away and because from inside, I could see what was actually happening. Diane found me fourteen months ago, she'd mapped enough of the structure to identify me as an anomaly, someone in place but not quite of the place. We worked out an arrangement; she built the documentation; I stayed accessible to Aldric, when she had enough to make something prosecutable, I was supposed to create the opening."
"She ran out of time."
"She moved early because the fourth name scared her, she identified him six weeks ago and immediately understood that the normal channels were closed, that's when she went quiet and started preparing the contingency instead. She said she'd identified someone outside the architecture." He looked at Mira. "She didn't tell me your name, I found it myself, the same way she did. The Calloway case thread, the notes that disappeared from the file."
"You went looking."
He confirmed, "She was right about you, that's worth saying out loud."
Mira absorbed that without responding to it because responding to it was a door she wasn't ready to open with him in an unlit corridor at eleven forty-five in the evening, "Szymanski, is he here tonight because Aldric is nervous or because he's always here?"
"Aldric has been accelerating since Diane's body was found, he doesn't know yet what she built, he knows she was building something and that it's unaccounted for, that makes him careful and careful men keep their enforcement close."
"How long before he knows I was never going to bury the file?"
"When you don't deliver in forty-eight hours, possibly sooner if Szymanski is already running his own thread on you."
"Is he?"
"He ran one on me for two years before concluding I was genuinely bought, he's thorough but he's not fast, you have some room." Something almost dry entered his voice.
"I need to get the notebook to Chen tonight, everything that's happened since the station, if the next forty-eight hours go wrong, he needs the full picture."
Percy nodded once, "Go, I'll follow in twenty minutes."
"You don't need to follow me."
He looked at her with the same expression he had on the bench and said again, "Twenty minutes."
She pushed through the door into the night air, which was cleaner than the inside of the house and considerably colder, she walked to her car without looking back, she already knew he was watching the door. Forty-eight hours, she kept her eyes on the road, both hands on the wheel and did not think about the way the corridor light had reduced everything to its actual dimensions until she finally did.
Chen was awake when she called.
"I'm fine." She said it before he could ask.
"I wasn't going to ask." Chen finally felt at ease.
"I need to meet you, the coffee place on Mercer, the one with the orange awning."
"It's quarter past midnight."
"It's open until two, there's a night shift crowd from the hospital."
"On my way." Chen already reached out for keys.
She drove there in fourteen and took a corner table with sightlines to both the entrance and the service door, an arrangement Morse would have approved of. Chen arrived at twelve thirty-eight, which was fast enough, he sat down, looked at her with the careful assessment he reserved for people he thought might be injured and hadn't admitted it, yet he appeared satisfied and signaled for coffee without looking at the menu.
She put the notebook on the table between them, "Everything since the station, Miller, Jones, the drive, Percy and what happened tonight, the Aldric meeting, what was said, what was offered and what I said in return."
He looked at the notebook, "You went in wired."
"Yes."
"To Walter Aldric's house?"
"Yes."
"I don't know how to feel about it." Chen was experiencing a mix of emotions, stunned, shocked, flabbergasted, yet somehow not surprised.
"If the next two days go sideways, you take that notebook and the bottom drawer to Jones directly."
"And if you go sideways with it?"
"Then the notebook is all the more important."
He turned it once in his hands, "Percy."
"What about him?"
"Four years inside it, that's a long time to be something you aren't." Chen looked at her.
"I know."
"People change shape, if you spend long enough performing a thing, the performance starts to wear grooves."
"I know." She said it again, meaning something different the second time. Chen heard the difference and did what he usually did with differences he'd heard, left them where they were.
"The recording from tonight, if it's clean, if it's Aldric on tape describing what happened to Diane Collier as a contractor who stepped outside her arrangement..."
"I know Chen."
Chen sighed and finished his coffee, "You know, if this works out, once it comes to light how we handled it, the career talk gets tricky. I'm not complaining, just putting it out there so we've both acknowledged it and can stop wasting energy on it."
"Go home, sleep if you can." Mira almost smiled.
"You should try to get some sleep too." Chen said before leaving.
Mira nodded and headed home; she slipped into an unplanned four hours of dreamless sleep and woke at five forty-three, seven minutes before her alarm. She got up and went for run, same uneven paving stone at the third bend which her left foot cleared without instruction, the park was empty at this hour, so was the bench at the east.
Mira noticed his absence and was irritated that she even cared, she hated that it even bothered her.
To be continued...