Chapter 20

The morning after the rain was bright and clean in the way Bangkok mornings sometimes were after a heavy evening – the air washed out, the streets still damp in the shaded spots, the city looking slightly more like itself than usual.

Freen noticed this on her walk from the car park to the firm’s building. She noticed most things on that walk – it was ten minutes of open ground between her car and the building’s entrance and she used all of it. Vehicles she didn’t recognise. People moving against the flow. Anyone who was moving at the same pace as her for too long.

This morning the street was ordinary.

She went in.

Upstairs the office was doing its Friday morning thing – Noey already at her desk with coffee, two of the associates talking about something near the printer, Heng coming around the corner with a stack of files that meant he had been to the registry already. The ordinary sounds of a firm a little over two weeks from the end of the biggest trial it had handled in years.

Freen sat at her desk.

Through the glass Becky’s office was empty. Her desk lamp was on – she turned it on remotely from her phone, Freen had noticed this weeks ago, so the office never looked unoccupied to anyone passing – but the chair was empty and the coffee from yesterday was still on the corner of the desk.

Seven fifty-three.

Becky arrived at seven fifty-eight, as she always did.

She came through the glass partition door and her eyes went to her office the way they always did, already thinking about whatever she had been thinking about on the drive in. She passed Freen’s desk without stopping. Went into her office. The door stayed open.

Freen looked at her screen.

She thought about the jacket and the two seconds and told herself she was not thinking about either of those things and looked at the contingency argument she had finished last night. She read the first paragraph. It was good. She moved to the second.

At eight fifteen Becky appeared in her doorway.

“The contingency argument,” she said.

“On your desk,” Freen said. “I printed it.”

Becky looked at her for a moment. Then she looked at the papers on her desk – she hadn’t noticed them, which meant she had come in with something already on her mind and gone straight to it. She picked up the argument and read it standing there in her doorway.

Freen watched her read.

She was getting better at not watching Becky read. She was not entirely there yet.

Becky turned a page. Read the second one. Set it down. “The third point,” she said. “Expand the case law reference. There’s a 2019 Court of Appeal ruling that strengthens it.”

“I’ll find it and add it.”

“Before noon.”

“Before noon,” Freen said.

Becky went back into her office. Freen turned to her screen and started looking for the 2019 ruling and found it in eleven minutes because she had gotten faster at finding things and added it to the argument and had it back on Becky’s desk before ten.

The morning moved the way Friday mornings moved. A little faster than the rest of the week, a little more purposeful, people trying to get things finished before the weekend slowed everything down. Freen worked through her task list and monitored the office and sent Nam a brief threat assessment update and received back a voice note of Nam apparently eating breakfast while reading it, which was not the level of professional gravity the situation called for but was very Nam.

At twelve thirty Becky came out of her office with her bag.

“Client lunch,” she said. “One hour.”

“I’ll come,” Freen said.

Becky looked at her. “It’s a lunch.”

“I know.”

A pause. Becky looked like she was going to say something about junior associates not attending partner client lunches. Then she looked at Freen’s expression and seemed to decide the argument wasn’t worth having. “Fine. Keep up.”

They left together.

—

The restaurant was three blocks from the firm.

Not a long walk. Ten minutes at a normal pace, slightly less at Becky’s pace which was always slightly more purposeful than normal. They came out of the building into the Friday lunchtime street – busy, the pavements full, the kind of crowd that made it easy to lose someone or easy to not be noticed.

Freen fell into step beside Becky and slightly behind, the way she had calibrated over six weeks – close enough, angled correctly. She scanned the street the way she always did. The pavement ahead, the doorways, the vehicles parked on the left side. A woman with a pushchair. Two office workers on their phones. A food delivery driver on a motorbike.

And behind them, two and a half blocks back, a man in a grey jacket who had come out of a side street thirty seconds after them and was now maintaining exactly the same pace.

Freen registered him without reacting.

She kept walking. Same pace. She did not change anything about the way she was moving or the direction she was looking. She noted him the way she noted everything – quietly, without flags, adding him to the picture.

Grey jacket. Mid-thirties. He was not on his phone. He was not looking in shop windows. He was walking with the specific purposelessness of someone who had a very specific purpose and was working hard not to show it.

She knew that walk. She used that walk.

One block. He was still there. Same distance. He was good – he varied his pace slightly, let a gap open and then closed it, used the crowd the way you used the crowd when you had been trained to. Not a casual follower. Someone who knew what he was doing.

Which meant whoever had sent him knew what they were doing.

She looked at Becky beside her. Becky was on her phone – a quick message, thumb moving, eyes down for four seconds. She put her phone away and looked up at the street ahead.

She had no idea.

Half a block from the corner Freen said: “Your phone’s ringing.”

Becky looked at her. “No it’s-“

“Check it,” Freen said. Mild. Matter-of-fact. The voice she used when something needed to happen and she didn’t have time to explain why.

Becky checked her phone. “It’s not-“

“My mistake,” Freen said. “Sorry.”

The half second of distraction was enough. Becky looked back at the street ahead and Freen let herself fall two steps behind – natural, unremarkable, the slight gap of someone who had slowed to apologise – and in those two steps she turned her head slightly to check the side street they were passing.

The man in the grey jacket was twenty metres back.

He had slowed when she slowed. He was good. But he had slowed and she had seen it and she knew exactly how far back he was and exactly what she was going to do about it.

She caught up to Becky.

They turned the corner.

—

The side street was narrower. Fewer people. A delivery entrance on the left, a parked van, a gap between the van and the building’s wall that was completely invisible from the street they had just turned off.

Freen had eleven seconds.

She knew this because she had walked this route on her third day at the firm and had noted the van and the gap and the sight lines and the eleven seconds it took from the corner to reach it, which was the kind of thing she noted about every route she walked regularly.

She said: “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

Becky looked at her. “What-“

“I need to make a call. Two minutes.” She was already stepping toward the van. “I’ll meet you at the restaurant.”

Becky looked at her for one more second. Then she kept walking. Purposeful, direct, already pulling out her phone for a real call this time.

Freen stepped into the gap between the van and the wall.

She waited.

—

Forty seconds.

The man in the grey jacket came around the corner at a normal pace and immediately clocked that he had lost the target. She could see it – the slight shift in his body, the eyes moving ahead and then to the sides. He was looking for Becky.

He was not looking at the gap beside the van.

Freen stepped out.

“Excuse me,” she said.

He turned.

She was already very close. She had positioned herself correctly – she was between him and the street, her back to the wall, which meant she was between him and the exit and also meant that from the pavement she was invisible. The whole thing looked, from any angle that mattered, like nothing at all.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

She said nothing for a moment. She just looked at him with the particular quality of attention that she had been told, more than once by people who had been on the receiving end of it, was extremely uncomfortable to be looked at with.

“Wrong street,” she said quietly. “I think you want the one back there.”

He was good. He held it for a moment. Assessed. She watched him assess and watched him reach the correct conclusion – that he had been made, that she was not what she looked like, that the situation had changed in a way that was not in his brief.

He left.

Not quickly. Quickly would have been a flag. He turned and walked back toward the main street at a pace that was slightly faster than it had been before and didn’t look back.

Freen straightened her lapel.

She stepped out from between the van and the wall and walked the rest of the block to the restaurant.

—

Becky was at a table near the window with her client – a man in his sixties who stood when Freen arrived and shook her hand with the warmth of someone who had been told good things.

“My associate,” Becky said. “She’ll be sitting in.”

“Of course,” the client said.

Freen sat. She ordered water. She listened to the lunch conversation with one part of her mind and ran the other part on the man in the grey jacket – who had sent him, what he had been there to do, whether he was watching or something more than watching.

Watching. Probably watching. Establishing a pattern, confirming a schedule.

Which meant they were still in the preparation phase.

Which meant she still had time.

She looked at Becky across the table, talking to the client about something involving contract terms, her hands moving slightly when she made a point the way they always did. Completely at ease. Completely unaware that nine minutes ago someone had been following her and that Freen had redirected that someone into a different direction.

The client laughed at something Becky said.

Becky laughed too. The real one – the one Freen had seen for the first time across the office and not been able to stop looking at.

Freen drank her water and looked at the window and the street outside and thought about preparation phases and closing arguments and two and a half weeks.

She had time.

She was going to use it.

—

She called Engfa at two in the morning.

Not a text. A call. She was sitting in the dark of her apartment with the lights off because she had come home and not turned them on and somehow an hour had passed without her noticing. The threat assessment she had been writing was on the table in front of her and the tea she had made was cold again and outside the city was doing its two in the morning thing – quieter than the day, never actually quiet.

Engfa answered on the second ring. She always answered on the second ring regardless of the hour. This was one of the things Freen had never asked about and Engfa had never explained.

“There was a tail today,” Freen said.

A pause. “How professional.”

“Trained. He knew what he was doing.” She looked at her notes. “He was watching. Not moving yet. But the pattern is shifting – they’re getting closer, getting more specific. They’re confirming her schedule directly rather than relying entirely on the leak.”

“Which means they know the leak is compromised.”

“Or they’re being cautious. Either way they’re moving to direct observation.” She paused. “We need to talk about timeline. They’re not going to wait until the week of closing arguments. They’ll move earlier.”

Engfa was quiet for a moment.

“We have a confirmed identity on the coordinating officer,” she said.

Freen waited.

“Colonel Surat,” Engfa said.

The name landed in the dark apartment and stayed there.

Freen knew that name. Of course she knew that name. She had served under Colonel Surat for fourteen months early in her career – not closely, he was far above her rank, but close enough to know his reputation. Close enough to have shaken his hand at a unit function and heard him speak about the duty of soldiers to the institutions they served.

She sat with it for a moment.

“How certain,” she said.

“Certain.” Engfa’s voice was even. The voice she used when the information was confirmed and there was no comfort to offer around it. “He’s been coordinating the faction’s moves against the Armstrong case for three months. The procurement fraud evidence directly implicates him – he signed off on four of the transfer authorisations that Becky has on the record.”

Four of them.

Which meant Surat wasn’t just protecting the network. He was protecting himself.

“He’s not going to wait,” Freen said.

“No. He’s not going to wait.”

The line was quiet.

Outside the city moved through its two in the morning rhythms. A taxi somewhere. Music from a bar a few streets over, faint enough to be a suggestion rather than a sound. The city doing what it always did, completely indifferent to the conversations happening inside it.

Freen looked at the dark window.

She thought about a woman on the other side of the city who was probably asleep by now. Who had spent eight months building a case against a network that had decided, three months ago, that she was not going to finish it. Who had read Surat’s name into the court record without knowing what it would set in motion. Who had no idea that the man who had spoken about the duty of soldiers was the same man who had sent someone to follow her home this afternoon.

“I’ll call you when I have more,” Engfa said. “In the meantime – stay closer.”

“I’m already close.”

“Closer than that.”

The call ended.

Freen sat in the dark for a while longer.

Then she turned on the lamp and picked up her threat assessment and started writing. Not the summary version. The full version. Everything she knew and everything she suspected and all the gaps she still needed to close.

The tea was cold. She didn’t touch it.

She wrote until the assessment was done and then she sat back and looked at what she had written and thought about Colonel Surat and his fourteen months of reputation and his four signatures on transfer documents that a lawyer in Bangkok had somehow found.

She thought about two and a half weeks.

She turned off the lamp and went to bed and lay in the dark and did not sleep for a long time.