Chapter 10

The courthouse had been standing for forty years and looked like it intended to stand for forty more.

Freen noted the entrance the moment they turned the corner onto the street — two guards on the door, one scanner inside, cameras covering the approach from three angles, one blind spot near the left pillar that she filed away without breaking stride. Becky was already moving toward the steps, bag over one shoulder, the folder of documents she had been reviewing in the car tucked under her arm. She moved through the morning crowd on the pavement the way she moved through the office — like the space around her rearranged itself rather than the other way around.

Freen kept pace beside her and said nothing.

She had been doing a lot of saying nothing this week. It turned out to be one of the more useful tools available to her in this assignment. In the field, silence was operational. Here it served a different purpose — it gave Becky nothing to push against, and Becky, she had learned, needed something to push against before she pushed. If there was nothing there she watched instead. And when Becky watched, she watched the way she did everything. Completely.

Freen preferred to be the one watching.

They went through security without incident. Badge out, bag on the belt, through the scanner and gone. The lobby opened up on the other side — wide and high-ceilinged and populated by the particular mix of people that courthouses always held. Lawyers in robes moving with purpose. Families in their best clothes sitting on benches and looking at nothing. A clerk wheeling a trolley stacked with manila folders. And near the far wall, by the noticeboard, a man in a grey shirt who was looking at his phone but whose eyes moved every time the main doors opened.

Freen noted him. He was not the man she was looking for. But she filed him anyway because filing things was not something she could turn off and she had stopped trying.

Becky took the stairs. Third floor, long corridor, the smell of old paper and something institutional underneath it. Other lawyers moved through the corridor in both directions — some who nodded at Becky, one who stopped to say something briefly that Becky answered in a sentence before moving on. She didn’t slow down. Whatever was in the courtroom at the end of this corridor was where her attention had already gone and the rest of the world was something she was moving through to get there.

Freen had seen this quality before. Not in lawyers. In soldiers in the hours before something started. The narrowing. The way everything non-essential fell away and what was left was very clean and very focused.

She filed that too.

The courtroom door was heavy. Becky pushed through it without hesitating and went directly to the lawyers’ table without looking at the gallery. Freen stopped just inside the door and stood for a moment, which was all she needed.

Long room. Narrower than it looked from the outside. Judge’s bench raised at the front, imposing in the way that things were imposing when they had been imposing for decades and had settled into it. Witness stand to the left. Two lawyers’ tables below the bench, facing it — Becky’s table near the left wall, the defence table opposite. Public gallery behind a low wooden partition, six rows of benches, already half full with a mix of press and observers and people who appeared to be there for no particular reason except that the Viroj case had been in the papers enough that it had become something people came to watch.

Freen identified her seat in the time it took most people to decide which row to sit in.

Third row from the back, left side. From there she had clear sight lines to the main entrance, the door behind the witness stand, the lawyers’ tables, and the full sweep of the gallery to her right without needing to turn her head more than thirty degrees. She could also see the door through which the judge would enter and the clerk’s desk and the small door in the far corner that the building plans told her led to a holding area.

She sat. Opened her notebook. Looked like a junior associate preparing to observe a court hearing.

She was watching the gallery.

Two rows ahead and to the right a man in a dark jacket was already seated. He had been there when she walked in — she had clocked him in the first sweep of the room, the same automatic registration she gave everything, and something about him had made her look again. Fifties. Ordinary build. The kind of face that was assembled from features that didn’t ask to be remembered — medium everything, nothing sharp enough to catch the eye. He had a notebook on his knee. He was not writing in it.

He was watching Becky’s table.

Not the room. Not the proceedings generally. Specifically the table where Becky was arranging documents with the system Freen had watched her use before — each item to its precise location, nothing placed without knowing where it was going. Heng was beside her, following the system without instruction. Four years had made them efficient in the way only time could.

Freen looked at the man in the dark jacket for three measured seconds. Memorised the face. Noted the jacket — good quality, not new — the shoes, the angle of his body which was slightly forward, weight distributed in a way that was practiced rather than casual. Not a journalist. Journalists wrote things down. Not a lawyer — he was on the wrong side of the partition. Not family of either party because he was watching Becky’s table and not the defence table and if you were family of Viroj you did not watch the prosecution with that particular quality of attention.

He had been at the last two hearings.

Nam had pulled the courthouse attendance records four days ago as part of the standard background sweep of anyone who had regular access to Becky’s schedule or movements. The man in the dark jacket appeared in both. Different clothes each time. Same seat. Same notebook he never wrote in.

She looked away from him without reacting and looked down at her own notebook and wrote the word Jeff with a question mark beside it because she didn’t have a confirmed name yet and she had learned in eight years that question marks were important. Certainty before you had earned it was how people got hurt.

She would run the face tonight.

The judge entered. Everyone rose and sat again in the practiced rhythm of a room that did this every day. Becky stood up and the hearing began.

—

Freen had every intention of maintaining the rotation throughout. Entry points, gallery, the man in the dark jacket — update each one in sequence, keep the full picture current, stay operational. It was straightforward. She had maintained surveillance in conditions significantly more demanding than a courtroom on a Thursday morning.

She maintained the rotation for six minutes.

Then Becky began the authentication framework argument and Freen’s rotation stopped.

It was not a decision. She was aware of this even as it happened — aware that she had stopped and aware that she had not chosen to stop and aware that this was a problem she would need to address. She addressed it by telling herself she would restart the rotation in a moment and then not restarting it because Becky was speaking and the speaking was — she searched for the right operational term for what was happening and didn’t find one because there wasn’t one.

Becky’s voice in this room was different from her voice in the office. The office voice was precise and direct and moved fast. This one moved at the same pace but with more weight behind each word, like she was placing them rather than just saying them. She was walking the judge through the framework — foundation first, then structure, each element necessary for the one after it — and the construction of it was visible if you were paying the right kind of attention.

Freen was paying the right kind of attention.

She watched Becky turn back to her notes between points. The movement of her hand across the page — quick, certain, writing shorthand that only she could read. The way she tracked the defence counsel’s reaction without appearing to look at him. The particular quality of her listening when the judge spoke — active, not passive, like silence she was using rather than just occupying.

The judge asked a question.

Becky answered in two sentences. Didn’t pause. Didn’t look at her notes. The answer was clean and direct and when she finished the judge wrote something down and the quality of his attention changed slightly, which meant the argument had landed.

Freen watched her move on.

She became aware, at some point during this, that the man in the dark jacket had moved. Slightly — shifted in his seat, recrossed his legs. She caught it in her peripheral vision and it pulled her attention back to the gallery and she did the rotation properly this time, all of it, entry to witness door to public entrance to gallery and back. Thirty seconds. Then she looked back at the lawyers’ table.

She allowed herself that much and told herself it was operational.

It was not entirely operational.

—

Becky noticed on the third time.

She was mid-argument — the authentication chain for exhibits seven through twelve, a section she had prepared extensively because it was where the defence was most likely to push — and her peripheral awareness caught the direction of Freen’s gaze for the third time in twenty minutes.

Not toward the lawyers’ table. Not toward the judge. Toward the gallery.

She was too professional to look. She finished her point and sat and opened her notebook and wrote two words — *certification, foundation* — and underlined them while she processed what she had seen.

Freen was supposed to be watching her. That was the stated purpose of bringing a junior associate to a hearing — observe, learn, take notes on how a senior conducts herself in court. Standard practice. Becky had done it herself as a junior, had sat in the gallery of courtrooms and watched the senior advocates she worked under and learned more in three hours of observation than she had in three weeks of reading.

Freen was not watching her.

Freen was watching the gallery. Specifically a man two rows ahead of her on the right side that Becky had never paid particular attention to. She tried to recall him now without looking — dark jacket, fifties, ordinary. She had registered him the way she registered everything in a room she walked into. Background. Not relevant.

She added him to the folder she had been building since day one.

Defence counsel stood to respond and Becky listened completely, which was the only way she knew how to listen. She noted the two strong points he made — he was good, she had always known he was good — and when he finished she stood and addressed both of them directly and watched the judge’s expression shift incrementally in the way that told her it had worked.

She sat.

Good, Heng said quietly beside her.

She nodded and made another note and did not look at the gallery.

—

The corridor afterward was emptying when Becky fell into step beside Freen. She had been working out exactly how to ask this question since the recess and had decided that the direct approach was the only one worth taking with someone who deflected everything indirect without appearing to notice it was happening.

“What were you looking at,” she said.

Freen glanced at her. The open expression. The unhurried eyes. “The hearing.”

“You were looking at the gallery.”

“I was taking in the room.” Even. Unbothered. “You said I should watch everything.”

“I said you should watch me.”

“I watched you,” Freen said. “And the room.”

Becky stopped walking.

Freen stopped a half-step later and turned. They were in the middle of the corridor and the lawyers and clerks and observers moved around them without interest, the afternoon business of the courthouse continuing on all sides.

“What were you looking at,” Becky said again. Quieter this time. The voice she used when she wanted an answer rather than a response.

Freen looked at her directly. The look that didn’t flinch and didn’t perform itself. It simply was, steady and complete, and it gave nothing away and took nothing back.

“Everything,” Freen said.

The word sat between them in the corridor noise.

Becky held the look. She was good at holding things — silences, arguments, the specific discomfort of a moment that wasn’t resolving the way it was supposed to. She held this one and waited for more because there was always more if you waited long enough.

Freen gave her nothing more.

“Wrong answer,” Becky said. “You should have been watching me.”

Something moved in Freen’s expression. Brief. There and gone before Becky could read it completely.

“I was,” Freen said.

Two words. Quiet. Carrying more weight than two words had any business carrying in a courthouse corridor on a Thursday afternoon.

Becky looked at her for one more moment. The folder in her head was open. New pages adding themselves without her permission — the direction of Freen’s gaze during the hearing, the three seconds of focused attention on the man in the dark jacket, the way she had moved in this building like someone who had already mapped it before she arrived.

She turned and walked away.

She did not look back.

She was aware, without turning, that Freen’s eyes were on her until she pushed through the stairwell door. She was aware of it the way she was aware of most things involving Freen — without choosing to be, without being able to stop.

The stairwell was cool and quiet and she stood in it for a moment before she started down.

The folder was getting full. She needed to talk to Charlotte. Not yet — not until she had enough that Charlotte couldn’t deflect with something reasonable and reassuring that turned out, upon reflection, to explain nothing.

But soon.

She started down the stairs.

—

Behind her in the corridor Freen stood for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.

The man in the dark jacket had left the gallery eight minutes before the hearing ended. She had timed it. He had taken the side corridor rather than the main exit — four minutes longer — and she had tracked his exit in her peripheral vision without appearing to and he had not looked back once which was either because he was confident he wasn’t being watched or because he was very good.

She would find out which.

She had a face to run tonight and a report to write to Engfa and the three pages of legal terminology from the hearing that she still didn’t fully understand and a list of questions she couldn’t ask Becky without raising exactly the kind of suspicion she was trying not to raise.

She also had two words sitting in her chest in a way that was inconvenient.

I was.

She put her notebook in her bag and walked toward the stairwell door and pushed through it and started down.

Four flights below, she could hear Becky’s footsteps already at the bottom.

She went after her.