Chapter 11

It started with the pen.

Freen was at her desk. She had notes to draft — a summary of the hearing yesterday, written in plain language so she could actually understand it when she read it back, plus a threat assessment update for Nam that she had been putting off since morning because the threat assessment required concentration and concentration required not being distracted and she was distracted.

She was distracted by Becky’s hands.

It had started, as she said, with the pen. Becky was at her desk on the other side of the glass, door open the way she had been leaving it, working through a stack of documents that had arrived that morning from the court registry. She held her pen loosely. Not the way people held pens when they were writing — gripped tight, knuckle-white, bearing down. Loosely. Like it was just resting there and might do something useful if called upon. She turned pages with two fingers, quick and light, the motion of someone whose eyes were already on the next page before the current one had fully turned.

Freen noticed this.

She went back to her notes.

She wrote two sentences. Read them back. They were fine. She wrote a third.

Becky tapped the desk.

Three taps, slow, spread out. The thinking tap. Freen had learned this in three days of sitting outside that office — one tap meant she was writing something in her head before she wrote it on the page. Two taps meant she had found something in the document that she didn’t like. Three slow taps meant she was turning something over. Working it out.

Freen looked up.

She told herself she was checking the office. Routine awareness. She did this regularly — looked up, scanned the space, noted who was where, went back to work. It was operational habit and it had nothing to do with the fact that Becky was tapping the desk with three slow taps and Freen had started to know what that meant.

Becky turned a page. Two fingers. Quick.

She made a note in the margin — Freen could see the movement of the pen from this angle even if she couldn’t read what it said. Short note. One line. Then she went back to reading and the pen went back to its loose resting position between her fingers.

Freen looked at her own notes.

She had written half a sentence since the tapping started.

—

The office that morning was quieter than usual. Noey was at a client meeting off-site. Heng was at the court registry collecting the documents Becky was now working through. Two of the other associates were in a conference room on the other side of the glass with the blinds drawn, working on something unrelated to the Viroj case. The main office had the particular quality of quiet that came when most of the usual noise had gone somewhere else.

Freen had no excuse for being distracted. There was nothing else demanding her attention. The office was quiet and settled and she had notes to draft and a threat assessment to send and the only thing preventing her from doing either of these things was the view through the glass partition.

She drafted a sentence. It was a good sentence. She moved to the next one.

Becky set down her pen.

She reached up and tucked a loose piece of hair behind her ear with the back of her hand — not her fingers, the back of her hand, a quick automatic gesture she clearly did without thinking — and then picked the pen back up and kept reading.

Freen looked at her notes.

The sentence she had just drafted was good. She read it again. It was still good. She wrote the next one.

She had been in places that required complete attention — field positions where losing focus for thirty seconds had real consequences, surveillance operations where the smallest distraction meant missing something that couldn’t be recovered. She had developed her attention over eight years into something she could point at a problem and hold there for as long as required.

She could not currently point it at her notes and hold it there.

She could point it at Becky’s hands without any effort at all.

This was not useful information. She filed it in the same place she had been filing the other not-useful information — the four seconds on the first morning, the photographs she had turned face down, the two words in the courthouse corridor yesterday. There was a growing collection of not-useful information and she was managing it the same way she managed things in the field that she couldn’t act on immediately. Filed. Set aside. Not examined.

She went back to her notes.

—

Becky found something she didn’t like.

Two taps. Freen didn’t look up. She knew what two taps meant and looking up would not help with the notes she was supposed to be drafting and she was not going to look up.

She heard Becky reach for a different document. The sound of a folder being opened. Pages turning — faster than the two-finger turn, this was a search, looking for something specific. Then stopping. A pause.

Then the single tap. She had found it. She was writing it in her head.

Freen looked up.

Becky was leaning forward slightly, pen moving now — real writing, not margin notes, a full line of something across a fresh page in her notebook. Her other hand was flat on the document she had found, holding the place, two fingers spread across the page the way you held something you didn’t want to lose. The writing hand moved fast. She wrote the way she argued — like her mind was already at the end of the sentence and her hand was catching up.

She finished writing. Looked at what she’d written. Tapped once more, lighter.

Then she sat back and reached for her coffee and looked through the glass partition at Freen.

Freen looked at her notes.

Her notes had four sentences on them. She had been sitting here for forty minutes. Four sentences in forty minutes was not a pace that was going to get the threat assessment to Nam at any point today.

She picked up her pen.

She wrote a fifth sentence.

—

Her phone buzzed on the desk beside her. She turned it over.

Nam.

threat assessment update?? it’s been two days

Freen looked at the message. She looked at her notes — four sentences and a fifth that she had started and not finished. She looked at the glass partition.

Becky had gone back to the document stack. She was working through them more quickly now, the thing she had been stuck on apparently resolved. Pages turning with two fingers. Pen loose. Occasionally writing something in the margin, a quick short note, and moving on.

Her left hand was resting on the desk beside the documents. Not doing anything. Just resting there, relaxed, the way hands rested when the rest of the person was occupied elsewhere.

Freen looked at it for a moment longer than she should have.

Then she looked at Nam’s message.

working on it, she typed back.

Three dots appeared immediately. Then: you’ve been working on it since yesterday morning

still working on it

freen

nam

A pause. Then: is everything okay over there

Freen looked at the glass partition. Becky had turned another page. Two fingers. Quick. Like her mind was always ahead of the text.

fine, she typed. send you the update tonight.

She put the phone face down.

She picked up her pen.

She had catalogued exit routes in seven languages across four countries. She had memorised faces from surveillance photographs taken at distance, in bad light, from angles that made it hard to be certain of anything. She had read terrain maps in complete darkness by touch alone, her fingers finding the contour lines, building the picture without seeing it.

She could not stop watching Becky’s hands.

This was a problem. She was aware it was a problem. She was also aware that being aware of it was not the same as being able to do anything about it, which was a new experience. Problems she was aware of were problems she could address. This one sat in a category she didn’t have a name for — somewhere between operational distraction and something she wasn’t going to examine more closely than that.

She looked at her notes.

Four sentences. Plus the fifth she hadn’t finished.

She finished the fifth. Wrote a sixth. A seventh. She made herself keep going, made herself stay on the page, made herself not look up at the glass partition or track the sound of pages turning or count the taps when they came.

She managed this for eleven minutes.

Then Becky stood up from her desk and stretched — arms up, a brief reach, nothing dramatic — and the movement caught Freen’s eye before she had decided to look and by the time she had decided not to look she was already looking.

Becky rolled her shoulders. Picked up her coffee. Looked at the glass and found Freen looking back at her.

A beat.

Becky raised an eyebrow. The expression that meant what.

Freen looked at her notes.

“Nothing,” she said, though Becky hadn’t asked out loud.

From inside the office, through the glass, she heard something that might have been a quiet sound. She did not look up to find out what kind of sound it was.

She picked up her pen.

She wrote an eighth sentence.

The threat assessment was going to be very late.