Episodul 156 · The Other Branch

Krista put the pencil down beside the drawing, very precisely, as if it might go off.

— I gave you the location, she said. Every part of it was accurate.

— Except the part about the slab.

— Except that part.

Her voice had gone polite, which was how Soles knew she was frightened. When Krista was angry she asked questions. When she was frightened she started organizing the room, and her voice went smooth and correct, like a letter to someone who could ruin her.

Tarn waited. He was good at it. He had the photograph, the earpiece and all morning.

Soles ran through it the way he ran through a fault with three possible causes. He could deny it, but the photograph was on the table, and denying a photograph only told the man what kind of people he was dealing with. He could let Krista carry it, and then her name would sit in that folder for good with a word next to it, and Krista had built her whole life around not being the kind of person other people could write things next to. Or he could give the man a true thing heavy enough to make the lie look like what it had really been.

The third would cost more than the photographs were worth. He knew that before he opened his mouth.

— It didn’t open for your man, Soles said, because it doesn’t open for anyone ordinary.

Tarn’s eyes came off Krista.

— It opened for us. For people like us. Like Varren.

For a moment nobody at the table moved. The jaw under the earpiece moved twice.

— Like you, Tarn said.

— Like us.

— And she told us it was damaged because?

— Because I didn’t want your men in there with a crowbar, Krista said. That part was true as well.

And now you can’t go in without us. That’s what she wanted yesterday. I’ve just bought it for her with the truth.

It should have felt like a win. It felt like handing over a key and watching the other man put it on his own ring.

Tarn wrote something in his notebook, one line, and underlined it. Pleasure did not come into it. He had the face of a man who had just been told the price of something he had already decided to buy.

— Show us, he said.

— Not today. Not with a crowbar.

— Then when?

— When you’ve told us something we didn’t know.

Soles leaned back, as far as the hip allowed.

— You’ve had the water from us. Now the slab. Two true things. Give us one.

Tarn considered him. Behind him the younger man had stopped writing.

— Ask, Tarn said.

— The man who came through my kitchen wall yesterday.

That landed differently. The younger agent’s hand went to his collar, where a flat black lens was clipped facing the table, and then away again.

— Didn’t knock, Soles said. Knew Varren. Said he’d trained him. The army, then something special.

— What did he want?

— The blade.

— And?

— No.

— Through the wall, Maxim added. I bolted the door afterward. Don’t ask me why.

— He said he’d be there when I died, Soles said. To take it.

Tarn’s eyes went to Soles’s jacket and stayed there. Soles kept his hand on the table.

— Can you describe him?

— His clothes, Tesa said. His face is harder. You look at it and then you can’t.

Tarn lowered his eyes and paused. When he raised them, Soles suspected that the answer had arrived through the small pale piece in his ear.

— These men belonged to a parallel branch, he said.

— Parallel to yours?

— Same military command. Different assignments. We study sites like this one. They handle field operations. Intervention. Clearing sites.

Clearing sites. Soles put the words away somewhere he would be able to find them again.

— Clearing people out, Tesa asked, or clearing people away?

— That depends on the operation.

She waited. He gave her nothing else.

— Are they working for you now? Krista asked.

— The men you describe are listed as missing in action. Or gone rogue.

— Which is that one?

— We haven’t identified him.

— You didn’t ask what he looked like until after you’d asked about the blade, Soles said.

— Both matter.

— To different people?

Tarn took his hand off the folder. There was almost a smile in it.

— If you want the full account, he said, you may have to work for the state.

Maxim turned to Soles.

— Do you get paid before or after they tell you what the job is?

— After you find out you can’t leave, Soles said.

— Ah. Benefits.

— Nobody has offered you a position, the younger agent said.

— That’s a relief, Maxim said. I’d hate to fail the interview sitting down.

The almost-smile went away. The younger agent opened his notebook to a fresh page, drew a line under what they had said about the Hunter, and below it, in a careful hand, wrote their names.

Soles watched the pen move. Yesterday they had wanted a location. This morning they had wanted an account. Now they wanted them, and he had just told them why they should.

One true thing. That’s all it took to turn us from witnesses into equipment.

He pulled the photographs back toward him because it was something to do with his hand.

— The pictures from before, he said. Before I went in. With the times.

The younger agent fetched another envelope. Krista laid the pictures out in order, using the edge of the basin as her fixed point, because everything else in the room had either moved or been moved by Soles. The thread was there in all of them, faint against the white wall, and in the ones with the measuring rule it had crossed another black mark between one morning and the next. They had known it was growing. Seeing the marks in a row made it worse, the way a gauge is worse than a feeling.

Beyond the pillar in the corridor photograph, tape crossed the floor well short of the washroom door.

— That’s where someone stopped, Soles said.

— A man couldn’t continue. We brought him out.

— I want to talk to him.

— He’s being examined.

— So was I. You still asked me questions.

Tarn held his eyes a moment longer. Then he touched the earpiece, listened to whatever it told him, and stood.

— Five minutes. The medic decides when they’re up. And whatever he tells you, I hear first.

— Or what? Maxim asked.

— Or I write that down too.

On his way past, he tapped the younger man’s notebook, on the page with their names.