He was there in thirteen minutes.
I know because I checked. It was a petty thing to notice and I noticed it anyway. He had said fifteen. He arrived in thirteen, which meant he had already been moving before the call ended, which meant some part of him had been ready, and I was not going to think too hard about what that meant because I had enough to think about already.
He came with two men I did not recognise, both of them carrying the very specific quality of stillness that belongs to people who have been trained to watch exits. Adrian spoke to them briefly in the corridor. One went to a position by the elevator. The other settled outside my door. Then Adrian came inside, looked at the room, looked at the envelope on the desk, and looked at me.
“You’re on the wrong floor,” he said. “T
