Five Fires (2)

A PHONE CALL- Unknown Location, 6:38 a.m.

He answers on the first ring.

"It's time," the voice says. Simple, unadorned. He knows this voice. He knows what it's time means from this voice because they have had this conversation in his head, in various forms, for the better part of a decade. "They're convening. Edinburgh. They need a neutral party and you're the only one with clearance from all five."

He is standing at a window. The city outside is waking up in the specific grey-blue light of very early morning, the moment before colour commits. He has been standing here for an hour. He has not been sleeping. He does not, precisely, sleep the way that requires a bed and a fixed location, he sleeps the way that long practice produces, in short segments, in places that are not usually beds, when the alternative is worse.

"How long?" he says.

"Roman's models give you sixty days before the degradation is structurally irreversible. After that," The voice stops. He knows what comes after. They both know what comes after. "Will you go?"

He looks at the window.

There is a restaurant on the Canongate in Edinburgh that opens on Sundays. He knows this restaurant with the specific granular knowledge of someone who has sat in it, three tables away, not at the corner, never at the corner, always positioned so that she would have to turn forty-five degrees and look past two other tables to see him, which she never does, more times than he has ever counted or will count. The owner is a woman named Fiona who saves the corner table every week because her regular customer has been coming in every Sunday for four years and always sits there and has never once had to ask.

He has watched this from three tables away. He has watched her drink her coffee and read things on her laptop and sometimes talk to Fiona and sometimes sit quietly and look out the window at the Canongate in the particular way she has of looking at things she finds interesting, which is not the passive way. The active way. The way that means she is, on some level, always working.

He has been three tables away for four years and she does not know he exists.

This is, he has decided, the correct arrangement. This is the arrangement that keeps her safe. This is the arrangement he chose eight years ago and has maintained and will maintain because the alternative is worse, and he has done the mathematics on the alternative enough times to be confident in that conclusion.

"I'll be in Edinburgh by morning," he says.

He ends the call.

He picks up his bag, always packed, has been packed continuously for seven years, an old habit from before the seven years that never became unhabitual. He does not look back at the window.

He does not let himself think about the restaurant. About the corner table. About the fact that the table has been empty for eleven Sundays now.

He picks up the bag and he goes.

SEBASTIEN- Edinburgh, 8:15 a.m.

He makes four calls.

Vienna answers on the second ring, Roman's voice, careful and controlled, carrying the specific flatness of a man who has been awake since before midnight and is not going to say so. I know, he says. I'll be there. Prague answers on the first ring, Joon-Ho, who sounds like he hasn't slept at all and is running the kind of brittle precision that comes from too many hours of trying to make something resolve that won't. Yes. One word. The word of someone who has already packed. Lisbon takes four attempts and Adaeze's voice when it comes is the most controlled of all of them, which tells him, because he knows Adaeze, exactly how bad it is. I'll be on the early flight, she says. We should talk about Florence before the others arrive. He says: Yes. We should.

The fourth number goes to voicemail. He leaves one sentence: We need to meet. All of us. Come to Edinburgh.

He puts the phone down.

It buzzes immediately. Unknown number, the same one from last night. He reads: I know where she goes when she's afraid. Don't make me regret this.

Underneath it, thirty seconds later: an address. A village on the Borders coast. A street. A postcode.

He looks at these two messages for a long time.

Someone has been here for three years. Someone knows her specifically enough to know where she goes when she's afraid, which is not the kind of thing that appears in intelligence files, it's the kind of thing you learn from being near someone across a long period of time, from watching them closely enough that you know which direction they move when things become too much.

He pulls on his coat. He looks at his desk drawer, the one he hasn't opened in six months. He opens it. The intelligence report is exactly where he left it. He picks it up. He reads probable conduit in black type for what is, counting the original reading, approximately the fortieth time.

He puts it in his coat pocket.

He looks around the office, the window, the Old Town, the castle that has stood there since before any of this was a concern and will likely stand there until after it's resolved one way or another. He thinks about the last time he saw her clearly. Not the dinner, not the green coat, not the goodnight that should have sounded like what it was. Further back. The conference in Edinburgh, eleven months ago. The presentation hall. Her at the podium, precise and unperformed, talking about momentum patterns in financial fraud, and him in the front row, and the specific, unrepeatable experience of sitting in that room and feeling his thinking sharpen. Not because of what she was saying, though what she was saying was worth hearing. Something else. Something he wrote off as the room, the quality of the presentation, his own concentration.

He understands it differently now.

He leaves the office. He takes the stairs. He walks out onto the close, the cold morning air immediate and sharp, Edinburgh being Edinburgh,  the kind of clean cold that doesn't apologize for itself.

He walks north.