I turn back to the monitors and keep myself busy.
It's two in the morning when the surveillance file pings.
The black sedan was returned at nine forty-seven tonight.
I'm at the desk with my third energy drink and the right monitor showing me the San Antonio Hertz return lot.
The man who brought the car back paid the contract in cash and walked out the front door at nine fifty-one.
I pull the lobby footage.
He's a big man. Six-three, six-four, two-twenty in dark clothes. Wide shoulders.
The kind of military bearing a man doesn't lose even when he tries.
He's wearing a baseball cap pulled low but I can see enough of his face to work with—clean shave, square jaw, a scar across the bridge of his nose that runs at an angle that says somebody hit him with something hard a long time ago.
I pause the footage. Zoom in and stare at him.
I know this type the way a hunter knows the shape of a deer behind brush.
The firm's people always have a tell.
Sometimes it's the watch. Sometimes it's the way they hold their off hand. This one—it's the scar and the bearing both.
He's a contractor. He worked for somebody before he worked for the firm, and that somebody trained him to stand still in ways civilians don't stand still.
I open one of the old back-channels.
I don't use these anymore. Haven't in years. Phantom doesn't know I still have access.
I feed the still frame in. Add a tag with the year I left the firm. Add another tag with the firm's name, which I haven't typed in close to a decade.
I wait three minutes. The hit comes back.
Curt Hartley.
I sit back in the chair. Iknowthat name.
Not the face. The face is older now, harder, scarred. But the name lives somewhere in the part of my head where I filed every man and woman whose roster I ever crossed paths with at the firm.
Hartley was a junior analyst when I was still on the inside.
A kid in his twenties, glasses, doughy.
The kind of analyst they put on the cold-file desk—the surveillance unit that watches ex-assets like me.
Names that were active once, then went quiet.
The cold-file desk doesn't run operations. They just keep eyes on the people the firm hasn't fully forgotten about.
He never worked an op. He read about ops. He sat in a windowless room and watched names get added and removed from the list of people the firm wanted kept track of without bothering.
I was on his desk for the last year before I left.
He never knew me, but I knew him. A decade later he's the man they sent.
That tells me one of two things.