Love Me In The Dark

Episode4:The Grey Sedan

The grey sedan found me on a Wednesday. I said found, not followed, because that's how it felt. Like something that had known where I was going before I did.

Three blocks from my apartment. The walk from the underground station, which I did on autopilot most evenings, the kind of route your feet take while your brain is doing something else entirely. I was thinking about the Cirrus Holdings timeline. About a number that hadn't been sitting right for two days and that I hadn't yet found the angle to approach directly. I was not, in other words, thinking about the street.

Then I took my second turn.

Nobody turned my second turn. It's not a route anyone took unless they lived in the building at the dead end of it, and only three families did. None of them owned a grey sedan. The turn added four unnecessary minutes to any reasonable journey and terminated at a blocked loading bay that had an ‘Out of Service’ notice on it since the previous October.

The sedan made the turn.

I didn’t change my pace. Changing pace would signal that you've noticed, and the moment they know you're alert is the moment the dynamic shifts. Not in your favour.

Don't change your pace. And, don't look back. Give the nervous system something mechanical to do so it doesn't spend its energy on panic. Count. Breathe. Observe.

I observed.

The sedan crawled. Three car-lengths behind, unhurried, making absolutely no attempt to close the distance or to seem like anything other than what it was. And, the not hiding, the openness of it, was the most frightening element.They weren't following me to see where I went. They were following me to make sure I knew I was being followed.

My phone buzzed with an incoming call from Laurence Ray, my deputy editor at The Median.

“Selene,” he said without preamble, his voice brisk. “Where are you with the Vael story? Any other specific corporate entities we should be watching?”

Laurence had developed this habit, lately. Always wanting the precise names of companies or individuals early, before I’d even filed a draft. I had always assumed it was editorial caution, his way of getting ahead of legal exposure.

“Still developing,” I said, carefully. “I’ll let you know when I have something solid.”

“Make sure you do,” he replied. “The sooner I know the players, the better I can protect the piece.”

I ended the call, frowning. I was starting to wonder if Laurence’s recent request for specific corporate names was truly for editorial caution.

I soon reverted my mind to my surroundings and called Damien before I fully decided to. My thumb found his number, while my brain was still debating whether this warranted a call or whether I was overreacting. I called, anyway.

He picked up on the second ring.

"Sedan," I said. No register of alarm, just information. "Grey. Three lengths back. I've made two turns that don't go anywhere and it's made both of them. They're not hiding it."

On the other end, I heard movement immediately. A chair. Keys lifted from a hard surface. A door.

"Keep your exact pace," he said. " Go to the coffee shop on Reade and Seventh. The green awning. Ten minutes."

He was there in eight.

I don't know why that still stands out to me. But it meant he moved faster than he'd promised he would, which meant he was more concerned than his voice had indicated.

Damian came through the back entrance, not the street door. He checked the place out like a man looking for a free table, found me at the window seat without the sweep landing on me directly. He took the seat opposite me and the plausible picture was that of two people meeting for coffee. Which we were, technically.

The waiter came. We ordered. Neither of us said anything until he moved three tables away.

"Still out there?" he asked. Very quietly.

"Gone when I turned onto Reade." I had both hands around my cup, not because I was cold. Because having something to hold onto is useful when the alternative is letting your hands exist unsupported. "Gone means parked. They know this area. They know which turns lead where."

He did the jaw thing. Again. I'd catalogued it by now. "They know we're working together," he said. "Someone inside my building has been monitoring. I suspect three people with both the access and a reasonable reason."

"Give me the names."

"Not yet." He said it without apology. "I need to be more certain before I say them out loud."

I didn't entirely like it, but I accepted it.

"You shouldn't go home tonight," he said. He looked at me with full, undeflecting attention that I'd stopped finding unsettling around night three. "A hotel. I can arrange something discreet, somewhere they won't know to look."

"I'm going home."

"Selene…"

"I'm going home." I said it the way I say things I’ve already decided. "A hotel room tells them they've rattled me. It removes me from my workspace. It hands them a psychological advantage I'm not willing to give." I paused. "And tomorrow I'm going to find out which of your three names it is, because that is more useful than hiding."

He tilted his head slightly, studying me in silence. Underneath the frustration, though, there appeared something else. Something warmer and considerably less managed, sitting just below the surface of the professional composure like a signal on a frequency I was picking up without meaning to.

He didn't argue, I took note. Another man would’ve pushed.

"All right," he said at last. "You're right that careful doesn't break a story." A beat. "I would still prefer you to be alive to write this one."

He walked me home. I guess he didn’t want to consider the alternative of leaving me to walk three blocks at eleven PM with a recently deployed surveillance vehicle somewhere in the vicinity. I could have objected. But, I chose not to.

At my building, I expected him to stop at the street door. He didn't. He came up, checked every space, which in a one-bedroom flat sounds less thorough than it was. Well, he checked inside the wardrobe and behind the bathroom door and the fire escape at the kitchen end. There was also the window in the bathroom that had been sticking since March, which I’d been meaning to have fixed in March and all of April and the first two weeks of May. He checked it with the focused efficiency of someone for whom this was not unusual activity, which raised again, the curious question of what, exactly, he’d been before he became what he was now.

He did all of this without a word.

At the door, while leaving, he stopped. Hand on the frame, he turned.

"Lock with chain and bolt," he said.

Five words. Specific!

I don't know why those words sounded the way they did. I'd been told to lock my door before. I'd locked my door, by my own volition, approximately every night of my adult life without anyone needing to mention it. But, the fact that it was the thing he chose to say at the threshold of leaving, the last thing he wanted confirmed before he left. That wasn’t filed under professional advice.

"I will," I said.

He left. I listened to his footsteps on the stairs. Unhurried, even, disappearing floor by floor. And then the street door below, opening and closing. Then nothing. The atmosphere of an apartment at eleven-thirty at night, which sounds completely different after that particular kind of evening than it does on a normal one.

I locked with chain and bolt.

Then I stood in the dark hallway with my back against the door. Not for any reason I can defend logically. Just…stood there. In the dark. For what was probably two minutes but felt longer, listening to the building settle around me.

"I am completely in control of what is happening," I said. Out loud. To the hallway, to nobody. To myself in the specific way of a person who’s not entirely convinced by her own statement but feels saying it aloud might help. "Completely in control."

Finally, I went to bed. I didn't sleep, or not quickly. I lay in the dark listening to the street below with ears that were now calibrated differently than they'd been forty-eight hours ago. They were now specifically tuned for the sound of an engine that starts and doesn't move, that idles in one position for longer than any legitimate parking scenario required. Buses. Voices, fragmentary, from somewhere down the block. A bottle, somewhere, breaking. The ordinary textures of a city at midnight, none of which were the sedan, all of which I was monitoring for.

At three in the morning my phone screen lit up.

Unknown number. Encrypted. Six words.

YOUR EDITOR HAS BEEN CONTACTED. CAREFUL.

I stared at it until the screen went dark. Then I lay in the dark for a moment longer, thinking. After some minutes, I jumped up, because lying in the dark thinking is something I’m genuinely very bad at. I tend to think faster when I'm upright and moving. So, I made tea, and sat at my desk, and opened my notebook to a fresh page.

I wrote Conrad Hale at the top. I wrote everything I knew about him beneath it, which took three and a half pages. Then I started on the fourth page with the timeline: the Cirrus Holdings incorporation date, the sequence of filings, the Halcyon project date, Hale's appointment as COO. I worked through the timeline methodically, the way I work through every timeline, looking for the place where the sequence doesn't quite…

I stopped.

Wrote something.

Stared at it.

The incorporation date was wrong.

Not wrong as in inaccurate. Wrong as in…out of sequence. The way a piece of furniture is wrong in a room when it's been there so long you've stopped seeing it, and then one day the light hits it differently and you think: that doesn't go there. That has never gone there.

I drew a box around it. Deliberate. The kind of box I draw when a fact is sitting in the wrong place and I can't yet see where the right place is.

Then, I closed the notebook. Because 3.45 in the morning is not, in my experience, the right time to pull a thread that might unravel an entire architecture. That’s the time when your pattern recognition is degraded and you are most likely to see shapes that aren't there or miss the ones that are.

I would look at it later. With coffee. And a full night's sleep behind me.

I checked the street from my window before going back to bed. No sedan with an idling engine. The street was empty, the way streets are empty in the small hours.

I went back to bed, thinking about the six words on my phone. I thought about what it meant. What kind of person monitors an editor's communications and sends an encrypted line to a journalist they've never identified themselves to? I thought about what careful means as the closing word of a warning. Whether it's advice or a threat or…

The notebook sat on my desk with the box drawn around the wrong date.

The phone was on my nightstand with the message on it.

My mind ran circle on the immediate action to take. But I knew I must follow those things carefully, in the right order, with the right preparation.

The question, which I was still turning over when I finally fell asleep, sometime after five, was not whether I could do those things.

It was whether I had enough time.