CLOSING THE DISTANCE
I didn't move from the chair.
Alex's hand was tight around mine and his eyes were on the door and the east wing had taken on that particular quality of held breath that it got when something was approaching it from outside. I listened. The corridor beyond the door was quiet — no footsteps, no keypad, no heels on marble. Just the specific silence of a space that has registered a presence and is waiting to see what the presence does next.
Then nothing.
Thirty seconds of nothing and then the east wing settled back into itself and whatever I had felt — whatever had made the air change — was gone.
Alex's hand loosened around mine.
"Harmon," he said. Not a question. The flat identification of someone who had spent long enough in this wing to know the difference between
