I sat in the chair in the Paris apartment with the dead feed on my phone screen and the coffee gone cold in my hand and felt the cold thing in my chest become something sharper and more specific.
Someone had been in my private office.
Someone who moved like a professional. Someone who could open a lock in forty seconds and sweep a room for surveillance before starting work and knew, or had been told, that there were documents worth finding in the house. Someone whose hands moved in a way I recognized from somewhere I could not place.
Someone who had known about the camera and had made sure I would know they knew.
That last part was deliberate. That was a message. That was a person standing in my office at four in the morning looking into a lens they had just found and making the choice
