Silent Empire

Eyes

The camera is behind the smoke detector.

I found it on the second morning, standing on the bathroom counter in my socks, because something about the angle of the little white disc had been bothering me since I woke up. I unscrew it with a butter knife — the only tool available in a kitchen stocked with everything except the thing I need — and there it is. Small. Precise. The lens is no bigger than a pencil tip.

Not a building camera.

Those are in the corridors, the lobby, the elevator. I have cataloged every one. This camera is different — newer model, a wireless transmitter, the kind that sends a live feed rather than recording to a local drive.

Someone is watching this room in real time.

I put the smoke detector back.

I do not touch the camera.

I step off the counter and I wash my hands and I look at myself in the mirror — at the woman who shook Daniel Stamp's hand twelve hours ago and agreed to thirty days of this — and I make a decision. If he wants to watch me find his camera and react, I will not give him the reaction. I will give him nothing he can read.

I go to the kitchen and I make coffee and I drink it standing at the window with the city spread below and my face completely still.

Let him watch that.

I spent the morning learning about buildings. Not aggressively — I walk slowly, like a woman with nowhere to be, which is accurate. The lobby staff know my name. Every one of them. The concierge, the two security men by the door, the woman at the package desk who smiles at me with the particular warmth of someone following instructions to smile warmly.

"Good morning, Miss Arthur."

"Good morning."

"Can I help you with anything, Miss Arthur?"

"Just looking around. Thank you."

Looking around. As if I am a tourist in the country of his empire.

I take the elevator to the fortieth floor because my card works there. It opens onto a corridor of glass-walled offices, empty on a Saturday, the kind of spaces that exist to demonstrate that important things happen inside them. I walk slowly. I look at everything. I find nothing I was not meant to find, which tells me everything on this floor is exactly what it appears to be.

I go higher.

Forty-two. The card works. An archive floor — rows of secure terminals, locked cabinets, a room at the end with a biometric reader. I note it and keep walking.

Forty-three.

The elevator opens and I step out, and the corridor is different here. Warmer. Residential, almost, with the specific quiet of spaces that are occupied rather than used. Four doors. All closed. One at the far end with a thin strip of light underneath it.

I stop.

The light moves. The particular flicker of a screen — a laptop, maybe, or a monitor.

Someone is in that room.

I take three steps toward it.

"Miss Arthur."

I turn around.

Daniel is behind me. Not from the elevator — from the stairwell door at the other end of the corridor, still holding the handle, looking at me with those gray eyes that have the quality of surveillance equipment. Patient. Recording.

"This floor isn't part of your access," he says.

"My card worked."

"I know."

I look at him. "You let me up here."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He releases the stairwell door. It closes quietly behind him. He walks toward me — unhurried, each step deliberate — and he stops four feet away, and he looks at me with an expression that gives away nothing and somehow communicates everything.

"Because I wanted to see which door you'd walk toward," he says.

I turn and look at the door with the light underneath it.

I turn back.

"Whose room is that?" I ask.

"No one you need to worry about."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agrees. "It isn't."

We stand in the corridor of the forty-third floor and the city exists outside the window at the end and the door with the light underneath it exists at the other end, and I am in the middle of both with a man who has just told me — very precisely, very deliberately — that there is someone in this building he does not want me to find.

"The camera in my bathroom," I say.

Something in his jaw.

"It's not the building," I say. "Different model. Wireless transmitter."

He says nothing.

"You're watching me live," I say. "Not recorded. Live."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He looks at me for a long moment. The kind of look that takes inventory.

"Because someone else was already watching you," he says. "Before I was. And their camera was in your bedroom."

My stomach drops.

"I replaced it," he says. "Bathroom only. You're aware of it now, which means you can choose your space accordingly."

I stared at him. "Someone put a camera in my apartment. Before I moved in."

"Before you move in," he confirms.

"Who?"

He holds my gaze. The light from the city window falls across half his face and the other half is in shadow, and he looks, for one unguarded second, like a man who is genuinely concerned and has no idea what to do with that.

"That," he says quietly, "is what I am trying to find out."

He gestures toward the elevator. Our conversation — apparently — is finished. I walked past him. I press the call button. I wait.

"Daniel."

He stops.

It is the first time I have used his name. I feel it land between us like something physical.

"The door at the end of the corridor," I say. "The light underneath it." I looked at him. "It moved when we were talking. Someone in that room turned off their screen when they heard our voices."

He does not react. He does not blink. He does not look at the door.

But his hand, at his side, closes slowly into a fist.

The elevator opens. I step in.

The doors close on his face.

On the forty-third floor, in a room with the light now off, someone had just learned that I had noticed things.

I wonder if that is going to help me or get me killed.