Chapter 113: Nine A.M.

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 113: Nine A.M.

The service entrance was on the east side and it faced a loading bay, and at 8:51 there was a laundry truck in the bay that had no business being there on a Tuesday.

"That's not ours," Thessaly said.

"No."

"Then somebody else got the same information."

Cole watched it from across the lot. Two men in the cab. Neither of them had got out, and neither of them had looked at the building once in the four minutes he'd been watching, which is a thing you only manage if you are being extremely careful not to.

"Corvin," Dana said.

"Corvin was removed from operational authority on Friday." Cole didn't move. "That's what she told me."

"Do you believe her?"

"Yeah, actually."

"Then who?"

"A man who got removed from operational authority on Friday and found out about it yesterday morning," Cole said, "and who has exactly one thing left worth spending."

He'd planned for a clean lift. Two escorts, no suppression, ninety seconds of corridor and a van.

He hadn't planned for a race.

"New plan," he said.

"That was the new plan," Marek said. "That was already the new plan."

"Newer plan." Cole was already moving. "Thessaly, van stays. Dana, you're on the bay — if that truck moves, I want to know before it finishes moving. Marek, with me. Vesper, service door, and if it's already open when you get there, don't go through it."

"Why not?"

"Because it should be locked, and if somebody's been kind enough to unlock it, I'd like to know who before we accept the favour."

The door was locked.

That was the first thing that went right all morning.

Vesper had it in nineteen seconds with something she'd never explained the origin of and Cole had long since stopped asking about, and then they were in a corridor that smelled like floor polish and disinfectant, and it was 8:56.

Nobody had been kind. Nobody had propped anything.

Cole found that reassuring in a way he did not have time to examine.

They met the escorts at 8:58 at the junction of two corridors, which was two minutes early and forty feet further along than the plan had allowed for, because the escorts had also seen the laundry truck and had decided to move their patient ahead of schedule.

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Dov Vossberg was in a wheelchair with a blanket over his knees and no restraints on him at all, which told Cole exactly how little anyone in this building thought he was capable of.

He was humming.

"Sir, you need to step—"

"I know."

The nearer escort got a hand to his belt and Cole read him in a quarter of a second — twenty-eight, nine months in the job, mortgage, dog, a Conviction built around I am not the kind of man who freezes — and did nothing about any of it, because the man was doing his job and the job was not the problem.

"I'm not going to fight you," Cole said. "There's a truck in the loading bay with two men in it who aren't Ministry, and they're here for him, and in about ninety seconds you're going to be standing between them and a patient in a wheelchair with no restraints."

"That's not—"

"You've seen the truck. You moved him two minutes early. You already know."

The escort's jaw worked.

"That doesn't mean I hand him to you."

"No," Cole agreed. "It means you've got about sixty seconds to decide which of the two options in this corridor you'd rather explain in a report."

Dov stopped humming.

Everyone looked at him.

He was looking at Cole with an expression that was not confusion and was not fear and was, unmistakably, patience — the look of somebody who has been waiting in a room while other people work something out.

"They're in the bay," he said.

His voice was thin and unused. It was in English this time.

"Dov—" Trina had come up behind Vesper, because of course she had, because nobody had successfully told her to stay in the van and nobody had genuinely expected to. "Dov, it's me—"

"I know. Hello." He didn't take his eyes off Cole. "There are two of them and one has a suppression collar in a bag and it isn't going to work. I'd like you to know that before you decide anything, because I think you're deciding based on how much danger I'm in, and I'm not in very much."

The escort had gone extremely pale.

"How long have you been able to talk," he said.

Dov thought about it.

"Six weeks," he said. "You're all quite loud."

The truck moved at 9:01.

Dana said something clipped into the radio and Thessaly said something back, and then the far end of the corridor opened and two men came through it fast, and one of them did have a bag.

Cole met them in the middle.

He did not use Verdict. He did not open Foresight. He'd made that decision on the drive over — no reading, no correcting, nothing that required the thing in his neck to be invited into a building with a hole in a wheelchair thirty feet away.

So he did it with his hands, and it was worse to watch.

The first one he took off his feet entirely, and the sound the wall made was structural. The second got the bag open, got the collar half out, and Cole broke his forearm against the doorframe with a deliberation that was much closer to carpentry than to fighting.

Eleven seconds.

The escort had not drawn his weapon. He was standing in front of the wheelchair with both arms out — not at Cole. At the corridor. Between two unconscious men and a patient.

"Okay," he said, hoarse. "Okay. That's — okay."

They didn't take Dov.

That was the thing Cole hadn't expected of himself, and he'd think about it for a long time afterward.

"Put him back," he said.

"What?" Trina's voice cracked. "You said—"

"I said I'd come back for him. I did." Cole was breathing hard. "And then he told me he's not in much danger, and he's been talking for six weeks and choosing not to, and if I put him in a van right now I'm making the same call everybody in this building has made about him since February, which is that he's a thing to be moved."

He turned to the chair.

"Dov. Do you want to come with us?"

Dov Vossberg looked up at him for a long moment.

"Not yet," he said. "I'd like to see where they take me. I've been very curious about it."

"That's insane," Marek said.

"Yes," Dov agreed, pleasantly.

They left him in the corridor with an escort who had just decided something about his own career, and two men on the floor, and his sister crying with both hands over her mouth, and a Ministry transfer scheduled for nine that was now going to happen at ten with a great deal more paperwork.

At the service door, Dov said one more thing.

Cole was the only one close enough to hear it, and it was in the other language again, and he understood it completely, and he did not tell anybody what it was for eleven days.

[End of Chapter 113]