The Net fired at 7:43 PM in the produce aisle.
Ethan had the jar of salsa in one hand and was reading the heat index on the back label because Emma had a specific preference for the medium-spicy range that he had never quite memorized and kept getting wrong. The store was Thursday-evening busy. The overhead lighting did what grocery store lighting did — pleasant, thorough, flattening everything below it into the same quality of illumination. Emma was in the pasta aisle behind him.
The Net fired.
Not the medium-low false-positive hum that had been running for two weeks. Not the ambient elevated baseline of the emotional-compromise window. Something with direction and weight — a signal that had a vector the same way the building collapse had had a vector, pointing him toward a specific quadrant of the city with the urgency of a thing that was not hypothetical.
He stood with the salsa jar in his hand.
The direction was approximately northwest. Three miles. The Board ran the northwest vector against the operational map it maintained of Andersen's schedule, and the map returned: Mid-Wilshire precinct, where she had been working late on a restructuring proposal that Grey had mentioned in a memo forty-eight hours ago. He had logged the memo. He had filed it. He had not acted on it because the Net had been giving false positives on everything for two weeks and acting on every elevation would make him operationally useless.
This was not a false positive.
He could not say with certainty how he knew the difference. The false positives had been diffuse, without direction, flooding the baseline equally in all directions. This had a line. It had a specific target at the end of the line, and the target was at the precinct northwest of where he was standing holding a jar of salsa in a grocery store.
He put the salsa jar on the nearest flat surface, which was the edge of the produce display.
"Ethan."
Emma was at the end of the aisle. She had not been behind him thirty seconds ago — she had moved from pasta without him tracking it, which meant he had been more focused on the Net's signal than on the room. She was looking at him with the expression she used when she had assessed something and reached a diagnosis and was about to deliver it.
She said: "Go."
One word. No question attached to it. She had read his posture, his stillness, the specific quality of his attention that had apparently become readable to her after two years of watching him react to things rooms didn't know were there, and she had made a determination that he needed to leave without waiting for him to explain why.
He looked at her for one second. She was holding a box of pasta and a jar of sauce — her version of the errand he had been running — and she had one hand in her jacket pocket and her chin was level and her voice had been the voice she used when a decision had already been made and she was communicating it.
"The car's in the lot," he said.
"I'll get an Uber," she said.
He was through the store's entrance before the sentence was finished.
The drive to Mid-Wilshire took eleven minutes at that time of evening. The Net was loud — not at the building-collapse maximum, but louder than anything he had run in months, louder than the Doyle gala, louder than the three-week false-positive storm. The Board was running the threat-map in real time, cross-indexing the precinct's access points against the potential threat vectors from the direction Ethan was driving from.
He parked in visitor parking and walked to the entrance at the pace of an off-duty officer who had a reason to be there and was not in a hurry to advertise the reason.
The lobby desk was staffed by someone he recognized from the overlap at Monday briefings. He gave his name and badge number and said he had paperwork to drop off for Grey. The desk officer noted it and let him through.
The Net was still loud.
He went to the second floor where Grey's office was, where the supervisor suite was, where Andersen's office was on the days she worked from Mid-Wilshire when her schedule brought her to the division. She was at the corner desk — door open, visible through the glass — with her tablet and a printed document spread on both sides of her. Working through something with the focused posture of someone who was going to be there another hour at least.
Fine. Alive. Unharmed. Working.
The Net did not quiet when he saw her.
It shifted.
The direction it had been pointing — northwest, the precinct — rotated. Not widely, not a full recalibration. A few degrees. The way a compass needle didn't point at a mountain but at the magnetic pole that might be behind the mountain. He had gotten the building right. He had not gotten the source of the signal right. The signal was not coming from Andersen being in immediate danger at this location. It was coming from something adjacent to Andersen, something in her field or her schedule or her trajectory that was pointing at a threat he could not locate from where he was standing.
He found a reason to pass her open doorway — a filing cabinet at the end of the hall that required checking a number he did not actually need checked. She looked up from her document and gave him the brief, neutral acknowledgment of a superior who had noted a patrol officer in the hallway and categorized the presence as unremarkable.
"Mercer."
"Captain."
She looked back at her document.
He went back to the lobby, thanked the desk officer, walked to his car. He sat in the parking lot.
The Net was running at the new vector. Not this building. Something adjacent to Andersen. Something in her next day or next week that he needed to locate before it located her.
His phone was in his hand. He looked at the grocery store contact on Emma's profile, then typed: On my way back. I'll get the salsa tomorrow. Thank you.
She replied in forty seconds: Medium spicy. Not mild. You always get mild.
He drove home. The Net's signal was still running at the elevated level, pointing in a direction that was no longer the precinct.
He needed to know where Andersen was going next.