The coffee was his sixth of the day and he'd stopped tasting them around the fourth.
Ryan sat at a corner table in a cafe somewhere between the federal building and nowhere in particular, a place that existed in every city block in Manhattan — small, independent, slightly too warm, the espresso machine loud enough to cover most conversations.
He'd walked in because his legs had decided to stop and his brain had needed somewhere to put itself.
He drank the black coffee slowly.
No cream, no sugar. He didn't usually drink it this way. But the bitterness was doing something useful — cutting through the specific adrenaline residue of four hours in a government office answering questions from men who were very good at their jobs.
A battle won.
Not the war.
He put his phone on the table and looked at the unknown number texts again. Both of them, read so many times the words had lost their texture and become just shapes.
*You're running out of time.*
He turned the phone face down.
