Micheal didn't rush it.
He turned the paper cup once in his hands, that single slow rotation, and Koshva filed it away. A thinking gesture. Not nerves. The man didn't have the smell of nervous about him.
"The 734 case," Micheal said. "You were on it from intake."
"Standard procedure for a Class 2 flag."
"You were in the building at 0340." He said it the same way Valentina had said it. Without accusation. Just the flat placement of a fact. "The incident was flagged at 0439."
Koshva said nothing.
Micheal looked at his coffee. "I've been watching the Another Star's distribution chain for eight weeks. The slot it came from. The machine it came from." He paused. "Someone placed it there deliberately. For a specific person. Then waited." He looked at Koshva. "Then a Class 2 Deviation died in the ghost plaza the same day the slot came up empty."
"That's a lot of watching," Koshva said. "For someone with a day-issue visitor pass."
"I work outside the building," Micheal said simply.
The building hummed above them. Recycled air through old vents. The sound Koshva had spent twenty two years learning not to hear.
He looked at Micheal. At the notepad. The color-coded pen. The face your eyes wanted to move past and then didn't.
'He knows enough to find me,' Koshva thought. 'He doesn't know enough to find them. And I'm not going to be the one who closes that distance.'
He finished his coffee. Set the cup down.
Stood up.
"Good luck with your investigation," Koshva said.
Micheal looked up at him. The equation in his expression didn't resolve. It just waited, patient as everything else about him, for a variable that wasn't coming today.
"Koshva," he said.
Koshva straightened his jacket. The automatic habit of twenty two years.
"If you find what you're looking for," Micheal said quietly, "and it's what I think it is — you're going to need more than a camera blind spot."
Koshva looked at him for one long moment.
Then he walked up the stairs. Back toward his desk. Back toward the face that fit considerably less well than it had yesterday morning.
He didn't look back.
He didn't leave an address.
Micheal waited until the footsteps disappeared completely. Then he picked up both cups, dropped them in the recycler, and walked out through the public intake the same way he'd come in. Visitor pass returned. Polite nod. Completely unremarkable.
The lower plaza was doing its afternoon.
Ivan was at the edge of it, exactly where Micheal had left him. Back against a support column, arms crossed, watching the building's main entrance with the stillness of a large man who had decided stillness was more useful than movement in most situations. Tall enough and broad enough that people's eyes moved around him the way they moved around structural features of the environment.
He looked at Micheal when Micheal came through the doors.
Micheal shook his head once. Small. The specific shake of a man who had gone in expecting a door and found a wall instead.
Ivan held his gaze for a moment. Then looked past him toward the building's east exit, where a figure in a Ment's jacket had just emerged and turned south without looking back.
Micheal followed Ivan's gaze.
Neither of them said anything.
Ivan uncrossed his arms.
"Don't be seen," Micheal said.
Ivan looked at him with the patient expression of a man being told something he has never once needed to be told.
He was already moving.
He was good at it. Better than most people gave him credit for, which was the point. A man his size moving through a crowd should have been visible from three blocks away. Ivan had spent enough years making himself invisible that it had become the same kind of reflex as breathing. You used what you had. You used the transit flow, the vendor stalls, the natural gaps in foot traffic. You stayed at the edge of the mark's peripheral vision and you moved when they moved and you stopped when they stopped and you never, under any circumstances, let yourself become the most interesting thing in their line of sight.
Koshva was good. Twenty two years of fieldwork good. He took three different route changes between the Authority building and the lower transit junction, each one natural enough to be coincidental and deliberate enough not to be. He checked reflections. He varied his pace. He did everything a trained Ment did when he suspected he might have a tail.
Ivan stayed with him anyway.
Down through the transit junction. East on the lower concourse. Then off the mapped routes entirely, into the corridors that the Authority's grid didn't quite reach, where the lighting got sparse and the air got older and the signage stopped being maintained sometime in the previous decade.
Sub-level 11.
Ivan stopped at the top of the access stairs and watched Koshva disappear into the eastern corridor below. Watched him turn behind a water reclamation unit that hadn't reclaimed anything in a long time.
Watched the door at the end of the corridor open and close.
He stood there for a moment in the bad light, committing the route to memory the way he committed everything to memory, completely and without effort, because that was what the work required and the work was what he did.
Then he turned around and went back the way he'd come.
Micheal was waiting at the plaza where he'd left him, synth-caff in hand, reading nothing, looking at nothing in particular with the focused patience of a man who had sent someone to do a thing and was waiting to find out if the thing had been done.
Ivan stopped beside him.
"Sub-level 11," he said. "Eastern corridor. Behind the water reclamation unit. There's a door."
Micheal looked at him.
"Fourteen people went in today," Ivan said. "None of them came out."
Micheal was quiet for a moment.
"Good," he said.
He dropped the synth-caff in the nearest recycler.
"Tonight," he said. "We go tonight."