Chapter 9: Boots on the Wet Ground

Arrival

The note was still in his inside jacket pocket.

Max became aware of this before he became aware of the plane, the way the body inventoried the things that mattered before the mind had fully reassembled itself. The jacket was folded on the seat beside him. The pocket held the slip of paper. The slip of paper held eleven words he had read twice and not taken out again.

He did not take it out now.

“Good morning, Janus.”

Sybil’s voice arrived through the earbud with the particular crispness of a system that had not slept, had not crossed time zones, had not spent ten hours at altitude with a note folded against its chest. She was exactly herself. He was approximately himself, which would have to be sufficient.

“Status,” he said. His voice was a register lower than usual, the particular roughness of a man who had slept at the wrong altitude in the wrong direction.

“January 6th. 11:47 Pacific Standard Time. We land in approximately fifty minutes. Current conditions in Seattle are clear, visibility excellent. Temperature 4 degrees Celsius. Traffic to Capitol Hill is running light. Your Airbnb has been provisioned per your specifications. The espresso machine is loaded.”

Max absorbed this without responding. Clear visibility. He had not expected clear visibility. Seattle in January was supposed to be what he had been told it was, gray, relentless, the specific punishment of a sky that had made up its mind.

“The person of interest has published a new post,” Sybil continued. “Shall I summarize?”

“Later.”

He pulled up the window shade.

The continent was below him, the Cascades running north to south in a line so clean and deliberate it looked drawn rather than formed, the peaks catching the January sun at an angle that turned the snow on them to something between white and gold. He had flown over mountain ranges before. The Alps from the CDG to Rome. The Cape Fold Belt. He had logged them as terrain and moved on.

He did not move on.

The range went on longer than he had calculated, peak after peak, and then the land dropped toward the water and he saw Puget Sound for the first time from altitude, the Sound broken into channels by islands he had studied on a map for three days and was now seeing as actual geography, the water between them the specific dark blue of cold water in direct sun, and beyond it the Olympic Peninsula with its own range, snow-capped, completing the enclosure of the Sound from the west.

“Sybil,” he said. “The mountain directly south. The isolated one.”

“Mount Rainier. 4,392 meters. A stratovolcano. The most glaciated peak in the contiguous United States.” A pause of precisely one beat. “Locals say the mountain is out on clear days. It has its own weather system. Overcast days make it disappear entirely. Many residents go weeks without seeing it.”

Max looked at the mountain. It stood apart from the Cascades the way certain people stood apart in rooms. Taller, occupying its own gravity. He had been told to hate Seattle. He had been preparing to hate Seattle since the quorum meeting, had calibrated his contempt on the plane from CDG, had been ready to deploy it on landing.

He had not accounted for the mountain.

He filed this under operational adjustment and pulled the shade down.

Returning to his map aid, he queried, “Sybil, how do you say P-u-y-a-l-l-u-p?”

“Pyoo-al-up,” she said. “It means generous and welcoming people. The Puyallup Tribe has occupied the territory around Commencement Bay for thousands of years.”

Max sat with this for a moment. Generous people. He was arriving to extract something from one of them.

He pulled the jacket across his lap and did not check the inside pocket.

The Mountain is Out

The jet bridge delivered him into a terminal that had decided, at some point in its design history, to make a declaration.

The carpet beneath his feet was patterned in the geometric forms of Pacific Northwest Coast art. Deep reds and blacks and the specific turquoise of glacial water, the shapes angular and interlocking in the way of Coast Salish design, animals resolving out of negative space only when you stopped looking for them directly. A raven. A salmon. Something that might have been a killer whale or might have been the ocean itself depending on the angle. Max’s eyes found the pattern and parsed it without breaking stride, the professional habit of reading environments doing what it always did.

He slowed slightly.

Not because the carpet required it. Because the bronze salmon did.

They were embedded in the walkway at the terminal’s center, a school of them cast into the floor in mid-migration, their bodies curved in the specific attitude of fish moving against current, fins angled, tails driving. They ran the length of the concourse in both directions, dozens of them, and the effect was that of standing in a river. The floor itself animated by the impression of water moving beneath your feet, the fish going somewhere with the particular urgency of things that were built to go somewhere and could not do otherwise.

Max looked down at them for three seconds.

Around him the terminal moved. The family with the luggage negotiating their cheerful dysfunction, the solo businessman already three gates ahead, the couple in their performed silence. None of them were looking at the floor. He was the only person in the concourse who had stopped for the salmon.

He noted this without examining it and kept moving.

The walls held totems in carved cedar, the figures stacked and interlocking in the formal grammar of Northwest Coast art. Thunderbird above, the watchmen at the corners, the forms depicting the specific cosmology of people who had been reading this landscape for thousands of years before the airport existed on top of it. The colors were not the bright tourist palette. They were the actual colors. The deep ocher, the blue-black, the red that was closer to cedar bark than to anything decorative, applied with the seriousness of a visual language that was saying something specific to anyone who knew how to read it.

Max did not know how to read it. He knew how to recognize a system of meaning, and he recognized this one.

A bronze bear stood at the terminal junction, life-sized, its posture the specific stillness of an animal that had decided to stay rather than flee. Someone had placed a lei around its neck, which had been there long enough to dry partially, the flowers going from yellow to the color of old paper. The bear did not look like airport art. It looked like something that had been here before the airport and had simply not moved.

Max passed it and descended toward baggage claim, where the carpet gave way to polished concrete and the salmon were gone, replaced by the standard infrastructure of arrivals. The carousel numbers, the ground transportation signs, the particular industrial quality of a space designed for function rather than declaration.

He preferred, on balance, the declaration.

He did not file this preference anywhere.

The baggage carousel returned his bag on the second rotation. He lifted it without adjusting his grip on his phone and moved toward the exit.

Outside the terminal, the air arrived first.

It was not the air he had been told to expect. It was cold and clean in the way of places where large volumes of cold water were nearby, and it carried something beneath the standard airport exhaust and concrete smell. Something green, biological, the specific scent of conifers that had been absorbing the winter rain for weeks. He stood for three seconds on the curb and breathed it before the operational mind noted that he was standing on a curb for no productive reason and reasserted itself.

“Driver is ninety seconds out,” Sybil said. “Black SUV. License ending 034. Vetted through the provisioning service. No flags.”

“His name.”

“Matt. Seven years driving. No relevant associations. His daughter plays soccer at the University of Washington.”

Max scanned the arriving vehicles. The SUV pulled up with the unhurried competence of a driver who had done this ten thousand times, which was exactly what Max had specified when he requested the service. He slid into the back seat before the driver had fully stopped moving.

The interior smelled of clean upholstery and the faint trace of a previous passenger’s coffee. The city began arriving through the windows as they merged onto I-5 north, the specific landscape Max had studied on satellite imagery for three days and was now seeing at ground level, the Douglas firs on the highway cuts taller than he had calibrated for, the Sound briefly visible through a gap in the tree line before the freeway banked and took it away.

“Great day to arrive,” the driver said, his eyes finding Max in the rearview mirror with the professional friendliness of someone who had learned to read whether a passenger wanted conversation or silence. Max’s posture apparently said something ambiguous because the driver continued. “Yesterday was the darkest day on record at the UW weather station. Less daylight than anywhere in the lower 48. People were genuinely suffering.” He glanced at the blue sky above the treeline. “But today the mountain is out. When that happens the whole city changes. People walk differently. They stop looking at the ground.”

Max returned a half-smile and looked out the window. Through a gap between buildings he could see Mount Rainier standing alone to the south, the glaciers on its upper flanks holding the afternoon light the way the harbor stones in Saint-Raphaël had held the moonlight.

“Dani’s most recent post,” he said quietly, his voice below the driver’s hearing threshold. “The Microsoft announcement. Summarize.”

Sybil’s voice arrived low and precise in his ear as the SUV moved north. “Summarizing.”

Max had noted the Boston reference in Dani’s posts three days ago. He had already planned this. He confirmed it now without acknowledging that Sybil had anticipated the request before he made it, or that this was not the first time she had done so.

The freeway entered Seattle from the south beside walls of Douglas fir, the trees crowding close to the highway cuts on both sides of I-5 until the road stopped feeling engineered and started feeling carved. Nothing about them seemed ornamental. They were the original condition of the place, tolerating the freeway’s presence without acknowledging it. Ancient and indifferent, as if the asphalt were a temporary arrangement the forest had agreed to review annually.

Then the city began revealing itself in fragments.

A flash of water between two hillsides. Gone before Max had registered it fully. A glimpse west toward the Olympic Mountains, their snow-bright ridgelines suspended above the horizon at a hard January angle, cold and clean and too large to belong to a city. Below them a sliver of Puget Sound, deep blue and metallic in the afternoon light. Not postcard blue. Northern blue. Water that looked glacier-fed even when it wasn’t.

The road curved and the view disappeared behind concrete and trees.

He caught himself waiting for the next opening.

They were approaching the interchange where I-5 met I-90 when Max saw it.

He was not fully awake. The mountain had done something to his attention that the operational mind had not yet corrected, and he was looking at the landscape with the unfocused receptivity of someone between states when the grassy triangle of the interchange opened up on the right side of the freeway.

Tents. Dozens of them. Packed into the wedge of public land between the converging highways with the specific density of a settlement that had been accumulating rather than planned, a city within the interchange. Blue tarps and dome tents and structures improvised from materials that had started as something else. A shopping cart. A folding table. Laundry strung between a tent pole and a freeway sign. A dog on a rope. A man crossing the connector road between I-5 and I-90 with a deliberate stride, crossing it the way you crossed a street in a neighborhood you lived in, because he did.

“Is that a campground?” Max murmured.

He said it to the window. The driver heard it anyway.

“Encampment,” the driver said. He said it without judgment, the flat accuracy of someone correcting a term. “The I-5 and I-90 interchange. It moves around. They clear it and it comes back somewhere nearby. There’s one under the overpass on Rainier too. A few others.”

Max looked at the man crossing the connector road until the freeway curve took the interchange out of view.

“How many people,” he said.

“In that one? Hard to say. Hundreds maybe. City stopped counting out loud.” The driver adjusted his grip on the wheel. “We call them unhomed now. Officially. The unhoused. The unsheltered.” A pause. “Most people still say homeless.”

“Which do you say.”

The driver was quiet for a moment. “I say unhomed. Because that’s what it is. They had homes. Most of them. Something happened.” Another pause. “My sister-in-law works at a shelter on Second Avenue. She says the average age keeps dropping. Younger every year.”

Max filed this. The operational mind had reasserted itself sufficiently to file things, though the man crossing the connector road was still in the cache without a category.

“Seattle accepts it,” the driver continued, not an accusation, something more complicated. “More than most places. There are people who leave food, water. Community organizations. The city funds services.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “And there are neighborhoods that have lost their parks. Green spaces that are now encampments. People who call 911 and nothing happens. People who are scared to walk their kids to school past the needles.” A breath. “Both things are true at the same time here. That’s the thing about Seattle. It holds two things at once and doesn’t resolve them. It just lives in the middle.”

The interchange was behind them now, the tents gone from view, the highway straightening toward downtown.

Max looked at the skyline ahead and thought about a city that held two things at once without resolving them. He had spent eleven years reducing people to the thing that could be used. He had built an entire methodology on the premise that a person, fully profiled, became a single navigable fact.

The man crossing the connector road had not looked like a single navigable fact. He had looked like someone crossing a street in a neighborhood he lived in.

Max noted this without filing it and said nothing for the rest of the drive.

The freeway dipped beneath the southern edge of downtown and the light changed. Concrete columns swept past in measured intervals. The acoustics compressed, tire noise echoing back from the overpasses in a rhythm that had nothing to do with the forest above. The city’s working interior, undecorated and unbothered by the view it was blocking. Gray in the specific way of a place designed for movement rather than admiration. Max had seen the underbellies of a dozen cities. They all carried this same grayness. It was the color of infrastructure that had stopped apologizing.

Then the exit sign appeared, white on green.

EXIT 166 OLIVE WAY

The SUV climbed sharply off the freeway.

Seattle did not rise gradually. It lifted with a stubbornness that felt geological rather than planned, the streets angling uphill at grades that made the city feel stacked rather than spread. Buildings perched above buildings. Neighborhoods suspended over other neighborhoods. The whole of it ascending with the particular insistence of terrain that had not been negotiated with and had no intention of starting now.

As they climbed, the skyline fell away behind them and the panorama opened through the gaps between buildings.

Puget Sound spread westward in dark winter blue, the Olympics beyond it with their snowfields holding the afternoon light in a way that made the range look lit from within. To the south, Mount Rainier stood enormous and solitary, the glaciers on its upper flanks glowing with a white intensity that made everything below it feel provisional. The mountain did not look like part of the landscape. It looked like weather. Something that had arrived and decided to stay.

The satellite imagery had given him the coordinates. The elevation maps. The traffic grids. None of it had conveyed the physical sensation of ascending toward that scale on a clear winter day. The cold January light scrubbing the atmosphere clean. Cedar and salt air coming through the SUV’s ventilation. The landscape insisting on itself with the confidence of somewhere that understood it had the better argument.

He had prepared to hate this.

He was having trouble with it.

Day Two

Four in the morning was Paris time. Seattle disagreed.

Max lay in the dark of the Airbnb for eleven minutes after waking, his internal clock running its own calculation against the evidence of the window. Too dark for 1 PM. Too quiet for any hour that mattered in the operational day he had been keeping for the past eleven years. The body did not care about the math. The body was in Paris. He was in Capitol Hill.

He got up.

“Sybil.” He kept his voice low out of habit, though there was no one to wake.

“Good morning, sir. 04:12 Pacific Standard Time. Overcast, 5 degrees Celsius. You’ve had approximately four hours of sleep.” A brief pause. “The espresso machine has been preloaded.”

He stood at the kitchen window with the first cup and looked at the street below. Seattle at 04:00 had a specific quality. Not the silence of a city that had gone to sleep. The quiet of one that had not yet decided to wake. The wet pavement caught the streetlights in long orange streaks. A delivery van moved through an intersection three blocks south without stopping. A crow landed on the power line across the street, considered the situation, and left.

Max noted the crow without deciding what to note about it.

“Caffè Umbria,” he said. “Walk time from here.”

“Six minutes. Opens at 05:00. It’s a frequented location for the person of interest.”

He set the cup down. He had known this. He had confirmed it twice in the profiling sessions in Saint-Raphaël. He was confirming it again because operational redundancy was not the same thing as obsession, and because it was four in the morning and Paris was still running its own clock somewhere behind his eyes.

He dressed with the deliberateness of someone building a character from the outside in. The clothes had been chosen in France for this specific city, the wardrobe calibrated to say freelance and particular and not trying without saying any of those things directly. He checked the result in the mirror with the professional eye of a man assessing a cover rather than an appearance.

Sufficient. He went out.

Reconnaissance

The air arrived first, the way it always arrived in this city. Not as a temperature but as a presence, the cold carrying Douglas fir and salt water and overnight rain in a combination he was beginning to understand was not weather but identity. Seattle smelled like itself the way Paris smelled like itself. Insistently and without apology.

He followed the route on his watch through streets that were mostly quiet. A bakery with its lights already on. A man walking a dog who gave Max the nod of one early-morning person acknowledging another without wanting conversation. The particular urban quiet of a hill neighborhood at the end of the long dark.

He was half a block from Caffè Umbria when he saw the tent.

It was beside a tree on the sidewalk’s edge, constructed with the specific efficiency of someone who had learned to do this. Tarps layered correctly against the rain. A backpack positioned as both pillow and barrier. A sign propped at an angle that caught the streetlight without requiring anyone to stop. A figure under the blanket, entirely still, either sleeping or performing sleep with the expertise of someone who had learned to make themselves small enough to be overlooked.

Max stopped walking.

He stood on the wet sidewalk for four seconds and looked at the tent. The operational mind ran its catalog. Location, visibility, structural efficiency, the sign’s positioning for morning foot traffic. He had profiled three thousand people. He had assembled attack packages from the fragments of their lives. He had watched Lily Torres’s birthday photo in metadata and clicked anyway.

The tent was not a data point. He knew this and filed it in the same place he filed the Torres profile hesitation and the moon over the Mediterranean when Sybil told him about the medication crisis.

The compartment was getting crowded.

He resumed walking.

At the door a man was leaving, coat collar up, coffee in hand. He held the door without looking at Max, his eyes moving to the tent with the particular flick of someone who had developed a practiced non-acknowledgment. “Just don’t make eye contact,” he said, not quite to Max and not quite to himself, and was already past him on the sidewalk.

Max held the door and went inside.

Caffè Umbria at 05:00 had three customers and the specific atmosphere of a place that knew exactly what it was. The pressed tin ceiling. The chalk menu with its corrections and additions accumulated over years. The coffee smell that had been in the walls long enough to be structural. Not a chain. Not a concept. A place that had decided what it was and stuck with it.

He ordered without consulting anyone and chose a table with a clear line to the entrance, the counter, and the street window. Operational habit. He was not expecting Dani at 05:00. He was positioning himself for the day he would be here when she arrived, which Sybil’s pattern analysis put at 07:40 on weekdays with a confidence interval of plus or minus twelve minutes.

The espresso was correct. He noted this the way he noted things that performed as specified.

Outside the window the tent was visible from his seat, the sign catching the first gray light of a Seattle dawn that was more a gradual brightening than an event. The figure had not moved. Someone had placed a coffee cup near the backpack. Recent. Still steaming faintly. From this distance Max could not determine who had left it.

He drank his coffee and looked at the street and did not think about the Torres family’s apartment going dark.

He thought about it anyway.

Pike Place

By eight the city had become itself.

Max walked down the hill from Capitol Hill toward the waterfront with the specific awareness of a man learning a city the way he learned everything. Through movement, through the body’s accumulating intelligence about grades and sightlines and the rhythm of foot traffic at specific hours. Seattle going downhill meant going toward water. Every street eventually arrived at the Sound. You could not get lost in a way that mattered.

“Pike Place Market,” Sybil said in his ear. “Ten minutes at your current pace. Oldest continuously operated public farmers market in the country. Opened 1907.”

He didn’t need the history. He needed the terrain.

The market announced itself before it was visible. The sound arrived first, the particular density of a public space that had been running at full capacity since dawn. Then the smell: fish and cut flowers and espresso and the specific cold-salt-wet of a market that sat at the water’s edge and let the Sound’s atmosphere come in through every opening.

He went in through the main arcade.

The fishmongers were already performing, the theater of the fish toss drawing a cluster of tourists who had their phones raised before the salmon left the counter. A vendor in a heavy apron called out his pitch in a voice trained to carry over crowd noise without shouting. Flowers everywhere. Dahlias, ranunculus, tulips coming in from the valley farms, arranged with the careless abundance of places that had enough of them that display required no conservation. The cobblestones underfoot were wet and irregular, the same quality of surface as the old town in Saint-Raphaël, and Max registered this without deciding what to do with the fact that he had registered it.

He moved through the stalls with the unhurried attention of someone with nowhere to be, which was the persona and also, for this particular hour, the truth. The reconnaissance had no specific objective today beyond accumulation. The layout of the space, the flow of traffic, the locations that would offer natural cover for a chance encounter and the positions that would not. He filed it all. He also, without authorization from the operational layer, noticed a table of heirloom tomatoes in colors that had no business existing in January and the woman at the flower stall who was arranging dahlias with the focused satisfaction of someone whose work matched their capacity.

A busker at the market entrance was playing something that required both hands and one foot, the guitar case open at his feet with a small accumulation of bills. He was good. Not busker-good. Actually good, the kind that made you wonder about the specific sequence of decisions that had produced this particular Friday morning on these particular cobblestones.

Max paused for eleven seconds and listened.

Then he kept walking, because the operational mind had finished its reconnaissance of this section and was ready to move to the next.

At the market’s edge, where the arcade opened toward the water, the Sound appeared without warning. The full expanse of it. Elliott Bay in the January morning, ferries moving across it, the Olympics on the far shore, the sky above all of it the specific pale blue of a clear winter day after a long dark.

He stood at the railing and looked at it.

“Sybil,” he said. “Remind me to come back here.”

“Of course.”

He stayed another two minutes without speaking. The ferry moved across the water with the deliberate patience of something that had been making this crossing long enough to have stopped hurrying. The Olympics held the light on their snowfields. The air carried cedar and salt and the specific clarity of a city that earned its good days through rain and knew it.

He had a mission. He had a timeline. He had Pavel’s expectations and the quorum’s contract and a woman whose profile he had read four times on the plane and whose apartment was six minutes from where he was standing.

He gave himself two more minutes at the railing.

Then he turned away from the water, the operational mind resuming its inventory, and walked back up the hill toward the city he had come to take apart.

Day Four

The sedan moved through Seattle’s midmorning streets in the specific quiet of a car that had nothing to prove. Max watched the city through the window the way he watched most things, with the divided attention of a man present in two places simultaneously, the external world catalogued at the professional level and something else running beneath it that he did not examine in moving vehicles.

“Dani is currently at the UW conference center,” Sybil said in his ear. “Panel discussion on cybersecurity ethics. Scheduled to conclude in forty minutes. I’ve registered you for her talk. It begins in twenty.”

“Talk track. Attendees. Location updates.”

“Compiling.”

He had known about the talk since Tuesday. Sybil had flagged it as the first viable observation opportunity in the three-week pattern she had built from Dani’s calendar, her published schedule, the implicit geography of her professional life. He had waited because patience was the methodology and because arriving too early at any target was its own category of error.

He was not early now.

The driver pulled to the curb. Max was out of the car before it had fully stopped, moving through the building’s entrance with the unhurried efficiency of someone who knew exactly where he was going and had decided to make it look like he always had.

He took the back row.

Not the last seat in the row. The third from the end, the position that gave him the room’s full geometry without announcing the choice. He had been making this choice in auditoriums for eleven years. He made it without thinking about it, which was the point.

The room was filling. Professionals in the specific wardrobe of the Pacific Northwest tech sector, the layered fleece and good boots of people who took both their work and their weather seriously. Someone was adjusting the projector. A colleague of the speaker was checking notes at the front table.

Then Dani walked out.

Max had seen the photographs. He had read the profile four times on the plane. He had studied her technical writing for the specific quality of her thinking and her personal writing for the architecture of her feeling, and he had understood, in the way that professional preparation produced understanding, who was going to walk onto that stage.

He had not prepared for the way she adjusted the microphone.

The specific ease of someone who had done this enough times that the mechanics had become invisible and what remained was simply the person. She exchanged something with the colleague at the table, a quick exchange that produced a brief laugh, and then she looked at the audience with the expression he had noted in the photographs. The smile deciding, in real time, whether the warmth behind it was safe to mean.

He noted this as operational confirmation of the profile’s accuracy.

He noted it twice, which was not operational.

Her talk was good.

Not conference-good. Actually good, the kind of argument that had been thought through rather than assembled, the kind of clarity that arrived when someone understood a subject well enough to have formed opinions rather than just accumulated information. She was making the case that cybersecurity as a discipline had developed a convenient blindness to the second and third order effects of its own interventions, the systems built to protect that produced new categories of harm, the security measures that generated the vulnerabilities they were designed to prevent.

Max had spent eleven years working in the gap she was describing.

He held this at the distance sufficient to continue functioning. The professional mind noted the argument’s structure and its weaknesses and the specific case study she had chosen to anchor it, a healthcare infrastructure breach that had exposed forty thousand patient records through a security protocol designed to prevent exactly this category of exposure.

He had built similar protocols. For different purposes.

“Is our duty solely to protect,” she said, her voice carrying without effort to the back row, “or does it extend to foreseeing the ethical ramifications of our protections?”

Max shifted slightly in his seat.

“Sybil,” he said, barely moving his lips. “Extract her slides. Full transcript. Cross-reference her thesis against current ethical standards.”

“Working.” A brief pause. “She’s citing the Duke research from her December forum post. The same material you reviewed in Saint-Raphaël.”

He knew this. He had been the one who filed it as approach vector.

He was having some difficulty keeping it filed.

The applause started before he had fully registered that the talk was ending. He stood with the room, which was not a choice he had made consciously, and then was aware of having stood and made himself still again while the audience began its dispersal. Dani had moved to the front of the room, where a cluster of people had formed around her with the specific urgency of those who had been saving the thing they needed to say since the second slide.

He watched her work through them. The attention she gave each person was not performed. She was actually listening, actually responding, the quality of her engagement not diminishing as the cluster thinned. Her hands moved when she talked, the gestures specific to the point rather than decorative, the whole of her giving the impression of someone who found the conversation genuinely worth having.

Max was in the back row observing this when she looked up.

It was not aimed at him. Her gaze moved across the room in the natural sweep of someone tracking who was still present, and it crossed the back row without intention, and it found him.

She smiled. The specific smile from the photographs, the one deciding in real time whether the warmth was safe to mean, and in this context it was simply the reflex of someone who had made eye contact across a room and responded the way people responded.

It lasted approximately one second.

Max took a half-step backward. His heel found the leg of the chair behind him before he had registered the movement, and he caught the chair’s back with one hand and steadied himself and stood for a moment in the specific stillness of a professional who had just stumbled in a conference hall because a woman he had profiled for three weeks had smiled at him across a room without meaning to.

He straightened.

“Get me an Uber,” he said.