Chapter 5
Not the tentative movement of someone discovering the weight, not the initial lurch of unfamiliarity. It moved at the pace of someone who knows exactly how much force the load requires and is providing it, the specific controlled drive of someone who has been pulling weight for longer than the men watching had been assigned to this base. I ran it to the far wall and turned and ran it back without stopping, forty meters out and forty meters back, and when I set the handle down the room had a quality of silence that was different from the silence at the beginning of the morning.
That silence was expectation. What it held now was something without a clean name, the sound of a room in the process of revising itself.
Mercer was standing where I had left him. The four operators around him had realigned, a small but visible shift in orientation, the unconscious repositioning of people whose attention has been redirected by information they did not expect to receive.
I picked up my backpack from where it had come to rest against the bench. I checked the folder inside. The bend in the corner was minor. I straightened it with two fingers and put the folder back.
Then I turned around.
"I'll be here every morning this week," I said. "Zero six to zero seven hundred. If the gym is occupied by authorized personnel conducting authorized training, I'll work around the schedule. If not, I'll use the space."
Mercer had not moved from his position. He was looking at me with the expression of a man who has been given new information and is running it against his existing model and finding more gaps than expected. The man at the pull-up rig had straightened from his lean without apparently deciding to do so. The one on the bench with the towel was looking at the folded towel I had placed there, and then at me, and then at the floor.
"You haven't told me your unit," Mercer said.
"No," I said. "I haven't."
I adjusted the strap of the backpack on my shoulder and walked toward the door. The room did not make noise as I crossed it. The rowing machine in the corner had stopped at some point during the sled work, and nobody had restarted it.
At the door, I paused.
May you like
"The towel your man threw," I said, without turning around. "It's on the bench. Someone should return it to the linen cage before the maintenance team comes through at zero seven thirty."
I pushed the door open and walked out into the Coronado morning.
