Chapter 4
I put the sixth paint round into Ryker's chest plate at eight minutes and eleven seconds.
He went to one knee. The field went quiet.
I pulled the notebook from my vest, wrote one sentence, tore the page free, and held it toward him.
He read it. His jaw tightened with the specific tension of a man absorbing something true that he did not want to be true. "I owe you an apology," he said.
I was already looking past him.
Not because I was being theatrical. Not because the apology didn't matter. Because something at the edge of my peripheral awareness had changed in the way things change when they are connected to a pattern you have not consciously identified yet but your body has already filed.
A Navy officer was moving toward Hayes across the courtyard with the specific urgency that does not belong to training environments.
He was carrying a sealed folder.
His expression was the expression of a man who has looked at what is inside the folder and does not want to be the person holding it.
Hayes took it. He opened the first page and his face hardened in the way faces harden when a document is confirming something rather than introducing it. He turned to the second page. A grainy surveillance photograph, the resolution of something captured at distance and at night and processed several times through systems designed to extract signal from noise.
A doorway. A shadowed second floor. An armed man in the foreground. And behind him, in the upper left corner of the frame, partially obscured by the doorframe's shadow, a marking on the wall.
May you like
A black triangle, specific in its proportions, specific in the way it was placed — not graffiti, not incidental. A marker. The kind used by a specific network that moved through specific locations and left specific signs for the people who knew to read them.
I had seen the same marking on the wall of the building in Syria that had fallen on me.
