At 9:32 AM Ethan was one block from Rourke's route.
He was parked on a side street that gave him the western approach of the arterial Rourke used for his morning loop — the circuit the Board had mapped over three weeks of observation. The route ran northwest on a specific pattern that put Rourke within two blocks of the location where Ethan had cross-indexed the highest density of Rourke's historical network contacts. The geometry was clean. He had built it carefully.
Jackson and Calloway were three miles south-southwest, running a patrol rotation in the warehouse district near the port access roads. The Board had Jackson's position logged from his unit's last check-in at 9:18.
The radio was busy. Two overlapping calls — a domestic disturbance pulling two units to the southeast, and a Code-3 medical on the 110 that had a second unit on standby. The channel was active with the specific compressed back-and-forth of a morning watch managing multiple simultaneous calls. Ethan listened with the secondary attention he used for radio when his primary attention was on a surveillance position.
At 9:44, Calloway's unit called in: "7-Adam-23, code-six on a possible 459 in progress, warehouse at 1218 Lomita South. Requesting backup."
Possible 459. Burglary in progress. The Board noted the call time and the address. Jackson's unit was assigned as primary backup.
The radio went to dispatch and back. A third unit requested.
"7-Adam-22, copy, responding to 1218 Lomita South."
Jackson's voice. Easy, professional, the same voice Ethan had heard at the diner last night.
The Board processed: 1218 Lomita South was three miles from Ethan's current position. His surveillance geometry did not cover the warehouse district. Rourke's morning route put him two blocks west, not three miles south.
He stayed.
At 9:51, the radio escalated.
Calloway: "7-Adam-23, advise — possible 10-71 inside the structure. Units should approach with caution."
10-71. Shots fired or about to be fired. The radio produced the specific compressed activity of a call reclassifying to a higher risk category. Two more units redirected.
The Net was running at its ambient frequency. It had been running at the ambient frequency around Rourke's position for two and a half hours. Nothing in the ambient frequency around the warehouse district three miles south.
At 9:53, Grey came over the command channel: "All available units redirect to 1218 Lomita South. We have a confirmed shots-fired developing situation. All units."
Ethan put the car in drive.
He turned south and accelerated. The Board was running the distance calculation: three miles to 1218 Lomita South at current traffic density, mid-morning, this part of the city. Seven to nine minutes. He activated the unmarked's lights and reduced the estimate.
At 9:54, the Net moved.
Not the ambient frequency. Something directional — the protective-extension frequency, the one that had fired clean and maximum in the hotel corridor in October. It was firing now, but the signal was not clean. It had the specific degraded quality of a read running through emotional-compromise fog — present, directional, unmistakable in its target, and uncertain in its intensity because the person it was pointing at was someone Ethan had been carrying protective attention around for three years and the emotional load on the signal made the difference between threat detected and threat-proximate distress detected impossible to resolve.
The direction was Jackson.
Not Rourke. Jackson.
He accelerated.
The radio produced Calloway's voice at 9:56: "7-Adam-23, first floor appears secure. Moving to second level." Professional. Measured. Clean. The voice of a man running a search pattern.
Jackson's unit: "7-Adam-22, copy, covering south exit."
Tim's voice came over at 9:57 from the supplemental channel: "7-Adam-12, three blocks out, approaching from the north."
Three blocks. Tim was three blocks from the warehouse, which was four and a half minutes closer than Ethan. Ethan was still four minutes out.
The Net's signal was intensifying. Not cleaning up — still fogged, still running through the emotional-compromise baseline — but louder. Louder the way the building collapse had been louder in the final minutes of the approach, the Net scaling with proximity.
He had four minutes.
He drove.
At 10:01, the warehouse at 1218 Lomita South had four units in approach and Ethan ninety seconds out.
Tim had arrived at the north face. Two responding units had the south and east exits. Calloway and Jackson were inside.
Calloway's radio: "Second level catwalk, east end. Single suspect in custody." Pause. "Jackson, come up the west stairs."
The Board ran Calloway's transmission against the warehouse layout it had been building from the satellite and permit data since the first escalation call. Second level catwalk, east end. West stairs from the ground floor. If Jackson followed the instruction, he would be moving away from the two units covering the south and east exits, up a stairwell that had no external camera coverage, onto a catwalk that was not visible from the ground floor entry points.
The architecture of what Calloway had just said.
The Board replayed the forty-eight hours.
Too-careful stillness. Filed as professional reserve. 42% secondary-link match. Dismissed as peripheral. Two overlap scenes. Tim's observation: good instinct, wrong thread. "7-Adam-23, clear" before the structure was actually clear. Second level catwalk. Come up the west stairs.
The recognition landed like the Board dropping every wrong-file data point simultaneously. Thirty-six points on Rourke. Four points on Calloway. All four of Calloway's were correct and current. Thirty-six of Rourke's were historical residue. Tim had told him. Tim had told him directly and Ethan had filed it as secondary.
The Net was not quiet around the warehouse anymore.
The Net was not fogged anymore.
The Net was maximum.
He was ninety seconds out.