Chapter 25 : The Pallid Man's Interest
He'd been running the Oregon audio in the technical workshop for three hours when Cole knocked on the door frame at 11:30 PM.
"Jones wants the full recording," Cole said.
"Tell her ten minutes."
"She said now."
Rowan saved his current notation — timestamps, speaker identification, the partial transcript he'd been building from the cleaner fragments — and pulled the audio files onto a portable drive. Ten years ago by the clock of a world he no longer lived in, he'd been a graduate student running interview data through transcription software. Different use. Same underlying methodology.
He followed Cole to the briefing room.
Jones had the map up: Oregon marked, the Night Room facility marked, the second corporate chain documents spread across the table with her annotations in the margins. She'd been working since before Oregon, probably since before the Night Room. She had the quality of a person who didn't distinguish between working hours and non-working hours because the work was always present.
He put the drive on the table.
She loaded it.
The recording ran from the beginning: the circuit vehicle, the ambient sounds of an Oregon parking area, the muffled operational conversations they'd been filtering for the past three days. Then the fragment they'd flagged. Jones's hand moved and paused the playback.
The Pallid Man's voice had a specific quality even through a vehicle's exterior microphone — precise, unhurried, the diction of a man who'd learned that calm delivery was more effective than emphasis.
"The scavenger who appeared with Cole at the psychiatric facility. He's appeared at Markridge, at the Night Room breach, now here. He carries no operational record. No registered identity. No traceable history." A pause. "He is not a coincidence. Find out who he is and what he's doing in Cole's operational shadow."
Jones stopped the playback.
The briefing room was quiet in the way rooms were quiet after someone had said something that required processing.
Cole was at the window, arms crossed. He'd heard the fragment in Oregon. He'd heard it again now. His jaw had the set of a man who was angry about a situation rather than a person, which was the more useful kind of angry.
Jones looked at Rowan.
"He's been building toward this since the psychiatric facility footage," she said. Not a question.
"Since before that. He had a face from the facility — forty-seven seconds of exterior camera angle, me at a bad angle in a parking lot at night." Rowan kept his voice level. "He's been cross-referencing everything that doesn't fit his operational picture of our movements. I appeared at Markridge. I appeared at the Night Room. Now Oregon." He looked at the drive. "He doesn't have a name yet. He has a pattern."
"And when he has a name."
"Then he starts building a picture of what I am. Which is more dangerous than the name."
Jones set the remote down and looked at the map. Her hand moved to the Markridge chain documents, adjusted their position without apparently needing to, the movement of a person who thought through her hands. "Your anonymity was your primary operational asset. He's dismantling it."
"Yes."
"Which means he'll anticipate your presence on future missions."
"Or attempt to use me as a lead to Splinter's broader operations." He met her gaze. "Which is why I'd like to stop being reactive about it."
Cole turned from the window.
"You want to run at him," Cole said. The flat statement of a man identifying a decision before it was presented.
"I want to use the hunt. He's already looking for me — that's resource allocation, attention, personnel directed at a moving target." He kept the idea in its cleanest form. "While he's chasing the pattern I give him, he's not covering something else. We use that window."
Jones was quiet for a measured moment.
"There's a difference," she said, "between using the hunt and walking into it."
"I know the difference."
"He's very good at what he does."
"I know that too." He looked at her. "But he doesn't know what I am. He knows I exist. He knows I appear in Cole's operational wake. He doesn't know the mechanism." He pressed two fingers to the map — the Oregon marker, the Night Room marker, the space between them. "Let him chase the mechanism. Let him build his picture. By the time the picture is accurate enough to be dangerous, we've already used the window he opened by looking."
Cole's jaw moved. "You're saying let the Pallid Man investigate you."
"I'm saying let him investigate while we're already moving."
A silence.
Jones looked at the map. She looked at Rowan with the expression she'd been developing across the weeks since the medical cell — the one that had moved from asset assessment to something more specific. The look of someone revising a category.
Three months ago, in a different room in this facility, he'd said three classified words to a pair of guards in a snow-covered perimeter, and those three words had bought his life. He'd come into this facility as a dying scavenger with nothing except the information in his head and the ability to make that information look like more than it was.
He hadn't been a soldier then. He'd been a liability that happened to be useful.
She was looking at something different now.
"You'll need better cover when you're moving in 2015," she said.
"I've been building it."
"Documentation?"
"I'll need more. The Dr. Shaw identity is solid at one layer. It won't hold if he gets someone inside CDC to run it thoroughly."
"I'll have an additional cover built. Two-layer legend." She picked up her pen. "Cole, I'll want a new operational window to 2015 in forty-eight hours." She looked at them both. "We'll use the hunt. We won't let it use us."
Cole rolled up his sleeve.
The recording light on the drive clicked off.