Hartwell slid a page across the table. The dates were eight months ago and four months ago. The partial match in the contractor registry, the one Thomas had found, was from an engagement eight months ago. The timeline fit together cleanly, and cleanly fitting timelines were never an accident.
Zuri had been at the safe apartment for four days when Adrian arrived one afternoon with a bag of books. Not educational texts, not the kind of serious titles someone picks up when they try to make a point about being helpful—just books: three novels, a collection of illustrated geography facts that she immediately flipped to the pages on Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region, and a paperback on the history of codes and ciphers that he said he'd read himself when he was about her age, and which he thought she might find interesting given recent events.
She looked at that one for a long moment, then looked at him. "You read this when you were eight?"
"Ten," he admitted. "But you seem ahead of schedule."
It was the first time she'd laughed since the morning at the plaza.
Renee watched this from the kitchen doorway with an expression that mixed gratitude and weariness in roughly equal measure. She was a practical woman who had learned not to trust large things being given freely, because in her experience, they usually came attached to something. She'd said as much to Adrian during their second conversation, directly enough that it had surprised him, not unpleasantly. He told her the only thing he wanted from Zuri was to make sure she was safe; everything else—her time, her trust, her future—was hers to decide about. Renee hadn't fully believed him then; she was starting to, slowly.
That afternoon, while Renee rested, Adrian sat with Zuri at the kitchen table while she worked through the geography book. She had a habit of asking questions that weren't really questions: statements shaped like inquiries, the kind that indicated she'd already started forming an answer and wanted to test it against someone else's thinking.
"The two men," she said, not looking up from the page. "They weren't from Moscow."
Adrian was quiet for a moment. "What makes you say that?"
She turned a page. "The way they said certain sounds. My dad worked near the western regions. He said the accent from near the Baltic border sounds different from central Russian: harder consonants, the vowels get shorter." She looked up at him. "One of them had that. I noticed it when he said the part about timing."
Adrian kept his expression neutral, but inside, something sharpened considerably. "You're sure?"
"I noticed it at the time, and I've been thinking about it since. I'm sure enough." She said it with the matter-of-fact confidence of someone who had learned to trust her own observations and hadn't yet been talked out of it by the world.
He excused himself for approximately four minutes, during which he made a call to Thomas, who relayed the information to Hartwell's team within the hour.
The geographic detail, if it held, would narrow the network considerably: Western Russia near the Baltic corridor pointed toward specific organized networks with documented ties to corporate and political espionage in Eastern and Northern Europe. Hartwell had a list of three such networks active in the current period; Zuri's detail cut that to one.
Meanwhile, Renee's world had gotten considerably harder. She had shut down her stall for what was initially supposed to be a few days, and had become, without anyone formally announcing it, an indefinite arrangement. She wasn't complaining—the apartment was comfortable, and Patricia was helpful, and she understood the seriousness of the situation—but she had customers who relied on her baskets for gifts and events, and she had a lease on a storage unit where she kept her materials, and she had a life that did not pause easily.
She started getting calls from people who'd heard something had happened near the plaza: nothing specific, just the way neighborhood information travels—distorted, but directional. She told everyone she was visiting family. She didn't like lying; she was not naturally built for it, which was something Zuri had inherited.