And at the security desk, a long curved counter of dark wood to the left of the turnstiles, Alvin Varnum was already standing up.
She had known it would be him. He had worked the morning shift at that desk for twenty-three years. He was a tall man, sixty-three, broad through the shoulders in the blue blazer with the Stanhope crest on the pocket, his gray hair cut so close it was only a shadow on his scalp, and he stood the way she imagined he had stood as an Army MP at a gate in Germany in the eighties, square, still, with his hands loose at his sides and his face giving nothing at all. People in the building called him the Stone. Not to his face, and not unkindly, mostly. Interns tried to make him smile on a dare. Nobody she knew of had ever won the dare.
She had not spoken more than ten words to him in seven years. She had arranged her mornings around it. She came in at the turnstile farthest from the desk. She said good morning to the screen of her phone.
He came out from behind the counter without hurrying and stopped a polite distance from her, a little more than an arm's length, which was what they taught.
"Ma'am," he said. "Step over here to the side for me, please."
"Mr. Varnum. It's Agata. Agata Brzezicki. Twenty-two, Security Systems." She heard herself say the floor number as if it were a password. "I've been out on leave. My badge must have dropped out of the cardholder group. It happens when someone's inactive past ninety days, there's a rule that sweeps them. I wrote the rule, actually. It's a ten-second fix. If you can let me through on a visitor pass I'll go up and fix it myself."
He looked at her for a moment with no expression whatsoever. Then he turned his head toward the desk, where a second guard, a young woman with a long braid whose name Agata did not know, had her eyes on a monitor.
"Danita. Pull her up."
The young woman typed. Agata knew what she was seeing because Agata had designed the screen. Name, photo, employee number, department, cardholder status. She could not see the monitor from where she stood, but she watched the young woman's face, and the young woman's face did something small and careful and then went neutral in a way that was worse than surprise.
"Status is inactive as of six a.m.," Danita said. "There's a flag. HR hold, escort required. It says call Gwendolyn Tremblay on arrival."