It was the question Agata had wanted to ask for seven years, and she understood, hearing it in his voice, that she had never had the right to.
Anselm Voight looked at the handset. Then he stood up and put his overcoat back on, and took his phone out of the pocket, and said, "Kiran's on twenty-two?"
"Yes," Agata said.
"Every re-entry door in every stairwell can be set to unlocked from the software. Both sides. Twenty-four hours. It takes five minutes. Ardent told me in June it would be a security exposure and I let them tell me that." He was already typing. "It's not a security exposure. It's a door. I'm going to have him do it now, while you're on the phone, and I'm going to authorize it in writing, and I'm going to put a guard on every stairwell until the Fire Marshal tells us what they want. And then I'm going to go upstairs and tell the CFO what I did." He looked at Agata. "I'd like you to come up and watch him do it. If you're willing. I'd like somebody who knows what she's looking at to see it done."
"She's been separated," Gwendolyn said faintly. "She doesn't have a badge."
"She has an escort," Alvin said, and dialed.
It took Kiran Sethi four minutes and forty seconds. Agata timed it on the clock at the bottom of his screen, because she could not help herself, standing behind his chair in the Security Operations Center on twenty-two with her arms folded and a red VISITOR — ESCORT REQUIRED sticker on the lapel of her blazer that Danita had printed for her at the desk. Anselm stood at the end of the console with his overcoat still on and his phone in his hand, and the two operators at their monitors pretended very hard to be watching the cameras in Charlotte.
"You want them all in one group?" Kiran said.
"Make a new group," Agata said. "Call it what it is. Then nobody can bury it in another one."