4338.219 · August 7, 2018 AD
Twenty-Two Fourteen
Hours of watching a quiet house with drawn curtains, and then three text messages on unencrypted phones rewrite the entire operation. Two women arranging something for tomorrow afternoon in a forest where one of them vanished once before. No tradecraft, no caution — the kind of carelessness that frightens Sienna more than sophistication would. The surveillance team has less than eighteen hours to confirm what they're dealing with before a clock they didn't set hits zero.
Webb's first report is routine — subject stationary since five-forty, single occupancy, lights on, curtains drawn. A woman on administrative leave sitting in her house on a winter evening. Then Draper's intercept arrives and routine disappears.
Three messages. Sarah Lahey's registered phone to Gladys Cramer's registered phone. No cover, no caution, no awareness that anyone might be reading. The kind of communication that people make when they've stopped calculating risk because whatever they need from each other has eclipsed every other consideration. Sarah has something. Gladys has something promised. Tomorrow at four, in a forest where winter light will already be failing, they intend to trade.
But the operation discovers it's already behind. Sarah has been home since before surveillance began. Whatever she's done, she did it in the hours before anyone was watching. Sienna needs three things confirmed before morning — and she needs them confirmed without the night staff at a hospital two hundred metres from the station realising what they're checking. The wrong phone call, the wrong conversation overheard, and a woman sitting in a quiet house with drawn curtains learns that the illusion of privacy she's operating under has been gone since three o'clock this afternoon.
Stout pulls his jacket on. The badge shifts against his ribs. He calls Garrett from the stairwell and says three words: I need you.
