Then he straightened up and waited for the door at the end of the corridor to open.
* * *
She came through the stairwell door at six forty-seven.
Same scrubs.Same low knot.Same lanyard.Her right hand was tucked at her waist with the burner phone palmed against her thigh, the way she’d practiced it on Sunday at her dining table while he sat across from her and ran her through the sequence one more time, and one more time after that.
She didn’t run.She walked the corridor at the same unhurried pace she’d walked through the lobby an hour earlier.She was a nurse in scrubs who had gotten turned around during a safety drill and was walking back to her unit.Anyone who saw her would see exactly that.
She passed him without looking at him.
As she went by, her right thumb came off the phone for the briefest fraction of a second and made a small gesture against the seam of her scrub pants — a quick three-tap, the all-clear sign they’d worked out together.‘Got it.Got out.Coming through.’
Three taps.Three weeks of work.The shadow log pulled to a federal server before the drill was half over.Forty-seven photographs of the paper originals on top of it.A username and a password folded against the inside of a chest pocket.Eighteen months of a notebook buried in soil.The four numbers.
Graham didn’t turn his head to watch her go.He stayed where he was, leaning on the cinderblock wall with the alarm still cycling and the intercom still calling for response staff to the loading dock, and he let his eyes close for one second.
Just one.
Then he opened them and pushed off the wall and walked toward the rally point in the east parking lot the way a hospital volunteer was supposed to walk during a safety drill — unhurried, visible, doing exactly what the protocol said he should be doing.
“Caleb,” he said into the earpiece.
“Here.”
“We’ve got it.”
Caleb didn’t say copy.He didn’t say confirmed.He didn’t say anything for a long second.
Then he said, “Okay.”
Just that.‘Okay.’
Graham walked out the front doors of the hospital into the morning sun.
Chapter 23
She set her keys on the entry table and stood for a moment with her back to him.
The house was quiet.Her bag was on her shoulder, her shoes still on, the front-door deadbolt above the new latch he’d fixed yesterday now turned and locked.She didn’t take off her bag.She didn’t move toward the kitchen or the couch or any of the ordinary places a person went when they came home at the end of a Monday.
She just stood there for a second, breathing.
He waited.He had spent the past eleven hours waiting and he had gotten good at it.He could wait another minute.
She turned around.
“Graham.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to be careful anymore.”
“Good.”
She slid the bag off her shoulder and let it fall to the floor.She kicked off her shoes.The lanyard with her hospital ID came over her head, and she set it on the entry table beside her keys, and the burner phone came out of her thigh pocket and joined them, and the folded paper with R-Embry-NS on it came out of her chest pocket and she set it on top of the badge.
Everything she’d carried into that hospital.Set down.In order.
