Page 255 of Chameleon Killer

So I had given her questions instead and let Mallory do what she did best.

Dig.

I caught the flicker from the monitor in the corner displaying the lobby. I glanced toward it, but it was normal.

The security desk remained occupied. A delivery driver stood near the entrance. Two employees crossed toward the elevators. So many people working on a Sunday.

Well, they did say the news never slept.

I returned my attention to Mallory. Then the parking garage flickered. A fraction of a second.

Less.

I frowned.

The image stabilized. Nothing had changed. I pulled the previous thirty seconds and replayed them.

No visible interruption. No dropped frames. No packet loss. Yet something had happened.

I checked the lobby. Then the service corridor. Then the elevator bank. Everything was normal.

Too normal.

I compared timestamps. Perfect synchronization. Every camera. To the millisecond. That was wrong. Network cameras drifted. Fractions. Latency. Compression. Processing delays.

I straightened.

“What are you up to, Elliot?”

I hadn't seen him enter. That bothered me. I opened another terminal and began tracing. The feeds were live, except they weren't.

Not entirely.

The lobby camera showed movement. Employees crossed. The guard shifted. A man entered through the revolving door.

Natural motion.

Except I had seen it before.

I searched backward.

There.

Nine minutes earlier.

The same woman crossed the lobby carrying the same red bag.

The same guard scratched beneath his left ear. The same man checked his watch. Loop.

Not a long one.

Nine minutes, forty-three seconds.

Enough to preserve movement. Short enough to deploy quickly. Clever. Very clever.

I moved to the internal network.

The camera system itself reported no anomaly because the cameras hadn't been disabled.