Warlocks

His mind smelled like a barbershop.

Jace had learned not to question these things. A person's subconscious arranged itself from whatever materials it had on hand. Memory, habit, the residue of a life spent in certain rooms. Thomas Hoffman had apparently spent enough time in one chair, under one set of hands, that his psyche had decided a barbershop was the architecture of safety. Warm lather. The clean snap of scissors. The low murmur of a television no one was watching.

Jace moved through it the way he moved through everything: efficiently, without sentiment, looking for the thing he'd come to take.

The shop had three chairs. Two of them were empty. The third held a version of Hoffman that the man himself would never have recognized. Stripped of the performance, the careful composure he'd maintained for eleven hours of standard interrogation. In here, the performance wasn't available to him. In here, there was only what he actually was: a mid-level weapons broker who'd been moving components to a cell operating out of the Balkans, and who had, somewhere in the soft tissue of his memory, the name and location of the man who'd given him his orders.

That was what Jace had come for.

He didn't rush. Rushing was how you left damage that didn't need to be there. Not that the outcome differed, but there was a precision to his work that he maintained out of habit rather than conscience. He moved between the chairs, past the mirror that reflected nothing useful, toward the counter where Hoffman kept his most private things arranged with the unconscious care people gave to objects they thought no one else could see.

The name was there. So was the location. So was a phone number that didn't appear in any database Jace's team had accessed, and a face he didn't recognize. A woman, early forties, standing in a doorway that might have been Brussels or might have been Geneva. He noted all of it. He filed it.

Then he took the name.

The barbershop lurched. In the chair, Hoffman's subconsciousness made a sound that wasn't quite language. A low, involuntary exhalation, the sound a person made when something they needed was no longer where they'd left it. Jace was already withdrawing, pulling back through the man's mental layers, the warm lather smell giving way to antiseptic and recycled air, to the flat fluorescent quality of a basement room in a building that didn't appear on any publicly available map.

He came back into his own body the way he always did: all at once, like stepping through a door.

The actual Hoffman sat across a metal table, blinking. He was a compact man, fifty-two years old, with the careful grooming of someone who took his presentation seriously and the eyes of someone who'd made peace with doing work he couldn't discuss at dinner parties. Those eyes were unfocused now. He'd look like that for a few hours. The vacant stare of a person who'd misplaced something important and couldn't name what it was. By tomorrow he'd have constructed a story that explained his mental gap. People always did. The mind didn't tolerate lacunae; it filled them with plausible fiction.

The lead analyst in the room, a woman named Reyes who ran these sessions with the organized patience of someone filing paperwork, looked up at Jace. He gave her the name. He gave her the location. He gave her the phone number and described the face in the doorway.

She wrote it down. "The cell leader?"

"Handled in Brussels. She's been his point of contact for at least two years, possibly longer."

Reyes nodded, already reaching for her phone. The room had the compressed efficiency of a place where time was measured in operational windows, and Jace was already peripheral to whatever came next. He retrieved his jacket from the hook by the door, checked that his earpiece was in his pocket, and left.

In the hallway, the fluorescent lights buzzed at a frequency that he'd catalogued, on his first day in this building, as slightly wrong. Seven years later it still bothered him in a small, structural way. The kind of irritant that never became important enough to address. He walked toward the elevator.

The fear arrived somewhere between the interrogation room and the elevator doors.

Not his. He was almost certain it wasn't his. It had the wrong texture. Too animal, too immediate, the fear that lived in the body rather than the mind. Hoffman's fear, almost certainly, carried out like a thread caught on a coat button. Jace had learned to recognize the sensation: a foreign emotional residue, leaching through whatever membrane separated what he'd absorbed from what he actually felt.

He stopped walking. Stood against the hallway wall and ran through the inventory he always ran, the one that had become as automatic as breathing in the last several years. What he'd felt in the last hour, categorized by origin. His own low-grade satisfaction at a clean extraction. That was his, it had the right shape and history. A flicker of something when Reyes had looked up at him with professional appreciation. Also probably his, though he noted the qualifier. And now this: the animal pulse of something that wanted very badly to be somewhere else, to be someone who wasn't sitting in a metal chair with no agency over what was being taken.

That was Hoffman's. He filed it in the appropriate column and pushed off the wall.

The elevator doors opened. He got in.

This was the part no one asked about. The debrief covered operational results, subject condition, intelligence yield. It did not cover the question of what an operative brought home with him after a hundred and forty-three extractions, which was the number Jace had counted, once, in an idle moment, before deciding that counting had been a mistake. It did not cover the growing difficulty of locating, with certainty, where Thomas Hoffman ended and Jace Adair began.

He touched the ring under his shirt without meaning to. His father's wedding band on its chain. The weight of it as familiar as his own heartbeat, and about as much comfort.

The elevator reached the fourth floor. He got out and went to find Donovan.

Marcus Donovan's office was the kind of room that had been designed to communicate nothing about the person who occupied it, and had failed. There were no personal photographs, no decorative objects, no evidence of life outside the building. All of that was standard, mandatory for anyone at Donovan's clearance level. But there was an arrangement to the stacks of folders on his desk, and a certain brand of coffee in a thermal mug, and the way the single window blind was angled to let in light without revealing the angle of the sun. The room communicated Donovan whether Donovan intended it to or not. Jace had spent enough time in it to read the subtext fluently.

Donovan was on the phone when Jace entered. He held up a finger. One minute. Jace settled into the chair across from his desk and waited.

The phone call was bureaucratic, something about a budget allocation for a program Jace didn't have clearance to know about. Donovan's end of it was mostly listening, punctuated by the occasional mm that communicated nothing and committed to nothing. He was good at that. The craft of occupying a conversation without surrendering anything. Fourteen years running psychic operatives for the Agency's most classified division had made him fluent in a language that didn't technically exist.

He hung up. Reached for the thermal mug. Poured a second cup from the coffee carafe on the credenza behind him and slid it across the desk to Jace without asking.

Jace accepted it. The coffee was always better than it had any right to be, given the building it was made in, and he'd never asked why.

"Hoffman?" Donovan said.

"Done. Reyes has the information."

"Clean?"

"Clean enough." There was a beat that Jace let sit. Donovan was watching him with a quality of attention that Jace had come to understand as the man's version of concern. Not demonstrative, not emotional, just present. He'd asked about the shoulder once, six months ago, after a problematic extraction had left Jace with three cracked ribs and a rotation injury that he'd filed as minor and stopped thinking about. Have you actually had someone look at that, or are you just waiting for it to stop hurting on its own? The question had been so unexpectedly direct, so outside the operational register, that Jace had been momentarily without an answer. He'd seen a physical therapist twice, which was probably not what Donovan had meant.

"You eat?" Donovan said now.

"Before."

"That's not what I asked."

Jace drank the coffee instead of answering. It was, as always, very good. Some people brought their humanity to work in small containers, and this was one of Donovan's. Jace noted it in the way he noted most things about people he trusted. Carefully, at a slight remove, in the part of his mind that catalogued what mattered.

Donovan let it go. He reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, the locked one, which he opened with a key he kept on his person rather than in any building system, and produced a single manila folder. He set it on the desk between them but didn't open it.

"The Hoffman case is closed," he said. "The cell will be rolled up in the next forty-eight hours. Good work." The assessment was matter-of-fact; compliments from Donovan had the quality of status updates. "I need you on something else. Immediately."

Jace looked at the folder without reaching for it. "Define immediately."

"This afternoon. If possible."

There was something in Donovan's delivery. Not hesitation, exactly, but a density, a careful arrangement of words that Jace recognized as the precursor to something complicated. Donovan didn't preface things. When he was prefacing, it meant the thing required prefacing.

"The intelligence that was taken," Donovan said, "is classified above my clearance level."

Jace was quiet for a moment. "You're briefing me on a mission whose parameters you can't access."

"Correct."

"That's a sentence I've never heard you say."

"I'm aware." Donovan opened the folder. Inside: a photograph, a personnel file, a single redacted document with more black bars than text. The photograph showed a man in his late forties. Square-jawed, close-cropped gray hair, the bearing of someone who'd spent years in the field and hadn't quite relaxed out of it in the years since. "Mark Sawyer. Fifteen years with the Agency. Station chief in Beirut, then Istanbul, then two years as a domestic liaison. Commendations. No disciplinary record. Family: wife, two kids, house in Alexandria."

Jace looked at the file photo. "Gone rogue."

"Three weeks ago. He accessed a classified server he had no clearance for, extracted a large volume of data, and disappeared for sixty-two hours. When he surfaced, he was in custody, but" — a pause — "he wasn't talking. Standard interrogation has produced nothing usable. He appears to be fully cognizant, fully functional, and completely unwilling to cooperate."

"Or unable."

"That's the question." Donovan's eyes moved to Jace's. "The people above my clearance level want what he took. They want to know where it went and who he gave it to. They've exhausted every standard channel."

Jace looked at Sawyer's photograph. Fifteen years. Commendations. A house in Alexandria. He turned the calculation over with the same detached efficiency he brought to most things and found, underneath it, something he didn't try to name. One of ours, he didn't say. He said: "Where is he being held?"

"Here. Sublevel three."

"How long do I have?"

"As long as you need. Within reason."

"And if what I find is classified above your clearance level?"

Donovan looked at him steadily. "Then I expect you to use your judgment about what I need to know."

It wasn't a directive to deceive. It was an acknowledgment of the position they were both in. A handler running an operative on a mission the handler couldn't fully oversee, and an operative being asked to make decisions his handler couldn't authorize. Jace understood the architecture of it. He'd worked inside it before.

He took the folder. He didn't open it again.

"One more thing," Donovan said. He reached into the desk and produced a second folder, thinner than the first. "You're getting support on this one."

Her name was Kathryn Kline. She was twenty-six years old and she had a quality of stillness that Jace associated with people who thought faster than they moved. An apparent calm that was actually attention operating at a speed that made calm look like the same thing.

She was waiting in the corridor outside the tech operations suite, laptop bag over one shoulder, a tablet in her other hand that she was reading with the focus of someone absorbing rather than skimming. Auburn hair with a streak of something electric at the temple. Blue, maybe, or teal. Hard to tell in the building's fluorescent light. She was dressed the way people dressed in this part of the building: practical, anonymous, slightly too young for the clearance level her badge indicated.

She looked up when Jace appeared. "Jace Adair." Not a question. She'd been briefed.

"Kat Kline," he said.

"Kathryn, technically, but only my dad calls me that, and only when he's disappointed in me, so." She tucked the tablet under her arm and offered her hand. Her grip was firm and quick. The handshake of someone who'd learned to lead with it because she'd had to. "I've read your file. The parts they let me read."

"Well, the parts they let you read are never the interesting parts."

"That's what I figured." She fell into step beside him, which he hadn't indicated she should do, but he didn't slow down. "I've been looking at the Sawyer data, what there is of it. The server he accessed is listed as Project Archive, which is a name that tells us nothing except that whoever named it wasn't trying very hard. The data he extracted is volume-flagged, meaning a lot of it, but the content headers are all stripped." She pulled up something on the tablet without breaking stride. "What I can tell you is that the access logs show four distinct file retrieval sequences, each from a separate partition, over a period of about ninety minutes. He wasn't browsing. He knew exactly what he was looking for."

"Four partitions," Jace said.

"Four very specific partitions." She glanced up at him. "Which means either he had a map, or someone gave him coordinates."

It was good analysis, delivered without editorializing, and Jace registered it as such. He said: "What else?"

"The server he accessed has only been live for eight months. It was migrated from a previous system. Legacy database, original classification date approximately twenty-two years ago." She lowered the tablet. "Whatever he took, it was sitting in a drawer for a very long time before someone decided to move it somewhere more current."

A maintenance worker passed them in the corridor going the other direction. A compact man in his forties, gray at the temples, wearing a photo ID badge that read R. VASQUEZ / FACILITIES and carrying a work order on a clipboard. He was checking something on a panel near a door junction, the small precise movements of someone doing a job they knew well. Jace registered him peripherally and moved on.

"How'd you end up on this?" he asked Kat.

"Donovan's read-in list. I've been supporting operations from this division for two years, mostly signals and data work. He asked for someone who could work a live extraction support role." She paused. "I've never done live extraction support."

"I know."

"You looked at my file."

"The parts they let me read."

She made a sound that might have been a laugh, truncated into professionalism. "Right. Well. I figured the honest answer was better than overselling a skill set I don't have."

Jace stopped walking. They were at a corridor intersection, one branch leading toward the standard operations floor, the other toward an elevator that required a separate key card. He turned to look at her directly for the first time. Really looked, in the way he'd trained himself to look at people, cataloguing rather than just seeing.

She met it without flinching, which was the right response, and without performing confidence, which was rarer.

"Live extraction support means you're going to see things that aren't in any training document," he said. "The subject will be distressed. I'll be distressed, or appear to be. The room is small and the work is not clean. If you need to leave, leave. Don't explain it to me, just go. If you have information relevant to what I'm doing, give it to me in fifteen words or less. If you have questions, write them down and ask them afterward." He paused. "Questions?"

She considered. "Are you always this direct, or is this a new colleague thing?"

"I'm always this direct."

"Good," she said. "I find vague people exhausting." She said it like it was a professional position rather than a preference, and he found himself, briefly and without particularly meaning to, amused.

They went to the elevator.

Sublevel three was where the Agency kept the things that were too consequential for normal detention and too complicated for normal process. The air down here had a quality that Jace associated with institutional permanence. Not quite cold, not quite stale, but sealed. Removed from weather and time and the ordinary friction of the world above. The lighting was consistent, artificial, calibrated to produce neither drowsiness nor discomfort. The doors were heavy and the locks were not standard.

He'd been down here before. Not often. The work that required sublevel three was its own category of work, and he was its own category of operative, and the overlap was infrequent enough that each visit carried its own weight. He walked the corridor with Kat a half-step behind him and read the door numbers as he passed them.

Most of the doors were closed. One of them had sounds behind it that he didn't try to identify. The work done in this building was the work of a nation that needed certain things done and preferred not to know the details of how they were accomplished. This floor was where the details accumulated.

Kat was quiet. She was watching the doors as he was watching them, and he could feel her processing what she was walking through. Not fear, exactly, but the recalibration of someone who was updating a model of the world in real time.

He stopped at 3-14. Flat steel door. A numeric keypad and a reader that required both access code and badge. He entered the code, fourteen digits, changed weekly, communicated only verbally to authorized personnel, and heard the locks cycle.

Before he touched the handle, he checked his phone.

He did it without deciding to. The phone was in his pocket and then it was in his hand and the screen was on, and there was a contact at the top of his recent list that he hadn't called. He didn't examine the name. He looked at it for approximately two seconds. The length of time it took for the thing he wasn't quite acknowledging to make itself felt, and then to be filed in the appropriate column. He put the phone back in his pocket.

He opened the door.

The room beyond was small and sufficiently lit and smelled of antiseptic and the staleness of a space that had been sealed for days at a time. In a reinforced chair in the center of the room, Mark Sawyer, fifteen years decorated, commendations, house in Alexandria, husband and father and whatever else he'd been before three weeks ago, sat with his hands loose in his lap and his eyes tracking to the door with an alertness that was the first interesting thing Jace had noticed about him.

Most subjects in this room looked afraid. Sawyer looked like a man who had made a decision and was waiting to see what it cost him.

Jace entered. He heard the door close behind him.

"Mr. Sawyer," he said.

Sawyer looked at him. Something moved in his eyes. A shift in the quality of his attention, a recognition that had nothing to do with Jace's face and everything to do with what Jace was. As if he'd been told what was coming and had prepared for it.

"I know what you are," Sawyer said. His voice was even. "I know what you're here to do."

Jace pulled a chair from the wall and set it across from Sawyer and sat in it. "Then we can skip the introduction."

He settled his hands on his knees and closed his eyes, and the room fell away, and he went to work.