PART 4:

He was fairly sure the secondary sweep wasn’t going to happen. He went back to his ladder and his light fixture and his ceiling cavity and he thought about what he was going to do. His phone buzzed again at 12:40. Not Dana this time. Lily herself, which meant she’d borrowed Dana’s phone. “Dad, can we have pasta tonight?” He stared at it for a moment.

Something caught in his chest that wasn’t a bad feeling. More like the way you feel when something very small and very good cuts through a complicated day. He typed back, “Yes, pasta tonight. Be good for Auntie Dana. I am always good, I know.” He put the phone back in his pocket and climbed back up the ladder. The lunch hour was busy.

The hotel filled with more arrivals, investors, journalists, some people who had the particular self-important bearing of people who had been told this event was important and had organized their identities around attending it. Ethan ate his lunch in the maintenance office. It was a small room on the basement level with a folding table, a microwave that needed cleaning, a coffee maker that was perpetually 3 days from being replaced, and a shelf of manuals for equipment that some of it no longer existed.

He ate a sandwich he’d made that morning, turkey, Swiss, the good mustard that Lily had picked out at the grocery store because she liked the label, and read through the afternoon work orders. There were three remaining items. The HVAC filter in the west corridor, a sticky lock on a fourth-floor suite, and a note from the morning supervisor about checking the event power draw in the ballroom to make sure the AV setup wasn’t going to trip the breakers.

That last one meant he’d be in the ballroom. He finished his sandwich. He He about the man with the tray. He thought about what he knew and what he didn’t know. What he knew. The man’s behavior was wrong in a specific readable way. What he didn’t know. Whether wrong meant dangerous or wrong meant incompetent or wrong meant something more mundane that he hadn’t considered.

He tried to be honest with himself about this. Three years of maintenance work, six years before that of a different kind of work. The habit of reading environments didn’t turn off just because the context had changed. But the habit could also produce false positives. He knew that. He had been wrong before. He was also pretty sure he wasn’t wrong now.

Mutassim. By 2:00 the caterer had moved. Not far. He drifted from the east service entrance to a position slightly closer to the stage near the edge of the left aisle. He still had the tray. The glassware still hadn’t moved. Ethan was checking the electrical panel in the AV alcove at the back of the ballroom.

The ballroom was about a third full now. Staff setting up, early arrivals being ushered to their seats. The event was scheduled to begin at 3:00. He kept his attention on the panel, but his peripheral awareness tracked the caterer with the steady unobtrusive attention of someone who had spent years making sure that unobtrusive attention was the only kind he showed.

The man had shifted again. Closer. Ethan closed the electrical panel and walked slowly along the back wall of the ballroom, taking a route that would bring him past the AV desk and toward the stage left corridor. He moved at work pace. Nobody looked at him. He got close enough to get a better look at the caterer’s badge.

The badge looked right, right font, right color, right lanyard. But there was something about the way it hung. It didn’t have the worn quality of a badge that someone had been wearing all morning. The edges were too clean. The clip was at a slightly unusual angle. It was a small thing. It might be nothing. He thought about Marcus Callaway and the expression on his face.

He thought about 250 people in a room. He thought about Sophia Blackwell standing on a stage. He pulled out his radio and called Prescott. “I need you to do something for me.” He said quietly, stepping into the stage left corridor. “Right now, I need you to call Meridian Event Services directly. Not the on-site coordinator, the main contact.

And ask them to give you the name and ID number of every catering staff member they have deployed in the ballroom today.” Prescott’s voice was cautious. “Ethan, just the list, just a verification. If I’m wrong about this, it costs 5 minutes of your time and we’re done.” A pause. “And if you’re right, then we’re not done.” A longer pause. “Give me 5 minutes.” Prescott said.

“You have three. The event starts in an hour.” He put the radio back on his belt and walked back into the ballroom. The caterer was looking at the stage. Ethan found a reason to stay in the room, a cable taped to the floor near the back that he crouched to inspect, real enough that no one would question it, and waited.

His radio crackled at 2:11. Prescott’s voice was different, quieter, with an edge in it that hadn’t been there before. “Ethan, Meridian Event Services has 11 people in the ballroom today. I have all 11 names. I asked the on-site supervisor to do a head count. How many did he get?” A pause. “12.” The floor of Ethan’s stomach dropped about 2 inches.

“Where’s Callaway?” he said. “He’s I think he’s outside with the motorcade.” “Get him, now! Tell him we have an unverified individual in the ballroom and get hotel security to the east side immediately. Do not spook this guy. Do you understand? Do not send people running at him. Ethan, what are you I’m going to talk to him myself.

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