He counted heartbeats the way other men counted breaths. For the first hour after dark he let the city settle around him, tuned to the tiny mechanical betrayals that marked a safe house: the reluctant wheeze of a rusted ventilation motor, the distant clatter of a loading bay, the faint, perpetual hum of an old server rack he kept for redundancy. The apartment was booked in a dozen names on paper, none of which had seen use in months; most nights it existed as a shell and a discipline, a place where Cass Hale taught himself patience.
Tonight patience fractured. The knock came three times, precise and uninsistent, a rhythm trained to dissolve certainty. Cass moved toward the noise without lights, feeling the worn grain of the plaster like a map beneath his fingertips. He thought of technique rather than terror, of angles and timing and how a wrong breath in a crowded alley could mean a mission unraveled. His body remembered things his mouth refused to name: the shape of shrapnel, the cold calluses on his palms from holding men steady and watching them stop.
He found her where he’d guessed he would — folded into the shadow beneath the stairwell, wrapped in a threadbare coat, a laptop bag like a wound at her hip. She was smaller than he expected, hair cropped close and cut in crooked lines, an ugly bruise blooming purple across one cheek. Her eyes flicked up at him, sharp as glass, then dimmed.
"You're Cass," she said, voice sandpaper. He would have told her not to talk, but her words were currency and she had already spent them. She shoved a grubby thumb at a sticker on the inside of her bag: a half-scratched logo, the name of a university server left for fools. "I need a place to sit for ten hours. After that, I'm gone. I’ll owe you a favor."
He considered calling her a liar. He considered leaving a note. Instead he found the old instinct to measure risk against human ruin and let her in. She melted into a chair like someone who had learned to accept shelter when it was offered. For a short while the two of them breathed the same air like two strangers tolerating the same train carriage; in those minutes they were not hunted. The sound of rain began at the window, and Cass listened to the city practice its secrets.
It took less than a single minute for the city to change its mind.