The lobby smelled like recycled air and floor wax and the particular institutional quiet of a building that processes people without caring about them.
I walked to the desk.
The trick with lobbies is that hesitation reads louder than presence. A man who walks in with direction gets the same three seconds of assessment as everyone else and then he becomes background. A man who pauses at the entrance, reads the room, considers his options — that man gets remembered. So I'd made the decision on the other side of the door and I carried it in with me like I'd had it all morning.
The desk officer was mid-fifties, the particular variety of bored that comes from a job that requires alertness and never provides reason for it. He looked up when I reached the desk. Behind me and to my left, the maintenance woman was still crouched at the conduit panel, tools out, back to the room.
"Visitor registration for the fourth floor," I said. "Hida Consulting. I'm late."
He typed something. "Name?"
"Tanaka Reo." A name I'd used twice before — clean, forgettable, documented in a way that traced back to nothing. "The appointment was moved to two. I just got the message."
He typed again. The screen showed him something that wasn't what I needed it to show him. His expression shifted marginally toward the inconvenienced.
"I don't see a listing for Hida under today's—"
I held his eyes.
Two seconds. Maybe two and a half.
The command was simple: *I'm on the list. Give me the pass.*
His expression smoothed. He reached under the desk, produced a laminated visitor badge, slid it across. "Fourth floor, east bank."
"Thank you."
The migraine arrived before I reached the elevator — not the worst I'd had, but present, pressing in behind my left eye like something had been wedged there and was being incrementally tightened. I kept my face neutral and pressed the call button. The maintenance woman was still at the panel. She hadn't moved. She hadn't looked.
But as the elevator doors opened and I stepped inside, I watched the reflection in the polished metal of the closing doors — and in the last half-second before the gap closed, her head turned.
Not toward me. Toward the desk officer.
She'd clocked the interaction. Not my face — I'd kept the angle wrong for that — but the interaction itself. Someone arriving after Yaoyorozu on an amended appointment for the same floor. In eleven days of surveillance, she'd built a behavioral map of this lobby. A deviation like that would register.
I had maybe ten minutes before she relayed it.
The fourth floor opened onto a corridor that ran east-west with four doors on each side. Fluorescent lighting. Scuffed linoleum. The particular architecture of a municipal building designed by someone who believed function was its own aesthetic. To the right, the east corridor ended at a frosted glass partition with a conference room visible behind it — two people already seated, a third standing near the window. Yaoyorozu wasn't visible from this angle, which meant she was either seated against the far wall or hadn't arrived yet.
The migraine pressed harder. I moved to the water fountain mounted between the second and third doors on the left, stood at it, and didn't drink.
From here I had a partial sightline through the frosted glass. The standing figure near the window was male, mid-forties, jacket without a tie — administrative rather than legal, based on posture and the way he was holding a folder with the easy grip of someone who'd carried folders professionally for twenty years. That was probably Moriwaki. The two seated figures were less clear through the diffusion, but neither had Yaoyorozu's silhouette.
She wasn't in yet. Still two minutes to the meeting.
My phone vibrated. Camie.
*He's not in the café. But I found the second position. There's a sedan in the Beppuken-dori maintenance bay — not the same car. Registered to a logistics company that dissolved four months ago. He's watching the building from the back.*
I typed one-handed: *He knows someone's inside. He's covering the exit, not the entrance.* Then: *Don't approach the vehicle. Note the plate and pull back two blocks.*
She responded immediately. The response wasn't a confirmation — it was a question mark followed by: *You went in, didn't you.*
I put the phone away.
The elevator behind me chimed. I moved slightly further down the corridor, kept my back at a plausible angle, listened. Footsteps — one person, measured pace, low heels on linoleum. Yaoyorozu's step pattern I'd catalogued without meaning to: deliberate, evenly weighted, the walk of someone who'd been told since childhood to move like she occupied space on purpose.
She passed me without pausing. I didn't turn.
The conference room door opened. Voices from inside — Moriwaki's, welcoming without warmth. The door closed behind her.
I let twelve seconds pass, then moved to the east end of the corridor.
The frosted glass was thin enough that shapes resolved into something almost legible if you stood at the correct angle and didn't need detail. Yaoyorozu had taken a seat on the near side. Moriwaki remained standing. The two other figures were clearer now — one was another administrative type, female, taking notes on a tablet. The other was pressed close to the window, partially obscured by the frame.
The partially obscured figure wasn't holding anything. Wasn't looking at Moriwaki. Wasn't looking at Yaoyorozu.
Was looking at the door.
The migraine spiked. I filed it as unrelated and focused on the shape by the window — the angle of the shoulders, the stillness. Meeting participants looked at speakers. They checked their phones. They looked at their notes. They didn't stand motionless at the window's edge watching an interior door with the patient attention of someone waiting for it to move.
Yaoyorozu was in a room with Moriwaki, an administrator, and someone whose behavior didn't fit any version of this meeting I'd modeled.
I checked my phone. Nothing from Hatsue yet on the notary chain. Nothing new from Camie.
The figure by the window shifted slightly, and for one clear second through the frosted glass I caught the angle of their face — turned not toward the door now but toward Yaoyorozu, studying her with a quality of attention that had nothing to do with whatever Moriwaki was saying.
The maintenance woman downstairs had ten minutes of response time. Maybe less.
And the person in that room had been watching Yaoyorozu since before she sat down.