The elevator took twelve seconds to reach the fourth floor.
I counted them while moving — east end of the corridor, a maintenance alcove barely wide enough for a mop and the particular kind of person who didn't want to be seen. I was the second kind. I pressed in and killed my phone screen and listened to the motor groan up through the shaft.
Twelve seconds was enough time to think.
Three-point coverage meant a minimum of three people plus coordination. Coordination meant a hierarchy. Hierarchy meant someone in that conference room was either running the operation or was the reason for it. The unknown man with the unopened folder was calm in a way that pointed toward running it — but calm people didn't always hold the leash. Sometimes they were the reason someone else needed one.
The elevator stopped.
The doors opened with the specific reluctant drag of municipal hydraulics that hadn't been serviced since a previous administration. I heard one set of footsteps. Measured pace. Not rushing, not casual. Purposeful in the way that people are purposeful when they've done a thing many times and stopped thinking about the individual steps.
The footsteps turned west. Away from me.
I counted four, five, six — then the sound changed. Softer. Carpet beginning where the linoleum ended, which meant they'd turned into the corridor that ran parallel to the conference room's far wall. Not coming to the conference room. Going around it.
Second approach angle.
I stepped out of the alcove.
The corridor was empty in both directions. Whoever had come up was already out of sightline. I put my back to the wall and worked it out. The conference room had two doors — the one I'd been watching, and a secondary access on the far side that Moriwaki had probably used for twenty years to get coffee without walking through the meeting he was supposed to be running. Municipal buildings were full of those. Design decisions made by people who spent a lot of time in meetings they wanted to escape.
Secondary door. Parallel corridor. New arrival who knew which way to turn without checking.
They'd been here before.
My phone. Camie.
*Rear watcher is mobile. Moving toward the building's north face.*
The north face was the service entrance.
I typed: *How many minutes out.*
*Three. Maybe four.*
So the outer layer was collapsing inward. The architecture wasn't just covering exits anymore — it was tightening. Someone had made a decision, or something inside that conference room had triggered a predetermined signal, and now the pieces were moving from perimeter to interior.
I had maybe six minutes before the room was fully surrounded in ways I couldn't account for.
The headache pulsed once, hard, behind my left eye. I breathed through it.
Options.
I could pull Yaoyorozu out. Walk in, interrupt the meeting, manufacture a reason — gas smell, emergency call, anything with enough authority in the delivery to move her before anyone thought to stop it. Clean. Fast. But it confirmed I was in the building, confirmed I had a connection to her, and handed the unknown man information he didn't currently have.
I could wait. Let the meeting conclude on whatever terms Moriwaki and the unlogged third party had arranged, get Yaoyorozu out through the front after, and work the problem with time and distance instead of proximity. Safer for me. Considerably less safe for whatever she'd just agreed to or refused to agree to in that room.
Or I could use the secondary door.
The headache pulsed again. I told it to wait.
The parallel corridor was empty when I reached the far end. Longer than the main hall, lower ceiling — the building's architecture doing that thing where the spaces people weren't meant to occupy got incrementally smaller, as if to make the point. A supply closet. A door marked RECORDS that someone had blocked with a filing cabinet six months ago based on the dust line. And at the far end, a door with a frosted glass panel that matched the one on the opposite side.
The secondary access.
No one in front of it. Which meant either the new arrival had gone past it, or they hadn't come here for the room.
They'd come here for the corridor.
I stopped walking.
The filing cabinet in front of RECORDS was at the wrong angle. Not pushed flush against the door — positioned to give someone standing behind it a clear view of the secondary conference room door while appearing to be furniture. The dust disturbed recently along its right edge. A handprint low on the cabinet's side, where someone had steadied themselves shifting weight.
Someone had been here before I arrived.
I looked at the handprint for a moment.
Pre-positioned. Which meant they weren't reacting to the meeting — they were part of it. The arrival upstairs, the watcher at the north face, the maintenance woman in the lobby. None of them had been triggered by anything Yaoyorozu or I had done. This had been built before we walked in. We'd entered a structure that was already standing.
The only question was whether the structure was built around Yaoyorozu specifically or around whoever showed up to this meeting on her behalf. The amendment Hatsue had flagged. The February filing with the redacted signatory. Someone had wanted to know who was watching that document move.
We'd told them.
I moved to the secondary door and listened.
Moriwaki's voice had changed — higher register, the particular frequency of a man who had just been told something he wished he hadn't heard. "—that's outside the scope of what I can—" A pause. Then, quieter: "I understand."
The unknown man's voice, closer now, and clear enough through the secondary door to hear actual words: "The review window is a formality. What matters is who files the objection."
Silence.
Then Yaoyorozu: "And if no objection is filed?"
"Then the amendment stands. And the district's infrastructure access consolidates under the new holding structure by the end of the quarter."
I stood very still.
Not Yaoyorozu. The district. The notary wasn't a connection to her — she was a connection to the district. She'd been investigating the same infrastructure play from the outside while this man had been building it from the inside. The meeting wasn't a pressure tactic.
It was an offer.
File no objection. Walk away. Let the amendment stand.
In exchange for something. I hadn't heard the exchange yet.
My phone vibrated. Hatsue.
*Found the third signatory. Shell structure. Registered to a holding company out of Nagoya. Parent company is—*
The message cut off. Not a bad connection — the typing indicator appeared, stopped, appeared again.
Then: *You need to see this.*
The elevator motor engaged again downstairs. Someone else coming up.
I had four minutes, probably less, and Yaoyorozu was thirty feet away being offered a deal I didn't have enough information to evaluate, and whatever Hatsue had just found had stopped her mid-sentence.
I looked at the secondary door.
The latch was the same lever style as the main entrance. The same two-centimeter gap. Thirty feet was still too far for Stage One.
But ten feet wasn't.