I saw him from my window on the fourth floor.

I had come home late from the university library, where I had spent six hours pulling every source document related to the 1947 Trieste Protocol annex, building the evidentiary foundation for the declaration Reeves and Cho needed.

My eyes ached.

My back ached.

I had eaten half a granola bar sometime around nine o'clock and called it dinner.

I was reaching to close the curtain when the black sedan stopped at the curb below.

Carlo Mancini got out.

He didn't look up at the building.

He stood on the sidewalk with his hands in his coat pockets and looked up and down the street the way a man looks at a neighborhood he is memorizing.

Then he got back in the car.

The sedan didn't move for forty minutes.

I sat on the floor below the window with my back against the wall and my phone in my hand.

I had Reeves's number.

I had Cho's number.

I had the number for the building's overnight security desk, which was staffed by a sixty-three-year-old man named Gerald who mostly read paperback westerns and would be absolutely no help at all.

I called Reeves.

He picked up on the second ring.

"Miller."

"Mancini is outside my building," I said.

"Black sedan.

He got out, looked around, got back in.

He's been parked there forty minutes."

A brief silence.

"Don't leave the apartment.

Don't turn on lights in rooms that face the street."

"Already done."

"We have a unit two blocks over.

They'll do a pass in the next ten minutes.

Don't call building security."

"I wasn't going to."

"Are you all right?"

I thought about the question.

"I'm sitting on my floor in the dark eating a granola bar," I said.

"So no.

But I'm not panicking."

"Good." A pause.

"Miller — did you tell anyone at Columbia about the declaration?"

"No."

"Anyone at the restaurant?"

"No."

"Anyone at all?"

"My dissertation advisor knows I'm working on the Trieste annex.

He's known for two years.

He has no idea why it suddenly matters."

"What's his name?"

"Professor Daniel Hartley.

He's sixty-seven years old and he has never in his life done anything more dangerous than argue about footnotes."

"We'll run a check anyway."

The sedan's headlights came on.

It pulled away from the curb and moved slowly down the street.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.

"He's gone," I said.

"For now," Reeves said.

"Pack a bag tonight.

Not everything — just enough for a week.

Keep it by the door.

If we need to move you, we need to move you fast."

"What about my mother?"

"I made the call this afternoon.

There's a case worker being assigned.

It moves slowly, but it's moving."

I pressed my head back against the wall.

Above me, the curtain moved slightly in a draft from the old window frame.

"Reeves," I said.

"What happened to the three witnesses who didn't make it to court?"

He didn't answer immediately.

"One was a bookkeeper," he said finally.

"She was in a car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike.

The other two — a port official and a shipping broker — both relocated abroad within six weeks of being approached.

We never heard from them again."

"Relocated voluntarily?"

"We don't know."

I looked at my packed bookshelf across the room.

Three years of research.

Annotated copies of documents most people had never heard of.

A dissertation that had started as an academic exercise and had somehow become the most dangerous thing I owned.

"I'm not going to relocate abroad," I said.

"I know," Reeves said.

"That's why I'm asking you to pack the bag."

I packed the bag.

Then I sat at my desk and kept working, because the filing window was now seven days away, and the declaration wasn't finished, and somewhere in this city a man named Dominic Russo was deciding exactly how much of a problem I was.

At three forty-five in the morning, my phone buzzed.

A text from a number I didn't recognize.

*You should have walked away when he told you to.*

I forwarded it to Reeves.

Then I kept writing.

The granola bar was gone.

I found half a sleeve of crackers in the back of a desk drawer.

I ate those instead, and I worked until the sky outside the window went from black to grey to the particular pale blue that means the city has decided, once again, to keep going.

So had I.