Chapter 8

The cord came up over his collar, and the badge flipped face-up into the light.

For a moment nobody spoke. The holiday strings played on, indifferent.

Laminated. The seal of the Ardenne Group in the upper right corner, embossed so it caught the gold light. Ned's photograph, taken in a beige office eleven weeks ago, in which he looked exactly like what he was. Below it, the assignment line, date-stamped: that day. And below that, the words that did the work:

CONTRACT ETHICS AUDITOR - AUTHORIZED ACCESS - ALL FLOORS.

Sloane's hand was still on the lanyard. She had stopped moving entirely, the way a person stops when the floor has moved under them and they are waiting to find out how far.

Reggie exhaled through his nose, one long breath, and took his hand off the counter.

Ned reached up, gently, and closed his own hand over hers. He didn't squeeze. He simply lifted her fingers off the cord, the way you would lift a child's hand off something hot, and let the badge settle against his cardigan.

"Ms. Berenger," he said, adjusting his glasses with his free hand. "Would you like my preliminary findings read aloud?"

Somebody near the garlands had said, forty seconds earlier, that she'd finally caught one. That person was now looking at the floor.

Nadia Berenger stepped forward. She looked at the badge for a long moment - at the seal, at the photograph, at the date - and then at Ned, and something in her face rearranged itself, the way a face does when it has been reading a page upside down and suddenly sees the words.

"How long have you been on this floor," she said.

"Six hours, ma'am."

"How many incidents."

"Three before this one."

Nadia's eyes moved to Reggie, and Reggie's hand went to his notebook.

Sloane's mouth opened. Nothing came out of it. Her beautiful face was doing something Ned had seen a hundred times in thirty-one years of loss prevention: it was running the arithmetic. The date stamp. The seal. The six hours. Every sentence she had said since 8:49 was now a line in a document, and she was counting them.

"Read them," Nadia said.