Rule one: you do not make the call from your own phone. Rule two: you do not make the call from a public phone in the city where you work, sleep, or have ever been photographed. Rule three: you do not make the call at all until you are certain — not reasonably certain, not professionally satisfied, but certain in the way you are certain the ground will hold your weight when you step off a curb. Marcus Chen had learned these rules from a woman who had not followed rule three and was now, by most measures, no longer available to discuss the experience.
He had forty-eight hours. This was not a figure of speech or an approximation — it was the specific window between the moment a classified filing was logged in a system he was not supposed to have access to and the moment someone noticed he had accessed it. Forty-eight hours to decide whether he was the kind of man who did this. He had thought, for eleven years, that he knew the answer. He had made his career on believing the answer was no. The filing had twenty-three pages, and by page six he had understood that the answer had always been yes; it had simply never been tested.
He took the train to a city three hours east, bought a prepaid phone in cash at a gas station, and sat in a diner that smelled like industrial coffee and good intentions. He ordered eggs he did not eat. He watched the parking lot. He composed the number from memory — he had memorized it the same afternoon he had told himself, firmly, that he would never use it — and he sat for a long time with the phone in his hand, because once you make the call you are no longer the person who hasn't made it, and he had been that person for a very long time.
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