Mike arrived back at Schneider's at one in the afternoon, the city air feeling heavier than it had that morning.
He deliberately used the two-hour window before Tyler's three o'clock arrival as a buffer, a psychological decompression chamber separating the man who had been intimate with Aveline in the Schmith residence from the operative who needed to sit in his apartment and calculate the next move in a game that had no winners, only survivors.
The ritual of return was mechanical: the scalding spray of the shower washing away the lingering scent of coffee and gunpowder, the crisp change into clean clothes, and the bitter ritual of making fresh coffee.
He sat at his kitchen counter, the laptop open before him like an altar, the neural interface humming at the base of his skull.
A single question had been running in the background of his consciousness since dawn, a low-frequency vibration that refused to be ignored.
