Lexicon

Yeats managed to snag one with a recent time stamp. It was from the building’s security system. Its confidence level was ninety-nine percent. Woolf was outside, right now.
    His office had a balcony. He was mildly tempted to go out and peer over the railing, see if he could pick her out. But that would be risky. That was, possibly, what Woolf wanted him to do. There could be a sniping issue. The fact was, as much as he believed he understood Woolf, she had been missing for a year and he had no idea how she had changed.
    His phone chimed. He felt rising excitement and waited until it was gone. “Yes?”
    “I’m so terribly sorry. But there are so many people who wish to speak to you, and they’re saying quite alarming things.”
    “Is one of those people Frost?” The poet responsible for building security. Yeats had spoken to him from the chopper, in between phone notifications, and asked him to execute certain important, long-planned orders. Specifically, Frost was to fill the lobby with Environmentally Isolated Personnel, men and women with black suits and guns who saw the world through a computer-filtered display and heard nothing but white-listed words. These had proved insufficient to retrieve the word from Broken Hill—the teams sent in had rather spectacularly killed each other—but that meant nothing, because he had deliberately engineered it. He was fairly confident that they could stop Woolf.
    “No, I haven’t heard from Frost.”
    “I’ll speak to Frost,” Yeats said. “No one else.” He closed the speaker. Red boxes continued to slide down his monitors. He saw the word LOBBY. He leaned back in his chair.
    So she’d entered the building. If all was proceeding as he’d instructed, Woolf would currently be on the floor, her hands bound in plastic, electrical tape being spread across her mouth. She would be lifted up and borne to a windowless cell. Then Frost would call.
    He folded his hands and waited. A new red box slid up his screen. POI POSSIBLE SIGHTING: WOOLF, VIRGINIA. SECOND FLOOR. He looked at this awhile, trying to imagine circumstances in which Security might have decided to take Woolf up rather than down. He reached for the speaker. By the time he got the handset to his ear, a new notification had arrived. THIRD FLOOR. Was there a delay on these? A few seconds? It had never mattered before.
    “Frances, would you mind putting the floor into lockdown?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And please attempt to reach Frost.”
    “Right away.”
    His screen blanked. The lights went out. Part of the lockdown. Nothing to be concerned about. He waited. His breathing was steady. He felt no emotion. Minutes passed. The lights came on.
    He pressed for the speaker. “Frances, why has the lockdown lifted?”
    “I don’t know. I’m finding out.”
    Noise in the background. Quite loud; he could almost feel its low echoes through the door. “Who else is there?”
    “It’s . . . how can I help you?”
    A female voice spoke. Indistinct; he couldn’t identify it. The phone clicked off. He slowly put it down.
    He had recognized Woolf’s natural aptitude for attack very early on. It would have been disappointing if she’d fallen to Frost and the soldiers. He would have missed his chance to test himself. Of course, there was the real possibility that she was about to walk in here and destroy him. That was a concern.
    These were feelings. He didn’t need them. He would prevail or he would not.
    He steadied his breathing and began to pray.
O God, be with me and guide my hand. Let me transcend this petty flesh and become Your holy force.
Warmth spread through his body. His relationship with God was his greatest resource. It had allowed him to become who he was. So many promising colleagues had fallen to temptation. They managed their physiological needs, eating and breathing and fucking deliberately and on schedule, taking care to remain in control at all times, but their social needs—their basic human desire to love, to belong, and be loved—these were simply suppressed, because there was no safe way to indulge them. And yet they were named
needs
for a reason. The human animal craved intimacy at a biological level, relentlessly, insistent. Yeats had seen many promising careers derailed by surrenders to intimacy: men who whispered confessions to whores, women whose eyes lingered on children. On such small betrayals were psyches unraveled. He had unraveled several himself.
    He had struggled in his early