Arch/Eternal - Chapter Eight

Amateur Espionage

This is Arch/Eternal, a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

If you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

And if you’d like to follow along with the world-building behind the story, take a look at the companion series shamelessly titled A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Finally, if you’d prefer to follow along on the app, you can do that here:

---

Amateur Espionage

Adam lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, in walking distance from Harvard. The plan was for me to spend a few weeks sleeping on his couch. Decompress, catch up, and visit some schools to see if I wanted to maybe relocate. (My poor parents.) 

Adam spent three full days with me, going to movies, concerts, museums. I did most of the talking. I told him everything. He told me he was proud of me for all of it, top to bottom, and it seemed like he meant it. Anyway it was what I needed to hear. 

I tried to get him to tell me what he’d been up to, but he was slippery, always finding ways to dodge direct questions. Eventually I gave up trying to get anything interesting out of him, and kept my sharpening curiosity to myself. 

Then he told me he had to get back to work, hooked me up with a T-pass and some cash, and cut me loose. I spent a few more days drifting around the city, watching TV, and tried to figure out how to figure out what the hell my brother did with all his time. He had to know that telling me nothing would drive me to extremes. 

At least, that’s how I justified it when I started to secretly follow him. 

How did I learn how to tail someone, you ask? YouTube. The trick, it turns out, is to do it in stages — that is, if you have the time, which, what else did I have?

From having watched him out the window, I knew which corner he turned down every morning. So, one of those mornings, I headed out before him to go get a bagel at a shop down the street. But I didn’t get the bagel — I got a spot to hide. As soon as he passed, I carefully moved to follow him at a safe distance, making sure his back was always to me. Every time he turned another corner, I had to jog a bit to get there in time and make sure I didn’t miss the next turn. 

When he disappeared inside a building, I went back to get that bagel. 

Later that day, contrary to the advice of the videos I’d been watching, and because I had no patience, I snuck around and cased the building he’d gone into. It didn’t seem special. Just some offices. And it looked like there wasn’t any kind of keyed entry, so I went inside, hoping my timing wasn’t so bad that I’d cross paths with Adam, with no reason to be there other than that I was following him. 

Unfortunately, I couldn’t really see anywhere to wait without being obvious. There were some glass-walled office suites, a short corridor, and a bank of elevators. The elevators had floor indicators above them, but I couldn’t figure out how I would be able to see which floor he got off at without standing there in plain sight. 

I looked more closely at the first floor offices and saw “Jensen & Brown, Attorneys at Law” stenciled across the door.

On the way back to Adam’s apartment, I pulled out my phone and looked up Jensen & Brown. They specialized in estate law. There was a number listed near the top. 

I called it.

A woman answered. I put on my best moneyed wasp voice, and told her I’d gotten the number from a friend of mine who said good things. My name was Justine Paul, and I was embroiled in a family dispute involving a nontrivial sum of money — I’d prefer not to disclose details over the phone, thank you — and I hoped that Mr. Jensen or Mr. Brown might be able to have a little sitdown with me at their earliest convenience. Yes, tomorrow would be perfect. 10am? I could make that work. 

Now, I’m not very tall, and at fourteen, I would have been hardpressed to pass for anything north of sixteen without some major adjustments. Thankfully the little bit of cash Adam had given me, combined with what I’d brought with me, was enough to afford a cheap pair of black heels, sunglasses, a used, mustard-colored peacoat, and some perfume that reminded me of the wealthy women I’d met at the handful of fundraisers my parents carted me to as a field experience for running in those kinds of circles.

The whole costume fit into my backpack once I’d emptied it out and hid the former contents in one of Adam’s unused cabinets.

The next morning, I headed out even earlier, armed with a story that I’d signed up for a free two-week trial at a nearby gym. I didn’t have to use the story because Adam didn’t ask, but you never know.

At a public restroom I’d located the day before, I got changed, parted my hair, and pulled it back into a tight ponytail. I applied a somewhat more liberal amount of makeup than usual, including some deep red lipstick I’d picked up several months earlier but hadn’t opened until now. Three spritzes of that perfume was enough to make me dizzy. 

Back then, I was still a couple inches shy of my current towering 5’5”, and those cheap stilts got me all the way to 5’8”. I donned the coat and the sunglasses and looked myself over in the mirror. Dayum, my 14-year-old self thought. 

The last step was to stash my backpack in a stall and hope no one lit off with it while I was away. After giving myself an indulgent muaw in the mirror, I did my best to walk naturally in those awful heels all the way to the offices of Jensen & Brown, Attorneys at Law.

As I walked in, I gripped my coat tightly around my shoulders to hide my shaking hands. 

“Can I help you?” asked the woman behind the desk with a little frown. I recognized her voice. 

“Hi, I’m Justine. I have an appointment.”

“Oh…” she gave me a quick once over before consulting her calendar. “Yes, it...looks like you’re…quite early.”

“Well, you know what they say.” I looked around, as though appraising the office, which I was. I needed to find the right spot to sit and wait.  

When it was obvious I wasn’t going to offer any further explanation for why I had arrived nearly two hours before my appointment, the woman cleared her throat and said, “Right. I can let them know you’re here, but —“

“Oh, no rush. I don’t mind waiting.”

“Are you sure?” she asked as I turned and headed toward one of the chairs off to the side. “I can call you as soon as they’re ready for you…”

“Thank you. That’ll be fine,” I said as I took a seat and pulled out my phone. I had a good view of the bank of elevators from the seat I chose, behind a tall floor plant that I hoped would, along with the sunglasses, make me unrecognizable to Adam if he happened to look over at me in passing. Of course, I was mostly counting on the fact that people generally don’t see things they aren’t, on some level, expecting to see. Adam had seen me leave in a track suit, and had no reason to look for his sister in sunglasses and a new coat hiding behind a big plant in the waiting room of a lawyer’s office. 

That line of reasoning did little for my nervousness. Setting digital traps from the comfort of a bedroom was one thing. This kind of cloak and dagger shit was way outside my comfort zone. But also I would be lying if I said it wasn’t fun. 

Sure enough, he showed up at exactly the same time he had the day before. He passed without so much as glancing in my direction, and hit the button to call an elevator. I barely breathed as I waited for the ding that signaled the doors opening. After another beat, I could hear them start to close again. 

I stood up, pocketed my phone, and said, “So sorry, I just realized I forgot something,” and made for the door.

Heading toward the elevators instead of the exit would look strange, I knew, but it was a risk I had to take. I waited in the bay and watched the display slowly tick to 7, then stop. I waited for one more breath before turning on a high heel to clip-clop for the exit.

Right in front of the glass-walled offices of Jensen & Brown, one of those shitty stilletos snapped at the base and sent me to the floor. It was not graceful. As I landed hard on my hip, I shouted a curse, and saw Jenny pop up and hurry over to the door. 

“Are you OK?!” she asked.

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you.” I yanked the heels off and climbed awkwardly to my feet.

“Alright, well, um, can I— can I help you with anything?”

“No, that’s alright. Thanks again.” There was going to be a pretty gnarley bruise. I tried to walk toward the exit without limping.

“Hey, are you— do you want me to reschedule, or will you be, ah, returning?”

I put up my hand. “I’ll call you,” I said, straightening my glasses.

“OK then. You sure you’re alright?”

Go away! I nodded, smoothing the wince off my face, and made the door to freedom. 

Some spy.

The next morning, looking much more like my cool casual self, and much less like a little girl playing dressup for a school play, I walked quickly past those 1st floor glass walls, and took an elevator up to the 7th floor. 

When I left the elevator, I found that there were two ways to leave the landing, one to the right, and one to the left, each with identical fireproof metal doors propped open, and T-ing into hallways that ran both directions for a few dozen feet before hitting right angles and joining up on the other side. A very boring design. 

Also, a design that would make it hard to spy out which office Adam went into. I circumnavigated the whole floor, and realized I would just have to pick one of the elevator landing exits to hide behind, and hope Adam went the other direction. It seemed like a bad plan, but I couldn’t think of a better one. 

I picked the side with the bathrooms, because there were fewer offices on that side, so it seemed like better odds. Then I sat down and waited.

Naturally, Adam was late that day. By an HOUR. This is when I learned that waiting can be its very own circle of hell. Half a dozen times, elevator doors opened, and half a dozen times, I clung to the wall with my heart pounding and watched someone other than Adam emerge. It got harder and harder to pretend I somehow belonged there. I walked casually in one direction or another, trying not to look conspicuous. I got very good at opening and closing the bathroom door. 

The only thing that kept me from just giving up was the risk of running into him on the way out — it would be just my luck that he happened to show up just as I was leaving. But after an hour, I was desperate, and decided maybe I could make a safe exit by waiting to follow someone who was already headed to the elevators. 

My ticket was a short, tubby guy with a mess of blond hair and a puffy jacket. He smiled politely at me as I stepped up next to him and stared at one of the displays ticking up to our floor number. 

The doors opened, and there was Adam, typing something into his phone. 

I took in a quiet gasp, held my breath, and loped as silently as I could to the nearest hallway. Then I stood there, back against the wall, heart hammering out of my chest, as I heard Adam say, “Oh hey, Fidan.”

“Hallo, Adam,” the tubby guy said. “I have something new I would like to send to you.” He sounded Finnish to me. It also sounded like he worked for my brother. I concentrated on these theories to help slow my heartrate.

“Send it over,” Adam said as he walked straight toward me. 

Shit. 

I bolted to the bathroom. As soon as I was inside, I swung around and pushed the door almost all the way closed, but not quite, then held my breath again, silently grateful for all the reps I’d put in with that door. 

I heard the elevator doors close. 

I waited.

Keys. A door being unlocked. Opened. 

Taking a huge breath and crossing every finger of my soul, I pulled the door open and stuck my head out. 

There. Down the hallway, a door closed. The hallway was empty. That had to be it. I made a strong mental note of which door it was, then scooted over to the elevator and hit the button, bouncing on the balls of my feet as I waited for my getaway car.

***

That night, on the pretense of wanting to go visit a friend in a nearby town, I borrowed Adam’s keys and made copies of the three that didn’t obviously belong to his car or his apartment. 

The next day, I woke up very early, loudly made myself an omelette, and left the mess in the kitchen. Another tactic of distraction, my logic being that if Adam was annoyed at my bad manners, he wouldn’t think too carefully about why I had left earlier than usual. The day before had taught me that I couldn’t absolutley count on him showing up at a specific time.

When I got to the building, the offices of Jensen & Brown were not yet open for business, and the elevators were requiring key cards. I debated whether to stick around and wait, or bail and try again later, before I thought to check the fire stairs. The door to the stairs on that floor was open, and I bounded up the six flights to find that the door to the 7th floor was locked. Thankfully, one of the keys I had copied the night before opened it right up. 

In another ten seconds, I was in Adam’s office. 

I snapped on a light, and thought, No way I get away with this now. If ever there was a person who would have his office set up to detect intruders, it would be Adam. Not that I could see the mechanism of detection, but that didn’t matter. It could be anything. I needed to make the best of whatever time I had.

The first thing I noticed was that this place didn’t look like it belonged to my brother. Sure, it was neat, and spare, but there was also a giant poster of Stephen Curry on the wall, and a signed basketball on a shelf. There were sports magazines on a coffee table. 

What the hell was going on here? Adam didn’t care about basketball at all. Or really any sports for that matter. Had he become a fan in the last few years? Anyone else might jump to that conclusion, confronted with the evidence. But that didn’t track with what I knew about Adam. 

My first thought, actually, was that this wasn’t his office after all. That I’d been mistaken. But no, I used his keys to get in. Was it someone else’s office, then, that he was borrowing? Or that he’d stolen? 

As I tried to make sense of it, I kept looking around, poking through the few items scattered around the room. It was all pretty generic. An executive desk centered under a big window with a good view of Cambridge. A big calendar hanging nearby. A stylish clock. A wastebasket with nothing in it. A little office wetbar, complete with a minifridge. A flatscreen mounted on the wall. Mostly empty bookshelves.

Two doors.

They were on each side of the executive desk. One of them was a private bathroom. I gave an approving nod. Very nice. The other one was locked.

The third key opened it.

When I saw what was inside, I understood.

---

This is the part where I spam you with CTAs:

1. Find the little heart and click that sucker.

2. Leave a comment!

3. Share Arch/Eternal with someone you think would appreciate it: