"Operations," she said.
Operations. Dispatch, then, or the warehouse liaison team on fourteen, or one of the night-shift coordinators who came up from the depot in fleeces and work boots and stood around the coffee machine on fifteen as if they owned it. That would explain the jacket. It would explain the shoes, even, the stupid clean shoes, somebody's idea of dressing up for a first day. Vanessa felt a flicker of something that might have been relief and it went out almost immediately, because none of the night-shift people had ever stood in the lounge looking under the sofas, and because the operations team was, as of this week, about to be reporting to a person whose name she still had not been told.
An outside hire, Gerald had said in his office last Tuesday, with his hands folded on the desk and his eyes not quite meeting hers. Very strong in turnarounds. The board was unanimous. He had said other things, kind things, about her value to the business and the Brenmoor relationship and how much he relied on her, and she had nodded and said she understood, and then she had gone down to the car park and sat in her car with the engine off for twenty-five minutes, holding the steering wheel at ten and two like a learner.
"Operations," she said, "is a big word."
"It's a big department."
"And nobody from operations came down to meet you."
"Someone from HR did."
"Who has gone for coffee."
"Who has gone for coffee," the woman said, and the corner of her mouth moved, very slightly, as though some part of her found this genuinely funny, and that was the moment Vanessa's voice went up.
She didn't hear it go. She only knew afterwards, from the way Sal's head came round at the desk with the phone still at his ear, and from the way the sound bounced back at her off the glass. "I'm glad you think this is amusing. People lost their work. Somebody lost a passport. We've had police in this building. I've spent three weeks having meetings about how to stop exactly this kind of thing."
"What kind of thing?"
"Strangers wandering in off the street and making themselves at home."
"I'm not making myself at home. I'm standing in a lobby."
"Next to the lounge."
"Next to a sofa," the woman said. "I'm looking at where your camera points, if you want to know. It doesn't cover these seats. It covers the desk. That's probably why your man with the bags picked this spot." She said it without heat, an observation, as if she were pointing out a loose floor tile. "You might want to put that in the next review."
Vanessa stared at her. For a second she couldn't find a single word, and the gap filled with heat, up her neck and into her face, and with it came a sudden clear picture of how she must look: a senior director in a blazer that had cost more than her first car being lectured on building security by someone who smelled of engine oil. Being made a fool of. In the lobby. At ten to nine on a Monday, with people starting to come in.
"How would you know what the camera covers?"
"I looked."
"Why would you look?"
"Habit."
That was not an answer anyone innocent gave. Vanessa was sure of it, as sure as she had been of anything in months, and the certainty was such a relief after a week of not being sure of anything at all that she leaned into it with her whole body. She stepped in. The space between them closed to an arm's length, then less. She could see the fine scuffing on the woman's jacket now, a pale abrasion running across the left shoulder as if it had been dragged along concrete, a loose thread at the cuff. She could smell coffee on her own breath. She was taller in her heels, a few centimetres, and she used them, lifting her chin so she was looking down.
Nadia did not step back. She thought about it, and decided against it, and the deciding took a fraction of a second and drew on nearly twenty years. If you stepped back from someone like this, they followed. Every time. She had learned that on a dock in the dark from a forklift driver twice her size who had not liked being told his load was unsafe, and she had learned it again in a community gym above a tyre shop, where an old trainer called Benny had tapped her on the sternum with two fingers and said, Hold your ground till you can't, then move. Don't dance backwards for them. So she held her ground, and she kept her hands loose and out of her pockets now, and she kept her voice where it was.
"You're very close," she said.
"You're in my building."
"It's not your building."
"It's more mine than yours."
Nadia let that go past her. There was a lot she could have said to it and none of it was useful. She was aware of her pulse, slower than she'd expected, and of the cold coming off the window glass behind the other woman, and of the guard at the desk, who had finally put the phone down on the counter without hanging it up and was half out of his chair with the slow, apologetic movements of a man whose knees had opinions. He wasn't coming over. He was watching to see if he needed to.
In the corridor behind the gates, Marcus heard it through the wired glass. Not the words, not at first. The pitch. He had spent six years in uniform and another nine in buildings like this one, and he had a kind of radar for the exact tone a voice took when an argument was turning into the other thing. It wasn't loudness. Loud was fine. Loud was a man shouting into a phone about a missed delivery. This was the sound underneath loud, a tightening, a voice going thin and hard at the edges.
He looked up from the alarm panel. Through the strip of glass he could see Vanessa's back, the beige of the blazer, and someone facing her, dark jacket, dark hair. They were too close together. He could see that from here. People who were just talking didn't stand like that.
He clipped the panel door shut and started walking. Not running. Running made things worse more often than it made them better, and anyway he didn't know what he was looking at yet. It was probably nothing. It was probably Vanessa telling some courier where to stand. He badged himself through the service door and the lock thunked and the lobby air came at him, cooler, bigger, full of that faint hum from the ceiling and her voice in the middle of it.
"I want to see some proper identification," Vanessa was saying. "Not a piece of plastic with nothing on it. A driver's licence. Anything."
"No."
"No?"
"I don't have to show you my licence. You're not police and you're not security." The woman's voice was quieter now, which made it worse somehow, because it made Vanessa's sound shrill by comparison. "If you've got a concern, there's a guard right there. Talk to him. I'm happy to wait."