Chapter 15

We left the café almost at the same moment, but walked in silence.

Sometimes a conversation ends not because the subject is exhausted. But because any new word would only tighten the noose further. The reality around us was losing its solidity, thinning out like old film stock under too powerful a projector lamp, and we both felt it.

The rain started again. Fine, suspended in the air, purely London rain. That kind of rain won't soak you through in a minute — it works differently. It settles on your eyelashes, on your jacket collar, in your hair, as a tiny cold dust, simply reminding you that you're still here. Physically. For now.

We turned toward St James's Park, hoping to lose ourselves among the scattered passersby. Halfway down the path, Helen suddenly stopped short.

"What?" I slowed, studying her frozen face.

She wasn't looking at me. Her eyes were fixed on a distant bench by a sprawling willow. A man sat there. Perfectly unremarkable — the kind of face that fades from memory before he's even out of sight around the corner. Dark jacket, a morning paper in his hands, a cardboard cup of cooling coffee. After sitting like that for a few more seconds, the man calmly stood, tucked the paper under his arm, and walked off unhurriedly toward the Mall.

"Do you know him?" I asked quietly.

Helen shook her head slowly, almost mechanically.

"No."

She paused for a long moment, watching his back — following him with her eyes to where the grey haze between the trees was already starting to swallow him up.

"But this is the third time today, Michael."

"Third what?"

"In the last four hours I've seen the same man on our route. First at Victoria, then by the tobacco shop, now here."

I spun around. The path behind us was nearly empty. The man in the dark jacket had already dissolved into the grey haze, as if he'd never been there.

"Maybe it was just nerves? Seeing things?"

"Maybe," she said too quickly. The way people speak when they don't want to pursue a subject, because the right answer is more frightening than paranoia.

Twenty minutes later we found ourselves in front of an old four-story building on the edge of Westminster. No glossy glass, no abandonment. Just an ordinary, shabby grey brick office block. Five years ago, according to the archive ledgers, this was where the accounting firm Harris & Croft had been housed.

The world had digested this place by now and moved on. On the ground floor, a private dental practice's sign gleamed; on the second, clerks from some small insurance company bustled about. And on the third, right on the fly-specked glass of the entrance, hung an old plastic sign: "OFFICES TO LET."

Nothing special. And it was exactly that perfect, mundane continuity I didn't like. If whoever was running the cleanup wanted to destroy physical traces, they'd have torched this building or bought it up whole. But here everything had been left untouched. Ordinary, cluttered life turned out to be the best camouflage for emptiness.

An elderly caretaker in a worn tweed jacket, smelling of cheap tobacco, fussed with his keys for an unbelievably long time. He apologized, wiped his glasses, complained about the old loose locks that hadn't been changed since the coronation.

While we waited in the narrow corridor, I studied the wall by the lift. Its entire surface was covered in dozens of tiny marks left by old corporate signs. Every company that had ever come through here had screwed in its brass or plastic letters, and then moved out into oblivion. All that was left were four little holes in the plaster and rectangles of slightly cleaner paint. The building's real history, written without a single word — just holes and lighter patches.

"There, please," the caretaker finally got the lock under control and pushed the heavy oak door open. "Not too long, though, I've got a plumber downstairs."

The space was completely empty. Bare white walls with faded outlines from calendars long torn down, an even layer of grey dust on the windowsills, the sharp, stale smell of old wiring and dry cardboard. Helen went straight to the window, looking out at the street through the curtain of rain. I started methodically going through the rooms, checking the empty built-in cupboards.

An ordinary, dead office. Nothing.

A couple of minutes later I'd already turned to leave when my eyes caught a strange optical inconsistency on the floor. In the far corner of what had once been reception, the carpet differed almost imperceptibly in color. An even square, roughly two meters by two. The fabric here was a shade lighter, cleaner than the rest of the surface, but the pile had been crushed down with tremendous force. I crouched and ran my palm over the stiff fibers. There were no marks from furniture legs. The weight had been distributed evenly across the whole area. As if something monolithic and unbelievably heavy had stood there, motionless, for years — something with no sharp edges, just a dense, uniform mass.

"Helen," I called.

She was beside me instantly, standing at my back. We both stared silently at that flattened square.

"A server room?" I guessed. "A rack of UPS units?"

She shook her head, scanning the ceiling and corners:

"No. There's no forced ventilation for a server room here. And no power cabling runs to this corner either."

I ran my palm over the carpet again, moving toward the join with the skirting board, and my fingers found something small and cold. A tiny metal plate right against the wall, no bigger than a fingernail. No markings. Just a matte scrap of gun-metal steel, set flush with the floor.

I took my keys out of my pocket and carefully levered the plate up with an edge. It gave way with a click and lifted. Underneath was an old cable channel sunk into the concrete. Empty. Completely dry and clean — as if someone had been maintaining it, not letting dust collect.

Except for one single object.

At the bottom of the narrow plastic channel lay an ordinary sheet of white A4 paper, folded neatly in half. I pulled it out with two fingers. No trace of age-old dust — the sheet was fresh, as if it had been placed here if not today, then certainly this week.

I unfolded it. On the first side, dead center, sat a single line, printed on an old laser printer with the characteristic faint grain of dried toner:

If you're reading this, then we're too late again.

I heard Helen behind me draw a sharp, hissing breath.

I flipped the page over, hands unsteady. Completely blank. The back of it too. No signatures, no dates. Just those eight words.

And in that moment I understood clearly what frightened me most about this discovery.

This message wasn't addressed to me. It wasn't addressed to any specific person at all. Whoever had left this sheet under the raised floor of an office long gone hadn't been calculating our exact steps. They were simply following an iron mathematical logic: in this system, sooner or later, someone would come here anyway. And that someone would make exactly the same mistakes.