Page 69 of His Wall

The doors opened. We stepped in.

The morning was bright for late June. The doorman lifted his hand at us as we came through the lobby. Julian lifted his back. Outside, trees on Eleventh Street had thickened to full leaf, throwing soft shadows on the sidewalk. A delivery truck was double-parked at the corner. A woman with a gray terrier passed us going the other way.

His hand was at the small of my back.

"Two blocks over. Their French toast will change your life."

"I don't like French toast."

"That is because you have not had theirs."

"That is what people who like French toast always say."

"Yes. Because we are right."

I almost laughed. The laugh did not come out, because the part of me that was a federal agent was scanning the sidewalk behind us at a low constant pace and the part of me that was the woman in his shirt twenty minutes ago was holding both at once.

He cut left at the corner of his building.

"Through the garage. Faster."

"Through the — "

"Garage. Two minutes saved. Trust me, this French toast is worth two minutes."

He had already pushed open the side door at the bottom of the lobby stairs. The garage was the residential garage under his building — low concrete ceiling, fluorescent overheads, four rows of parked cars, the smell of gasoline and cool damp concrete that all garages had at nine in the morning.

We came down the short ramp.

His voice bounced off the low ceiling. He was still talking — something about the pastry chef, who was forty-six and Algerian and had walked out of a three-star kitchen in Paris because the head chef had refused to let him use his own bread. The voice carried.

I was scanning. I had been scanning since I had stepped onto the sidewalk this morning and probably for thirty-six hours before that and I had not let myself name what I was scanning for.

The crack came from the ramp behind us.

A flat sharp sound. Compressed. Suppressed. Concrete chipped off the pillar 3 ft. from Julian's head and dust came off it in a thin gray puff that drifted.

I moved.

Before Claire. Before protocol. Before any conscious decision.

I hit him with both hands at the chest. I drove him sideways into the gap between a black SUV and a silver sedan. He went down hard against the wheel well of the SUV and I was on top of him before he had hit the concrete. My right hand was flat against his chest, pushing him down. My head was up. My eyes were on the ramp.

"Don't move."

"Claire — what — "

"Don't move, Julian. Don't move."

I scanned everywhere.

The garage entrance. The ramp. The shadows between the cars on the far side. The stairwell door at the south end. The supply closet. Every line of sight from the ramp down to where we were against the wheel well of the SUV.

His phone buzzed in his trouser pocket.

I reached down and pulled it out without taking my eyes off the ramp.

The screen was lit. A new message. An unknown number.