"I'm sorry," she said, in her most professional voice. "I'm not able to discuss the layout of our office. Is there something I can help you with regarding your billing query?"
A pause. Then: "Of course. I apologise. It was just curiosity." And the voice returned to the billing query, answered her follow-up questions correctly, thanked her appropriately, ended the call.
She sat for a moment after the call disconnected. Then she flagged the ticket with an internal note: Customer asked unusual question about office layout. May want to review recording. She moved on to call forty-one.
After the shift, she went to Rajan. He was shutting down his workstation, the end-of-night routine.
"One of my calls tonight," she said. "The customer asked about the floor layout."
Rajan did not look up from his shutdown procedure. "What exactly did they ask?"
She told him.
He was quiet for a moment. His shutdown procedure continued — methodical, each step in order. Then he said: "Did you answer?"
"No. I redirected."
"Good." He stood up. He looked at her. "How many nights have you been here?"
"Four."
"The questions will get more specific," he said. "They're not always obvious — sometimes they're embedded in a normal call so naturally that you answer before you've noticed the question. That's the technique." He picked up his bag. "They are collecting information about the building."
"Who is they?"
"The callers."
"The US clients."
"Some of the calls, after midnight, are not from US clients." He said it the way you say something that sounds insane but is true — with a specific flatness that was not calmness but the cousin of calmness, the tone of someone who has already done the internal work of accepting an unacceptable thing and is now simply reporting it. "Some of the calls come from somewhere else."
"Where?"
