"Which accounts?" he said.
She gave him the three account numbers. She watched his face. Nothing obvious. But his hands, on his desk, shifted slightly — the knuckles changed.
"Standard accounts," he said. "What's your question?"
"The call patterns on those accounts don't match normal customer behavior. The timing, the frequency, the regularity — it's not human. I think you know that."
A long pause. The floor hummed around them — the AC, the quiet call murmur of the people still working, the distant sound of the building being itself.
"Close the door," he said.
She closed the door of his small office. She sat back down.
"How long have you known?" he said.
"Two weeks."
"How far have you gone?"
"Floor ten."
Something moved through his expression. Not surprise. Something older. "You came back from floor ten."
"Yes."
"Most people don't notice the button until much later, if ever. You went in two weeks. And you came back." He looked at her with a new quality of attention — still professional, but something had been added. "What did you see up there?"
"Their database. A record of everyone in this building, sorted by awareness level. And something in the open area at the far end that I couldn't look at directly."
"The Anchor," he said. The capital letter was in his voice — not a metaphor, a noun. "That's what I call it. The thing that doesn't move."
"You've been up there."
"I manage the relationship," he said. He said it the way you say things that have taken a long time to arrive at a short description. "Zenith Solutions has been in this building for nine years. I've been here for eight. The management above me — the directors, the owners — they're aware of the situation. They were told when they took the lease. The building was offered at a price significantly below market rate. The condition was accommodation of the — tenants."
"Rajan calls them the tenants too," she said.
"Rajan has been here long enough to have worked it out independently." He looked tired in a way that was different from night-shift tired. "The tenants use the infrastructure. The call system — they route through our lines to gather data. The physical space — they expand the floor geometry after midnight because they need the space for something we don't have a framework to understand. The people—" He stopped.
