If Nazari was watching and had a good view of the door, she would have seen a person entering. The door must have just popped open. A faulty latch mechanism would explain it. I hadn’t noticed either way. The door had latched just fine before. I took the stairs to the third floor. The corridor was the same as the second. Tile floor. Bare walls. No photograph. The third floor office door was directly above the second floor office door.

I tried the knob. The third floor office door was unlocked. Which made me pause because maybe there was someone in there. And if there were, that someone might have seen the doorknob twisting. In which case they might be carefully and quietly retrieving a weapon from the desk drawer and then checking the load, and racking a round into the chamber. If there was a safety they would be quietly clicking it off with a thumb. Then the front sights would be trained on the door around chest height.

But people don’t actually fire weapons blind, into the dark. Who knows? It could be a little old lady looking for the bathroom. I stepped to the side, twisted the doorknob and pushed it open. I let the door swing by itself. The hinges made very little noise, just the swish of lubricated metal on metal. Nothing happened. There was no sound, other than the door on its hinges and muffled Middle Eastern music from the restaurant. The office was dark. I looked in. There was nobody there, only the sparse outlines of a desk. I walked inside and closed the door.

The office had a window out to the street, through which electric light entered. There was a single desk in the middle of the room. On the desk was a laptop computer and a burner phone, identical to the one I had in my pocket. A chair was tucked under the desk. The chair, a desk, a laptop computer and a burner phone. There was nothing else in the room. No shelves, no pictures, no lamp, no plants. The room smelled of fresh paint.