A look up at the courtyard’s angled enclosures reminded him of the Baruch Houses’ walls, both spaces a kind of prison, though these were graffiti-free and there was no one lurking in the shadows selling weed, meth, or H. Ironic, he thought, having traded one prison for another, though he had imagined this one would offer not only a way out but also success and glory. Was it too late for that? Another pull on his cigarette, a thought taking shape as if the smoke were skywriting in his lungs or on his brain: If you are ever going to succeed, ever make a name for yourself, you need to do this. Smith eyed the people across the space and wondered if they could read his thoughts. He had done things in his life he was not proud of; some he had never confessed to anyone. But could he do this?

He was still debating that when he finished his cigarette, continued to debate it in the elevator, was still debating it and all that was at stake, as he made his way across the analysts’ soundless floor. He passed researchers in open cubicles, others in what looked like small padded cells, three walls of tufted gray material to muffle conversation, used when one researcher needed to speak privately to another. He slowed down at a glassed-in conference room where an analysts’ meeting was in progress, one he had not been invited to. He hurried past, fists balled at his side, neck muscles tightening, crossed the space, and sagged into the ergonomic chair behind his desk.

At forty-seven, he was still a criminal intelligence analyst, just one of many in INTERPOL’s Art Theft Division. Every year, he saw other, less dedicated analysts ascend the ranks to join the General Assembly, INTERPOL’s governing body, while he was passed over. Twenty years of logging data and research, twenty years since graduating from New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice with a degree in data science and cryptography, and what did he have to show for it? A chair behind a computer ten hours a day.

Smith heaved a sigh, sat back, and stared up at the long, flat tubes of warm incandescent light. He needed to do something, something big, something unique, something that would be talked about, something to show the men and women at the top he was someone special.

He leaned forward and reread the emails between the two men, then routed them, along with their texts and calls, to his personal email and cell phone, something that would not be questioned—particularly as no one else would see it. He dragged his cursor down a column of documents and files he had been compiling for years, all of them pertaining to the notorious art theft, and opened one labeled Perrone. His center computer screen filled with every known fact on the man: the almost twenty-year correspondence Luke Perrone had conducted with various people regarding his great-grandfather, his art exhibitions and teaching jobs, high school suspensions (there were four, one for smoking in the boys’ room, two for classroom fistfights, one for gang affiliation), a list of women Perrone had dated for more than six months—there were many—with subdocuments on each, a DWI at sixteen, an arrest for breaking and entering, supposedly expunged as Perrone had been a minor, though working at INTERPOL had made it easy for Smith to tap into Bayonne’s police records and obtain a copy, as well as documents on Perrone’s parents and relatives.