He was somewhere in his forties, compact build, wearing a dark jacket with a rail authority patch on the sleeve — but the patch was wrong. She saw it immediately. The rail authority logo had the words running in the wrong direction, the kerning slightly off, the kind of error that only existed on a forgery made from a downloaded image. He had a laptop open on the floor beside him and his hands were inside the panel, working at something she couldn’t see.
He looked up.
For a moment neither of them moved.
His eyes were very calm, which frightened her more than anything else had. Not the eyes of someone caught doing something wrong. The eyes of someone recalculating.
“Maintenance,” he said.
“I know,” Maren said.
She walked back the way she came, steadily, not running, the way you don’t run when an animal is watching you. She came out through the corridor door and went directly to Gregor Schuh’s window and said, in a voice that was very quiet and very clear: “There is a man in your service corridor with a laptop connected to your utility panel. He has a fake uniform patch and he has been on your network long enough to clone your access point. You need to call the police right now and you need to do it from a phone that is not connected to this building’s Wi-Fi.”
Gregor stared at her.
“Right now,” she said.
He reached for his personal cell phone.
Maren moved away from the window, scanning the terminal. The school group was clustered near the vending machines. A woman with a red suitcase was sleeping across two seats near platform two. An older man in a wool coat was reading a newspaper at the far end of the hall, and Maren clocked him the way she always clocked waiting men — duration, stillness, angle of body — and found nothing alarming. She moved toward the main entrance, wanting distance from the service corridor, wanting sightlines.
The departure board flickered.
Every train on the board reset to the same number: forty-seven minutes.
Not a malfunction. A message. Or a timer. She couldn’t tell which, and the difference mattered enormously.
She was still deciding when two plainclothes officers came through the main entrance at a pace just below a run, badges already in hand, heading for the ticketing area. Behind them, a third officer spoke into a radio. Response time was under four minutes, which meant Gregor had called before she told him to.
Maren stopped walking.
She turned that over. Gregor had already known. He had already called. He had been bracing at that counter not because he was hiding something from her, but because he was waiting — waiting for backup, waiting for instruction, waiting with the particular tension of someone who has been told to hold position and not cause panic.
The plainclothes officers went past the ticketing window without stopping. They went through the service corridor door.
Thirty seconds later, one of them came back out and spoke briefly to Gregor. Gregor nodded. He picked up the desk phone and made a call that resulted, two minutes later, in an announcement over the PA system: a mechanical issue, brief delay, passengers please remain in the main hall.
The man in the forged jacket was not in the corridor when the officers entered. The laptop was gone. The panel was closed.
Maren gave a statement to a detective named Osei Tamboli who had arrived by the time the terminal doors were quietly locked from the outside — not sealed, just locked, the kind of thing you don’t notice unless you try to leave. She described the man precisely. Compact. Forties. Calm eyes. She described the laptop, the rogue access point, the burnt-copper smell she’d noticed when she first walked in.
Osei Tamboli wrote everything down. He thanked her. He asked her to stay in the terminal.
It was only later — much later, sitting in a plastic chair near platform four while technicians in civilian clothes moved quietly through the building — that Maren understood what the burnt-copper smell had been.
Not a malfunction. Not ventilation. Soldering. The smell of fresh solder on new circuit connections, the kind made when you are splicing something into a system that wasn’t designed to receive it.
The man in the corridor hadn’t been stealing data.
He had been installing something.
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