By the time Agent Corvin Vale was summoned to Briefing Room Three, the rain had begun its nightly work of polishing the city into a sheet of black glass.

The building that housed Directorate Section Nine did not officially exist. It had no number on the street, no name on the brass plaque beside the door, and no listing in any municipal archive anyone could access without signing three waivers and surrendering a tooth. Inside, however, it was all walnut paneling, quiet carpets, and men and women speaking in tones that suggested civilization was being preserved only by their continued employment.

Corvin had been employed there for twelve years.

He had crossed frozen borders with microfilm stitched into his collar. He had spent nine days in a shipping crate to overhear one sentence from a defense minister. He had once pretended to be a minor duke for four months because the real duke had developed a gambling problem and vanished into Nice. He had done all this with the professional melancholy of a man who accepted that absurdity was the natural cost of patriotism.

Even so, the file waiting for him on the lacquered table gave him pause.

Director Halden stood at the head of the room with one hand resting on the folder as though it were a relic. He was a grave, silver-haired man with the voice of a funeral procession and the personal conviction that every operation, no matter how ridiculous, became noble once spoken aloud in sufficient baritone.

Beside him sat Analyst Vey, who believed every map was improved by additional pins, and Colonel Morrow, whose face had been folded so many times by suspicion that it now appeared permanently creased.

“Agent Vale,” said Halden, “thank you for coming at once.”

Corvin took his seat. “I gathered it was urgent.”

“It is,” Halden said. He opened the folder with ceremonial precision. “Tomorrow evening, at precisely nine-thirty, you will infiltrate the headquarters of Bellarmine Consolidated Holdings.”

Corvin waited. Bellarmine was exactly the sort of corporation that looked villainous even on its annual charity posters. It occupied a tower of smoked glass and pale stone in the business district and maintained the public fiction that it manufactured adhesives. Most intelligence services quietly agreed it probably manufactured much else besides.

Halden slid a photograph across the table.

It was of a briefcase.

Not even an alarming briefcase. Brown leather. Brass corners. Modest handle. The sort of thing a middle manager might take to lunch.

Corvin looked at it for several seconds. “That,” he said carefully, “is the objective?”

“The Sterling Case,” said Vey, with the breathless reverence of a curator unveiling a crown. “Modelled in calfskin, reinforced seams, double latch, interior dividers. According to our sources, Bellarmine’s most sensitive project files are placed inside it nightly.”

“And where is it kept?” Corvin asked.

Halden met his gaze. “Fourth floor. Office 417.”

Corvin nodded once. “Behind a vault door?”

“No.”

“In a secured archive room?”

“No.”

He shifted in his chair. “Then in a private safe concealed behind a painting of maritime weather?”

Morrow frowned. “No, man.”

Corvin looked back at the photograph, hoping some hidden detail would emerge if he stared hard enough. None did. It remained a briefcase. Brown, ordinary, offensively accessible.

“Where, precisely, in Office 417?”

Halden consulted the file. “On a desk.”

There was a silence.

It was not the dramatic silence that followed the announcement of war or betrayal. It was the softer, more intimate silence that followed a statement so profoundly foolish that language itself hesitated to continue.

Corvin folded his hands. “On a desk.”

“Yes.”

“In the office.”

“Yes.”

“Unlocked?”

Vey blinked. “Naturally. Otherwise how would the chairman review the contents?”

Corvin turned slowly from one superior to the next, as though one of them might yet smile and admit this was a test of his composure. No such mercy presented itself.

“With respect,” he said, “why are the state-threatening secrets of Bellarmine Consolidated being stored in an ordinary briefcase in an unguarded office?”

Three faces regarded him with something perilously close to disappointment.

Morrow leaned back. “Because that’s where such things are kept.”

Corvin let that settle, but it settled nowhere. “I’m sorry?”

Halden steepled his fingers. “Agent Vale, for over forty years, the transfer of industrial and strategic intelligence has relied upon a series of well-established conventions.”

“Conventions,” Corvin repeated.

“Quite so. Sensitive documents are placed in briefcases. Briefcases are left in executive offices. Executive offices are located on upper floors with broad windows and expensive decanters. Men like Bellarmine trust architecture. It makes them careless.”

Corvin glanced again at the photograph. “Or perhaps,” he said, “it makes them decorative.”

Vey gave a small, pitying sigh, the sort usually reserved for children who had not understood a hymn. “You are overcomplicating it.”

He stared at her. “I am trying to understand why no one has simply walked in and taken it before now.”

“Because,” said Halden, with mounting patience, “no one has been you.”

That was the kind of line meant to end discussion. In another room, in another operation, it might even have worked. But Corvin had spent too long crawling through the machinery behind grand statements to be soothed by them.

“Has anyone confirmed the case contains anything at all?”

Vey straightened indignantly. “Our source inside Bellarmine overheard the phrase ‘put it in the briefcase.’”

“Once?”

“Twice.”

Morrow tapped the table. “From two separate meetings.”

“That is still a phrase people use,” Corvin said. “It does not necessarily mean the fate of nations has been tucked beside a fountain pen and railway receipts.”

No one wrote that down.

Rain ticked at the dark windows behind them. Somewhere deeper in the building, a telephone rang with the lonely insistence of bureaucracy.

Halden closed the folder. “Agent Vale, your caution does you credit. It is one of the reasons you are our finest operative. But there comes a moment in every assignment when a man must cease asking why the enemy behaves as he does and instead exploit the fact that he does.”

Corvin sat very still.

There was, he reflected, a particular fatigue known only to professionals: the exhaustion of being the only person in a room alarmed by the correct thing.

At length he said, “So the official position of Section Nine is that Bellarmine Consolidated has placed its most precious secrets in a normal briefcase, inside a normal office, on a normal desk, and that my reluctance to accept this makes me the unusual one.”

“Yes,” said Halden.

“Unquestionably,” said Morrow.

Vey offered him an encouraging smile. “It really is all quite straightforward.”

Corvin looked down at the photograph one last time. The briefcase sat there in mute, bovine innocence, as if butter wouldn’t melt on its latches.

Then he exhaled through his nose, took the file, and rose from his chair.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll go and steal the most important object in the city from the least imaginative hiding place in recorded espionage.”

Halden gave a solemn nod. “I knew you would understand.”

Corvin tucked the folder under his arm and made for the door.

He understood, certainly. He simply suspected that understanding and confidence were not, in this instance, the same thing at all.