The lecture hall was deserted when we walked in. It wasn’t a big room-maybe twenty chairs-and it was going to be harder to blend in if we ended up with only a lecturer, my team, and three or four SSD operatives. Kim refused to cancel the operation. He said I was afflicted with a fear of shadows, that it was a result of my living too long in a warped environment. That left us at the mercy of SSD. In the best case, SSD might send only one person, but I had a feeling there would be what we always called belts of security-the key agents, then a team watching them, then a team watching them. The Ministry never worked that way, but SSD was in the business of shooting ghosts, or at least tracking them. They needed a lot of people to do that.
I had assumed the room would also have a few students, several academics, a couple of bureaucrats desperately trying to learn new vocabulary that would help them keep their jobs, and the inevitable party types taking notes on what was said and who was there. It was beginning to look like my assumptions were wrong. At 1:10 there was no lecturer and still no one else in the hall. The short man leaned over to me.
“Maybe we’re in the wrong room.”
“You have inside information?” I said. “Maybe you know something the rest of us don’t?”
He sat back and let a faint frown settle around his mouth. The man from SSD had closed his eyes and was resting comfortably. The third man, the one who didn’t say much, was looking at his hands.
The room was still empty at 1:20 when the door opened. “The lecture has been canceled for unavoidable reasons.” A young woman walked to the front of the room. “We have another group coming in at one thirty, so you’ll have to leave.”
“When was it canceled?” I looked at the man from SSD.
The short man was on his feet. “And why didn’t someone bother to come in and tell us before? We’ve been sitting here waiting. Do you think that’s all we have to do?”
“I don’t know what all you have to do. I do know you’ll have to get out of this room.”
“Is it OK if he stays through the next meeting?” I pointed at the man from SSD.
“And why would it be OK if he stayed?” she asked.
“Because he’s dead.”