Yara
The address she had given him was in the medina, off a street that did not appear on the routing app he used in European cities and which required a different app, a local one, to navigate at all. The taxi left him at the Bab Fahs and indicated with some precision that this was as far as he would go. Daniel had two hours of sleep and the alertness of someone who has replaced rest with forward motion and not yet noticed the cost.
November in Tanger was not what Amsterdam had prepared him for. The cold he had carried through three days — the canal wind, the grey of the water, the chill of conference rooms set against autumn — was replaced, at seven in the morning, by an air that was mild and faintly salt-threaded and carried the smell of charcoal from somewhere he could not identify. His jacket was wrong for it. He kept it on.
He found the street by counting, which was what the local app recommended, and the door by colour, which Yara had specified in her message: blue, not the one with the grille, the one after it. The door was blue and had a brass knocker in the shape of a hand. He had seen these before and still did not know their name. He knocked twice and waited.
She opened the door herself. She was shorter than he had pictured from the photograph — the photograph was professional, a headshot from Arken's published team page before it was taken down — and she was wearing reading glasses, which she removed before she spoke, and there was about her the quality of someone who had been working before he arrived and had not entirely stopped.
"You found it," she said. Not a question.
"The app was good."
She held the door and he stepped into a room that was higher than the building's exterior suggested: whitewashed walls, a low table covered in papers, two windows giving on to an interior courtyard where a lemon tree stood in a terracotta pot and nothing else did. The light from the courtyard was the colour of diluted honey. On the wall above the table she had pinned a hand-drawn diagram — too far away for Daniel to read, but the structure was visible, the boxes and arrows, the layered tiers of something architectural.
"Coffee," she said. "Sit."
He sat at the low table and she made coffee in the kitchen without closing the door and he did not look at the diagram on the wall. He looked at the papers on the table instead, which were face-down, which was deliberate, and then he looked at the courtyard. The lemon tree had three lemons on it, at different stages of ripeness — one still green, one turning, one fully yellow and heavy on its stem. He wrote none of this down. He was in the part of an interview before the interview begins, when the room is still telling you things and the notebook would close it.
She brought two cups and sat opposite him, her legs tucked beneath her on the cushioned bench, her glasses back on. She was, he thought, late thirties. She had the habit of stillness. He had interviewed many people who were still and most of them had learned it professionally, as a performance of composure. Hers felt older than a professional habit — like something she had brought with her from somewhere else, somewhere that had required it.
"Tell me about the document," she said.
He told her. He told her the same things he had told his lawyer Vermeer in Amsterdam: the board minute from February, the Phase 3 scoping document, the accountability attribution language, the delivery method. He watched her face as he spoke and her face gave him nothing.
When he finished, she was quiet for a moment. Then: "When you say you verified it — what does that mean to you?"
"Consistent with Arken's internal formatting. Board date cross-referenced against a public filing. Named executives confirmed as having roles at that time."
"You confirmed it was consistent."
"Yes."
"Not that it was complete."
He looked at her. "No. Not complete."
She took her coffee cup in both hands and held it rather than drinking it. "Who sent it to you?"
"I don't know. Physical delivery. No return address."
"No digital trace? No email first, nothing indicating who had access to that document tier?"
"Nothing."
She nodded slowly, as though this confirmed a calculation she had already made. "And you're here because you believe I can verify what you have."
"You were Head of Ethics. You left eight months ago. You would have had access to—"
"I know what I would have had access to." She set down the cup. "I'm asking what you believe I can add."
The question was not rhetorical and not hostile. It was, he realised, a genuine taxonomy question — she was asking him to state his theory of what she was for. He had been in enough interviews to know when a question was designed to understand his frame before she showed him hers.
"Independent confirmation," he said. "And context I don't have."
"That's two different things."
"I know."
She looked at him. Through the courtyard window, something moved in the lemon tree — a bird, settling.
"Mr Voss," she said. "I have been here for eight months. In that time, three journalists have contacted me about this story. The first two I did not meet. You I met because your Nakamura piece demonstrated a level of technical literacy that the other two did not have and because you asked different questions." She paused. "I'm going to ask you a different question now."
He waited.
"Your document arrived the morning after your piece was published."
"Yes."
"You published the piece at what time?"
He felt something move in him — the same movement he had felt at forty thousand feet over France and put in a seat pocket. "Eleven-fifteen in the evening."
"And the package arrived?"
"Before six."
She said nothing. She looked at him and waited.
He said: "I noted the timing."
"Where?"
"My notebook."
"Not your typed record."
"No."
She was very still now. "I'm not accusing you of anything," she said. "I'm asking you to tell me what you wrote in your notebook and why you wrote it there."
The room was quiet. Through the window the lemon tree held its three lemons at their different stages. On the wall above the table the diagram waited in its tiers. He had not looked at it directly yet and it was in his peripheral vision the whole time, the way something is when you are deciding whether to look at it.
"I wrote that the timing was either coincidental or it wasn't," he said. "And I wrote both versions and closed the notebook."
She looked at him for a long time. Then she said: "I have something different from what you have. More complete." She did not move toward the papers on the table. "I need you to come back in the morning."
"My filing deadline is Wednesday evening."
"I know when your deadline is."
He looked at her.
"Come back at eight," she said. "I'll have it ready."
He stood. She stood with him and walked him to the door and opened it without ceremony. The street outside was louder now — a cart passing, voices from somewhere above. He stepped out and she was already closing the door and then she paused.
"The diagram on my wall," she said.
He had not asked about it. He had not even looked at it directly. He looked at her.
"You didn't look at it. Most people would have." She held his gaze for a moment. "Come back at eight," she said again, and closed the door.