Chapter 53 A personal favor

Chapter 53 A personal favor
Nia had already rehearsed what she was going to say by the time she reached Xavier's office door.

She was not the kind of person who prepared scripts. But she had a shape in her head, how much to give, how much to hold back, which words to use so that the request did not invite the question she was not ready to answer. She knocked once and pushed the door open.

Xavier was at his desk. He looked up.

She closed the door behind her.

"I need a favour," she said. "A personal one."

He put down what he was reading without making a production of it. Just set it aside and looked at her. "Go ahead."

"I am looking for someone. A woman. Mid to late forties." She kept her voice even. 

"I have tried what I can reach on my own and I have found almost nothing. I need someone with better resources than I have."

Xavier was quiet for a moment, not the quiet of someone processing what he had heard. The quiet of someone deciding what to ask. "Who is she?"

"I am not ready to say yet."

He looked at her for another moment and then he nodded, once, and let it go. That was something she had learned about him. When he decided to give someone space he gave it fully. He did not leave a door half open.

"Is she a threat to you?" he said.

"No."

"Then I will have Gia start a search. Send him whatever you have. Name, approximate age, last known location, anything."

"I will do it today."

"Good." He picked up what he had been reading. Not dismissively. Just returning. The conversation was done and he was not going to linger in it. "Anything else?"

"No. Thank you."

"You do not need to thank me."

She left.

The walk back to her desk took less than two minutes and she spent all of it thinking about what she had just done.

She had asked him for help and she had not told him why and both of those things were true at the same time and she was going to have to live with the discomfort of that until there was something real enough to justify the full explanation. 

She had been honest with Xavier about almost everything that mattered. This was the exception. She was making it an exception on purpose and she knew it.

She sat down and opened her work files.

The search ran quietly underneath everything else for the rest of the day. She did not check on it. She did not message Gia asking for updates. 

She had asked for help and the help was in motion and there was nothing to do now except wait and work and not let the waiting eat into the working.

She managed that until about four in the afternoon.

Then her desk phone rang. Internal line.

"Nia." It was Gia.

"Yes."

"I have started the search. I want to confirm I have the right details, Hamma Rahman, born approximately forty-five to fifty years ago, last known city is the one from the letter you mentioned?"

"That is correct."

"All right." A pause. "This may take some time. The name is not returning clean results."

"I expected that."

"I will keep you updated." He paused again, briefly. "Is there anything else that might help? A photograph, a profession, a contact name?"

"No photograph." She said it flatly. "There are no photographs. That is part of the problem."

Gia was quiet for a second. "Understood. I will work with what I have."

The line went quiet. She put the receiver down and sat with her hands on her desk and thought about what it meant that there were no photographs. What kind of erasure that required. What kind of intention.

She went back to work.

Xavier found her in her office at half past six that evening.

She was still at her desk, which did not surprise him. What surprised him was that she had clearly shifted from the chronology she had been working on all day to something else entirely. 

The Rahman family records were open on her second screen. The documents that related specifically to the period immediately before the DeLuca partnership, the personal correspondence, the family records, the things that had come out of the investigation into what Vittorio DeLuca had done.

He stood in the doorway.

"I thought you sent the chronology before four," he said.

She looked up. "I did."

"So what is this?"

She glanced at the screen and then back at him. "Cross-referencing."

He came in. He looked at the screen properly. He did not say what he was thinking, which was that the section she had pulled up predated the algorithm theft by several years and had nothing obvious to do with the chronology. He pulled the chair from the corner of the office and sat down.

"What are you looking for?" he said.

She hesitated. Just briefly, just a half second, but he noticed. "Family records," she said. "From the Rahman side. I want to make sure I understand the full picture before the ball."

He looked at her.

She looked back at him.

Another half second. "Possibly."

Xavier sat back. He looked at the records on the screen. He thought about the name she had given Gia, which Gia had relayed to him briefly in passing standard procedure, he was informed of all active searches. He had not asked questions. He had simply noted it and filed it.

But sitting here now, watching her pull up the Rahman family records in the late evening when the floor was empty, he thought about the timing. The public exposure of her birth. The search she had started immediately after. The Rahman family name on her screen.

He did not say what he was thinking.

"Go home," he said instead. "Whatever this is, it will still be here tomorrow."

She looked at him. "I am almost done."

"You said that at five."

Her mouth moved slightly. Not quite a smile. "I will leave in thirty minutes."

"Twenty."

"Twenty-five."

He stood up. "Twenty-five," he agreed. He picked up the chair and put it back. At the door he said, without turning around, "Whatever you are looking for, Nia. You do not have to look alone."

She did not respond to that. He left.