By nine on Sunday night the nod had its own legal pad.
Mei Lin had set it beside the tea, yellow and ruled, with a heading already printed across the top in her small square capitals: THE NOD. On the windowsill the succulent had a ruler propped against its pot, which had nothing to do with the nod and which neither of them mentioned. Raza's session notes were open on her phone. For the day, under Bagas, he had written one word and underlined it.
"'Nod,'" she said. "Underlined. Start with what it isn't."
"It isn't yes." Vael sat down and pulled the tea toward him. "Wahyu shook his hand, asked if he was still not talking, and Bagas nodded. Wahyu walked away with a plan."
"Which was?"
"Leg locks. He'd already decided Bagas was going to sit there and take them." He drank. "So Bagas let him. Left him the heel on purpose. Wahyu took everything he was offered and built the whole attack out of it."
She clicked the pen and wrote for a while. "So the signal is real and the meaning isn't."
"Yes."
"That's a lie with better manners."
"It isn't a lie. He never said anything."
"I'm aware that's worse," she said, and underlined something twice. Then she put the pen down. "Show me."
"Show you what?"
"The nod."
He nodded.
"What did that mean?"
"Nothing."
"Coming from you, that's alarming." She picked the pen up again. "Tomorrow. Dato Azlan wants me at the field briefing at ten. Actual officers, not analysts."
Vael nodded.
"Stop that."
"I'm agreeing with you."
"You don't know that," she said. "I don't know that. Nobody is ever going to know anything again."
On Monday the whiteboard said week seven, with a small three underlined beneath it. Bagas came in at eight-nineteen and nodded at Raza.
Faris, halfway through his wraps, stopped and watched it land. "Which one?"
Bagas nodded.
Faris studied him for several seconds, then went back to his wraps with the face of someone who suspected he'd been losing arguments to that nod for years and wasn't ready to audit them.
"I knew," Raza said from the desk.
"You didn't," Jin-ho said.
"I suspected."
"You say that when you didn't know."
Raza picked up the handheld timer and pretended not to hear. "Nine o'clock. Tokyo. Vael, you're Chul-han."
Vael looked up from the bag. "Now I'm Chul-han?"
"He waits four-tenths of a second after the other man commits. Then he comes in. Not three-tenths, not five." Raza held up the timer. "You wait better than anyone in this building, but you wait by reading. Today you don't read. You count."
Jin-ho took his position at the center of the mat. Jab, jab, hip loaded for an Eclipse that never left. Then the short body shot from the same geometry, and he was settled again by the time the timer in Raza's hand reached four-tenths.
Vael hadn't moved.
"Enter," Raza said.
"Why?"
"Because he committed."
"He threw two jabs and a body shot," Vael said. "The jab hasn't meant anything yet today. Why would I walk into the range of a kick I've never seen come off it?"
"He's right," Faris said from the far bag, and Bagas nodded, which now meant nothing at all.
Jin-ho frowned. "Chul-han has eight fights of footage on that jab."
"Footage is what he knows," Raza said, and set the timer on the desk. "Standing in front of you is what he believes. Right now your jab means nothing, so the trap has no bait." He turned to Jin-ho. "Does it mean Eclipse today?"
"No."
"Then make it mean Eclipse. Throw the real one off it, twice, and let him feel it. Then he waits for it. Then you break it."
Jin-ho was quiet for a second. "So I have to tell the truth twice before I can lie."
"Most fighters do it the other way round," Raza said. "They lie first and wonder why nobody believes them."
At the water station afterward Vael cornered Bagas.
"Does it ever mean yes?"
Bagas thought about it with his whole face. "Sometimes."
"How do I tell?"
"You don't."
Vael waited for more. Bagas nodded, picked up his water, and left him standing there trying to work out what he'd just been told.
Mei Lin came home at nine, stepped out of her shoes by the door, and ate cold noodles standing at the table straight from the takeaway box, which Vael had learned was how she told him the day had been long without saying so.
"Field briefing," he said.
"Twelve officers and a whiteboard." She stabbed at the noodles with her chopsticks. "The field lead looked at me when I walked in and said, 'So you're the analyst.' The way you'd say, 'So you're the intern.'"
"What did you say?"
"Yes." She chewed. "Then I stood up and told him the terminal entity was overdue."
"Overdue."
"Victor's people never ran the last company in a chain for much more than a year. They swapped it. Woke up a dormant one, moved the money across, retired the old one." She drew it on the tabletop with a chopstick. "This one is fourteen months old. And a swap is the one moment the person behind it has to touch the paperwork themselves, because somebody has to sign the reactivation."
"So you wait for the swap."
"You watch the registry and the registered address, and you catch the hand that signs."
"And if you know the hand?"
The chopsticks stopped halfway to her mouth. "They were inside it while I was," she said. "I've probably walked past them in a corridor." She ate the mouthful anyway and put the box down. "I'd rather know the signature than the face. Faces lie better. Anyway. He asked how I knew. I said I'd spent eighteen months learning how they think."
"And?"
"He wrote it on the whiteboard." She said it flatly, and then her mouth went crooked. "Afterward he asked for my extension. It was already on the whiteboard. He'd written it himself."
"Did he say anything else?"
"He asked if I'd be at the next one. I said I'd be wherever the whiteboard needed me." She considered that. "It sounded better in my head."
"How was it, really?"
"Being looked at while I'm right?" She turned the box a quarter turn on the table. "Strange. Everyone in that room was watching me, and I kept waiting to feel exposed, and mostly I felt like I'd finally been let into a room I'd been standing outside of for a year and a half." She shrugged one shoulder. "Dato Azlan didn't say a word the whole meeting. At the end he said, 'Correct order of operations,' and left."
"You were nervous."
"Slightly." She held up her thumb and finger an inch apart. "That much. You're allowed to have noticed."
Vael started to nod, caught himself, and said, "Good."
"Thank you," she said. "Was that a yes?"
"It was a good."
"Better."
"I asked Bagas if it ever means yes," he said. "He said sometimes. I asked how you tell."
"And?"
"You don't."
She pulled the legal pad across the table and wrote it at the bottom of the page. "That's Dato Azlan," she said. "That's his entire face."
Jin-ho spent Tuesday and Wednesday throwing the real Eclipse off the jab until Vael's thigh had formed an opinion of him. On Thursday they ran the test again with one change.
Jab, Eclipse. Jab, Eclipse. Vael caught the second one on the thigh and said a word Raza chose not to hear. Then the third jab came, and the first time Vael got greedy and went in at three-tenths, straight into a body shot that hadn't finished arriving.
"Early," Raza said.
They reset. The second time he flinched and went in at five, and the Eclipse was already waiting.
"Late."
The third time he stopped thinking about the jab, and the timer, and what Jin-ho was supposed to be doing, and just counted, the way Chul-han would have counted. Four. The short body shot had come and gone. Jin-ho was already settled, the Eclipse already rising to meet him, and it stopped an inch from Vael's ribs only because Raza had said it would.
Vael looked at the foot beside his ribs.
"I believed the jab."
"That was the point," Jin-ho said.
"I'm going to be annoyed about it for a while."
"It's allowed." Jin-ho took his wrist and hauled him up. "Truth twice. Then the lie."
Afterward Raza put Vael on the tired drill: sprint the length of the mat until his lungs tried to leave the building, then stand at the window and read Jin-ho's footwork. "Three weeks to Reyes," Raza said. "Left foot." It stayed forward for eleven minutes, which was a record, and then slid back three centimeters, which was not.
"Foot," Jin-ho said, without looking over.
"I know," Vael said.
Raza was writing. Jin-ho leaned over his shoulder to read the page.
"That's my line."
"I suspected it," Raza said.