Transmission from a Stranger

Seventeen nights I'd spent parked outside her building, eating vending machine sandwiches and watching her through the thermal camera. My handler said she was a corporate spy stealing pharmaceutical patents, but the woman on the screen seemed innocent enough. She fed the stray cat in her alleyway at 11 PM sharp, leaving a bowl of tuna on the fire escape. The cat would appear like clockwork, its orange fur glowing in the night vision, eating while she watched from her window, looking impossibly lonely.

Tonight was different. She emerged from her building wearing a fedora pulled low over her eyes, the brim casting shadows across her face. In her hand, she carried a coiled ethernet cable—the physical drop, my handler had warned me about. I tailed her at a distance, my heart hammering against my ribs. She moved through the city like she owned its shadows, turning down alleyways I hadn't noticed existed.

She stopped beneath a highway overpass where a man in a trench coat waited. Their exchange lasted seconds—just the cable passing between gloved hands, a nod, and they parted ways. I followed the man instead, forgetting the woman entirely. Three blocks later, I realized my mistake. The cat. I'd abandoned my primary subject for a decoy.

When I returned to her building, she was gone. Her apartment stood empty, stripped bare except for one thing: the cat's empty bowl, still sitting on the fire escape. My handler screamed in my ear about blown operations and compromised assets, but I only thought of that woman, whoever she really was, and the way she'd looked through her window every night, feeding something that needed her.

Somehow, in the business of watching people, I'd forgotten that the ones being watched might be watching back, measuring their observers, deciding when to disappear. The cat had been the signal all along. I just hadn't known how to read it.