It was a grey day, rain sighing down through the elms. He stood in the doorway of an apartment building as the cobblestones on the street in front of him grew slick, and hausfraus and burghers fumbled with their keys and collected their groceries from the hatches of their cars. Every once in a while he looked at his watch and made a show of slight impatience, shuffling from one foot to the other. He hadn’t caught a tail so far as he knew. Still, he’d learned what you know doesn’t count for much. So he stood there, and did his reconnaissance, and didn’t see anything suspicious, and so he didn’t leave his coat unbuttoned. That was the signal.

If they showed up. If this sort, kinda, maybe lead to someone who supposedly knew something panned out. It was about natural gas. That was all he knew.

The car turned around the corner exactly on time. It came down the street towards him, slowly, as if looking for something. A parking space perhaps. A nondescript black hatchback. He stared at it a fraction too long. What the Hell? Black? He sighed expressively, took one last look at his watch and made a show of turning up his collar, and venturing out onto the sidewalk, strode past the slowly moving car without a second glance.
This was supposed to be easy. A quick trip over, a quick trip back. Just some possible contact at a gas company. Or as they said nowadays, energy company, he thought inconsequentially.

Anyway.

Nothing in his earpiece. He pulled out his phone as he walked, just another idiot texting along, oblivious to the world. The screen was dark. He pushed the power button again. Nothing. Suddenly the world grew very real. The slight scent of ozone in the air, the soft hiss of tires on pavement. The brush of a sudden small gust of wind on his cheek. His neck prickled with sudden sweat. No comms. The black car meant no team. And, for something that was supposed to be very, very simple, no real prepared cover. Nothing that would stand up to more than the most cursory scrutiny, anyway.

Maybe it was a test?

There was a café on this street, halfway down the block. It would be the most natural thing in the world to step inside, order a Kaffe Schwartz and take his time. Figure out at least a few of the angles. Could this be salvaged?
He neared the café. The rain was starting to gust now, but as he approached the door a girl sitting at a table near the window happened to look up. Maybe she meant, to, maybe she didn’t, but she caught his eye for the briefest of seconds before looking down again at the magazine she was reading. Expressionless, but that didn’t mean anything. He hesitated at the door to the café and looked down the street further, let go of the handle as if he’d noticed someone, or just thought of something, and continued down the street. He didn’t see any other pedestrians just then, a good sign.

A magazine. How old-fashioned. Not a tablet, not a smartphone, but an honest-to-goodness magazine. Pulped trees, he thought to himself inconsequentially. What a waste.

The rain came down harder. Soon, he’d become conspicuous, no longer someone just caught in the sudden downpour, but a man perversely continuing a walk when any reasonable individual would take a pause indoors. Strange behavior is suspicious. Suspicious behavior is anything strange. Words were beginning to rattle in his head, he thought to himself. A bad sign. The nearest safe house was five blocks over. The team was supposed to be in the van, around the corner from where he was to have been picked up, but there’d been nothing. His comms were dead. It was nothing, he told himself. Nothing. Nothing meant anything. The girl was just a girl. The signals had been mixed up. The mission was a bust, that’s all. His team had been here illegally, trying to get a piece of this to sell to somebody, but…

Everybody did it.

Information wanted to be free they said. He’d read that, a quote from some techutopian. Idiot. Information existed to be captured and sold to the highest bidder.

Like a competing gas company.

Energy firm, he corrected himself.

His neck still prickled, despite the sudden chill of rain. Bad signs.

Bad signs.

This was a small thing, not even a mission, really. A sort of, maybe, perhaps kind of a feeler thing, he told himself. Checking out a very vague lead that was probably nothing. Nothing that any other team or crew, whether on contract or government, would even care about. Right? Right. That girl in the café had just been a girl reading a magazine who’d happened to look up he told himself again. The comms were out because of a solar flare that the techs had forgotten to brief them on. The car had been black because the supposed, perhaps, maybe contact had been sick, or their boss had held them up at work. Nothing had gone wrong.

He told himself that again as he turned the last corner before the safe house, actually an apartment.

Nothing had gone wrong.

Blue lights flashing against the façade. A polizei, green uniform glistening in the rain, looked at him interestedly as he approached. He looked at the flashing lights of the green-and-whites with mild interest, crossing over to the other side of the street. The policeman looked after him thoughtfully, then, unobtrusively, spoke something quietly into the mike hanging by his shoulder.

The door to the safe house was on its hinges, wood splintered onto the sidewalk.

From an unmarked car parked at the end of the block a man emerged, dressed nattily in black. The passenger door opened almost simultaneously, and a female figure emerged, also dressed entirely in black. It was something about the weather he’d decided long ago, this compulsion to wear the darkest shades imaginable.

They started walking towards him, unhurriedly. Both falling into step with each other naturally. He was made, no doubt about it. The polizei was right behind him, the light tread of someone on the balls of their feet. Suddenly he was calm. It didn’t matter. He was just suddenly glad everything was over.

Two weeks later a new contract was announced between the Federal Republic of Germany and LukProm, the gas company.

Or, as they preferred to be called, energy company.