They set the watch in the records room.
It was the narrow chamber on the far side of the command post's east wall, where Kelvin's clerks kept eight years of supply returns in dust-proof crates. Gruk had cut an inspection slot through the plaster that afternoon, a hand's width, at the height of a seated man's eyes. A spyhole into the room where the letter would lie.
Satou placed the reply himself at midnight.
He set it on the blotter. He set the pen beside it, left of the sheet, at the angle he'd left it the night of the first message. He looked around the command post once — maps, lamp, the shelf of binders — and locked the door from the outside, and walked down the corridor and into the records room by the back.
There were four of them there.
