Warren picked up on the second ring, which was unusual. He normally let calls go to a message service and returned them within two hours.
"Sorokin," Marcus said.
A pause. One second, maybe two. The kind of pause that was not surprise but was something adjacent to it — recognition of a topic arriving ahead of schedule.
"Where did you get that name?" Warren said.
"Yuki found a revision history in a published paper that had been edited to remove his co-author credit." Marcus described the metadata find in three sentences. "He's been tracking Threadline since before our Series A. Fourteen months minimum."
Another pause, longer. "Come in tomorrow morning. Not the facility — the other building. Nine AM."
The other building. The older one, closer to Washington. The Phase Two building.
"I'll be there," Marcus said.
The call ended. Marcus sat for a moment with the phone in his hand. Warren had not said *I'll look into it* or *that's an interesting lead.* He had said *come in tomorrow morning* in the tone of a person who already had a file open.
Sorokin was not a new name to Warren.
---
The meeting the next morning had a different composition than the Phase Two briefing. Warren was there, and a woman Marcus had not met before — late forties, compact, with the particular stillness of someone who spent a lot of time in spaces where stillness was a professional asset. She was introduced as Elaine, no further qualification.
Pemberton was not present. Marcus noted this.
"Viktor Sorokin," Warren said. He set a folder on the table. Marcus looked at it but didn't reach for it. "You can review the relevant portion. It's been cleared for your access level."
Marcus opened the folder. Fifteen pages, about a third of them redacted to varying degrees. He read carefully.
Sorokin had been on the working group's radar for seven years. Born in Kyiv, educated in Moscow and then Zurich, built a small data firm that had been acquired in 2015 by a holding company whose beneficial ownership traced through four jurisdictions to a principal that the working group described in the document as Subject Alpha. Sorokin had stayed on as the operating face of the successor entity — Vektor Systems — while the capital structure and the strategic direction were controlled from elsewhere.
Vektor Systems was not primarily a data analytics firm. It was an intelligence-collection operation with a commercial revenue model attached to it for legitimacy. Its clients included the sovereign wealth funds Yuki had identified and several others. What it sold to those clients was less important than what it collected in the process of selling it: data access, methodology insight, and increasingly, information about the capabilities of competitors and counterparties in the alternative data space.
Marcus read the section about Threadline. It was brief — two paragraphs, partially redacted. What remained visible was enough: Vektor had been assessing Threadline since early in Marcus's first year, initially as a competitive threat and later as something the document characterized, in careful bureaucratic language, as *a capability of potential strategic interest to Subject Alpha's principal network.*
He set the folder down.
"They're not trying to replicate what I built," he said. "They're trying to acquire access to it."
"Or to you," Elaine said. It was the first thing she had said. Her voice was precise and without affect.
"What's Elaine's role?" Marcus asked Warren directly.
Warren looked at him for a moment. Then: "Elaine works in a function that monitors foreign intelligence operations targeting domestic technology companies."
"Counterintelligence."
"Adjacent to it."
"And Threadline is now on her list."
"You've been on her list," Elaine said, "since the second Monitor story."
Marcus absorbed this. He was not alarmed — he had been building toward this understanding for weeks. But it was one thing to infer that you were being watched from multiple directions and another to sit in a room with the people doing the watching and have them confirm it.
"What's the current threat assessment?" he said.
Elaine looked at him with an expression that was not quite approval but was something in the neighborhood of it. The question of a person who wanted information for operational purposes rather than reassurance.
"Sorokin is in a reconnaissance phase," she said. "The IP paper was a probe — testing your response and measuring your public profile against their internal assessment. They have not moved to an active phase."
"What does an active phase look like?"
"Recruitment attempt. A seemingly legitimate business approach — partnership, acquisition, licensing — designed to gain access to your methodology or your relationships. Possibly a technical intrusion more sophisticated than the endpoint probing you found in October."
"Possibly both simultaneously," Marcus said.
"Possibly."
"Timeline?"
"The IP paper was three weeks ago. Based on operational patterns we've observed from this network, an active approach typically follows reconnaissance by four to eight weeks."
Four to eight weeks. Marcus thought about the Reiss partnership, which was currently in term sheet review. He thought about the supply chain intelligence product that Priya and Amir were beginning to scope. He thought about the customers he was trying to close in Q1.
He thought about the fact that he now had approximately one month before someone with a fourteen-month head start and a $2.3 billion principal network decided to stop watching and start acting.
"What do you need from me?" he said.
"Continue operating normally," Elaine said. "Don't change your public profile, don't accelerate or decelerate any business activities that could signal awareness." She paused. "If an approach comes — any form of contact from Sorokin or from an entity that might be connected to him — bring it to me before you respond."
"Before I respond to Marsh."
"Simultaneously." She held his gaze. "We want to know what approach they choose. The approach tells us something about what they know."
"You want to use me as a sensor," Marcus said.
"We want to use the approach as a sensor," she said. "You're the environment."
Marcus thought about this. It was, he recognized, a reasonable and well-framed request. It was also a request that positioned him as passive — as the terrain across which other actors moved rather than a player making his own moves.
He was going to accept the framing for now. Not because he agreed with it, but because the information he would gain from accepting it was more valuable than the autonomy he would preserve by pushing back.
"Agreed," he said. "But I want direct contact with you — not through Cho, not through the facility schedule. Your number."
Elaine looked at Warren. Warren looked at Elaine.
She wrote a number on a card and slid it across the table.