The room she was taken into at half past four had three people in it she had never met and a man called Hale who ran something she had never been told the name of.
"You built it," said Hale.
"In 2029. It was my second one."
"How much of it is real?"
"None of it is real."
"Ms Duarte — "
"That is not evasion, it is the answer," said Ines Duarte. "There is no borrowed thread. No real cousin, no genuine school with a different name on the register, no address that exists with somebody else living in it.
"I built it clean because it was my second one and I was terrified and I did every single thing by the book, and it is the only legend I have ever built with nothing borrowed in it — and that is the reason he is alive at half past four this afternoon."
Hale looked at her.
"Then why are you in this room?" he said.
"Because it is clean," she said, "which means nobody can check it from the outside. Which also means nobody can pull him out through it.
"If you send somebody to Lisbon with a set of words, he will not go with them. And he should not. He has been Tomas Reis for six years and he has a flat and a job and four friends, and a stranger arriving with a phrase is precisely what a burn looks like from the inside. Every single thing you would send him is the thing that would tell him you had been got at."
"He has a handler."
"He has had four," said Ines. "None of them have met him either. That is the architecture, I did not design it, and I have thought it was wrong since I was twenty-four."
There is a long table in that room and a photograph on the wall of a building.
"So what does he do," said Hale, "when he finds out?"
"He runs on the route."
"Which is?"
"Which is on page thirty-one of the file that was photographed at eleven minutes past four this morning," said Ines Duarte, "and which I also wrote when I was twenty-two."
Nobody in that room said anything for about four seconds.
"So there is exactly one person alive," she said, "who knows every seam in that identity well enough to build a second way out of it, and to walk it, and to get a man who has never been handled by anybody he can name to come with her.
"I have never been in the field," said Ines Duarte.
"No," said Hale.
"I have never been out of this building. I have asked four times and I have been refused four times and the last one was in the January and the reason is written down and I have read it."
"I know what it says."
"Then say it back to me," she said, "because I am about to volunteer and I would like us both to have heard it."
Hale did not look at a piece of paper.
"D. is exceptional at the desk," he said, "and there is no operational case for the risk."
"Right," said Ines Duarte. "How long have I got?"