THE MERIDIAN COMPACT Book Two of the Eva A Trilogy

She woke at six, which was not a preference but a discipline, and lay for a moment in the particular light that came through the shutters of the rented apartment in Mouraria — not golden, exactly, but something adjacent to gold, bleached out at the edges, the light of a city built on hills that caught the Atlantic early and held it differently than anywhere she had lived before. Different from the particular gray of Washington mornings, the grudging gray that pressed down on federal buildings and said: your work here is important, your work here is observed, your work here belongs to the institution. This light required nothing. That was the word she always came back to. Lisbon’s morning light required nothing of the person standing in it.
She was thirty-five now. The birthday had passed in May without ceremony — a solitary glass of vinho verde on the terrace overlooking the steep tiled street, a brief call from Eleanor Drum on the encrypted line, Eleanor’s voice dry and fond and deliberately incurious about where Eva was, although Eleanor certainly knew. Eleanor had been a signals analyst for thirty years. Eleanor knew where everyone was.