The sixth time was in a part of the city I have no documented connection to. Not near the parking structure. Not near the route I use regularly. A street I had taken specifically because I was varying my movements after the fourth occurrence — an attempt to make my own pattern less predictable. He was there. On a street I chose at random, at a time I had not fixed in advance, I turned a corner and he was eighty meters away, walking at the same measured cadence, facing away from me.

The geographic break is significant. The first five occurrences could be explained, if you were committed to explaining them, by coincidence of routine. Same neighborhoods, same likely routes, same demographic patterns for the kind of person who walks that way in that area. The sixth occurrence cannot be explained that way. The sixth occurrence requires either that my spontaneous route selection was predicted or that the coverage area is larger than the clustering of the first five implied.

He was on the phone. Not talking — I watched for long enough to be sure of that. Ear against the device, mouth still, occasional small nod that could have been a response or could have been an affectation. At eighty meters, in the light conditions at that time, I could not resolve the device clearly enough to confirm it was a phone and not something smaller. I wrote it down as phone in the notes because phone is the most plausible interpretation. The less plausible interpretation is that he was holding a receiver or transmitter of a kind not commonly used by civilians.