CHAPTER 51: COASTAL"The property is three hundred meters from the waterfront."River pulled up the satellite image on the screen and I looked at it while my team moved around me with the quiet efficiency of people who had done this before and understood that noise was the enemy of a good approach.Six of us. Not a large team. Large teams made noise and noise made targets disappear. Six people who knew what they were doing was enough."Two confirmed heat signatures in the primary structure," River said. "One in the adjacent outbuilding." He pointed to the smaller structure to the right of the main property. "That one has been active since this afternoon. Power consumption suggests electronics.""The communications specialist," I said."Consistent," River said. "The two in the main structure are in the ground floor rear. One moving, one stationary.""Teel and the woman," I said."Most likely." River looked at me. "The woman's identity still is not confirmed. Nothing in the network's ac

CHAPTER 53: PUBLISHED"They published it."My voice came out steadier than I felt saying it. I read the article on my phone screen in my apartment while the security detail stood in the corridor outside and the city outside my window did its ordinary dark thing without any knowledge of what had just landed on a website that called itself independent journalism but was clearly nothing of the kind.The article had my name in the headline.It had the grounds of the preliminary divorce filing quoted in full.It had a timeline that framed my cooperation with the investigation as beginning the same week the divorce was filed, framed as a woman who had abandoned her husband and then, upon understanding who he actually was, had cooperated with his investigation as a means of repairing a relationship she had damaged.It was carefully written. Not defamatory on its face. Just shaped, each paragraph moving the reader toward the same conclusion, which was that my testimony in the investigation wa

CHAPTER 55: TWO-THIRTY"You're still awake.""I said I would be," Vivian said.She opened the door and I stood in the corridor with the particular stillness of a man who had been moving for six hours and had just stopped and was not yet sure what to do with the stopping. The security detail was gone. She had told River at midnight that she was fine and the detail was no longer required and River had relayed that to me in the coastal city with the specific brevity he used when he thought something was fine and agreed with the decision.I came inside.The apartment was warm and it smelled like coffee and it was lit in the particular way of a space where someone has been awake at a kitchen table doing important things and has cleared the evidence of it. I noticed the cleared table. I noticed the mugs on the drying rack. I noticed the notepad still on the corner of the counter with her handwriting on it.I noticed all of it because I always had."Sit," she said.I sat at the kitchen table

CHAPTER 57: TYLER TRIES"I need to say something."Tyler was standing in the doorway of my office and he had knocked first, which was not something Tyler did. He knocked on doors other people were behind only when he wanted to be noticed, which was usually, but he had never knocked on my office door specifically because entering my office without knocking had always been a way of asserting that he belonged in any space he wanted to be in.He had knocked.I looked up from the board call notes I was reviewing."Come in," I said.He came in and sat across from me without being asked, which was also unusual because Tyler usually stood when he was in my office because standing gave him the option to leave quickly. He sat down and folded his hands on the table in a way that suggested he had rehearsed this or at least thought about it for longer than was usual for him."I read the article," he said. "Last night. And your statement. And Zara Quinn's statement.""Okay," I said."And I have bee

CHAPTER 58: NINA AND ETHAN"Mr. Cole."Nina said it from across the Group B lobby and I stopped walking.She had been coming out of the elevator when I came through the front entrance and she had seen me before I saw her and she was standing now with the particular stillness of someone who had made a decision about something and was implementing the decision before they could change their mind."Nina," I said.She crossed the lobby toward me.She stopped about two feet away. Close enough for a real conversation and far enough to maintain the professional register that I understood she needed, for this conversation, more than I did."I want to say something to you," she said. "I sent a message three weeks ago but a message is not the same as saying it." She held my eyes with the directness that I had always, even when it was aimed at me as hostility, respected. "I was wrong about you. Not in the small peripheral ways that people are wrong about people they don't know well. In the speci