I don’t raise my voice. I don’t move.
He looks at the folder. Closes it. “The council will have more questions.”
Viktor lets the quiet stretch, then leans forward on his forearms.
“That conversation can wait for another day,” he says to the room. “What Decker’s movements actually handed us is bigger.” He glances at Vanya. She nods.
“We finally have the proof the council’s been looking for,” she says. “That outpost road was supposed to be clear. By the time Healer Marsh turned the key on Wednesday night, Creed already had an ambush set. Which means someone inside this building told Creed they were coming. Someone with access to the security feeds, flagging that a van was on the road.”
“The mole,” Zoe says.
Tabitha’s hand tightens around her pen. She doesn’t speak.
Viktor’s eyes come back to me. “You’ve been working this case a while. Your reports have been thin.”
I say nothing.
“Don’t take it as a fault,” Vanya says. “I spent twenty-one years inside the Syndicate without getting caught. People who operate at that level don’t leave easy trails.”
Viktor nods. “Tonight, we have a candidate.”
“All right.”
“Zoe came to me forty-eight hours ago with patterns she’d been catching on her side. Routing access. Window-of-opportunity work. I told her to keep digging. After the escape, those patterns started pointing at a person.” He turns to her. “Walk him through it.”
Zoe steps to the screen. She doesn’t look at Davis, or at me. She looks at the tablet, then up at the wall. A routing diagram I recognize appears, next to a column of access timestamps I don’t.
“Three windows on Wednesday’s transport,” she says. “The schedule went out Tuesday morning to everyone analyst-tier and up. The revised route went to six people Tuesday afternoon. The clear-time—when the mountain road was logged free of Aurora movement—was never sent anywhere. It updates live on the security desk in the restricted wing. To put Creed in the right place at the right hour, you’d need eyes on that feed. Without it, you’d be setting a rig on a road that still had our vehicles on it.”
She pulls up a list. Six names. The fourth one is mine.
“These six badged into the restricted wing in the windows that mattered.” The list shrinks. “Cross-reference against who’s actually cleared to be in there, and one credential stays lit that has no business in that column.”
A single line lights up.
Tabitha’s eyes go to the screen. She doesn’t move.
“An operative?” I say.
Zoe shakes her head. “A survivor.” Her mouth goes tight. “And I hate pointing at one of the ones who got out of those places. But the logs don’t lie.”
“Recommendation?” Viktor says.
“Pull the activity file. Start looking, and see what comes up,” Zoe says.
Viktor nods. “Decker.”
“I’ll pull the file.”
Davis closes his folder again. He hasn’t read from it since Viktor took the room. “It seems we have an obvious suspect.”
I don’t say what I’m thinking—that the name on that screen is probably sitting in a room somewhere right now, drinking coffee, with no idea today’s the day they got to be the obvious suspect.
The obvious suspect is rarely the right one. But you pull what you’ve got.
“Double down on this,” Viktor says. “Full attention. You report to me. Only me. No paper. No ride-alongs. Pull what you need from intel and keep it under wraps.”
“Understood.”
