“Everything on that phone makes me look guilty.”
“Everything on that phone makes you look like what you are. A woman they squeezed. He needs to see the difference between that and what’s in his file.”
Her jaw works. Then she catches my hand before I can stand, presses it flat against her cheek, and lets it go.
“Come back,” she says.
“That’s the plan.”
The boulder fights me on the way out. The burns across my back haven’t finished closing, and they pull the whole time I’m putting my shoulder into the stone. I seal her in, check that it’s firmly wedged, and start down.
The truck is where I left it, and I hit the road deep in thought. I spend the entire drive lining up what I’m going to say. And the bear spends it with his head turned backward, keeping count of every mile I put between her and us.
She’s safe. Hidden. Behind rock that nothing can move. He doesn’t care.
He doesn’t care as the mountain fades into the distance, and he cares even less as the gates to Aurora’s outpost loom ahead. The guards wave me through security without question, and I get the sense I’ve been expected.
Viktor is at his office window when I come in. He doesn’t turn right away. When he does, he crosses to the desk, picks something up, and sets it down in front of me.
A phone in a clear evidence bag. Cheap. Older model.
“Before you say whatever you drove down here to say,” he says, “look at that.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“An anonymous tip. Came into the intake line a day after you went dark. Said we’d missed something in her cubicle. Zoe ran it down; she’s been handling that side of the case. It was under the floor, wrapped in plastic, charger and all.” He sits. “The outgoing traffic goes back months. Routes. Rotations. Names.” He lets a beat pass. “There’s a thread covering the night Samien Khalef died.”
I go quiet.
Tabitha said his name to me at that first meeting when Grace’s name came up.We buried him.I didn’t know I’d end up standing in the middle of it.
“So understand what you walked into,” Viktor says. “I’m not sitting on a leak anymore. I’m sitting on the woman who fed one of my people to the Syndicate. And you’ve had her hidden for days.”
I reach into my jacket, take out her burner, and set it on the desk beside the bag.
Viktor looks at it. “What is that?”
“Her phone. The real one. I took it off her after I pulled her out of an ambush. She’s carried it every day since they first made contact.” I slide it toward him. “Open it. Incoming calls from one number. Outgoing, almost nothing—and what’s there wouldn’t get a supply run moved. Corridor talk. Half of it wrong.”
“And?”
“And now explain why the woman owns both. She keeps the harmless phone in her boot, on her person, around the clock. The one that damns her—the one with a dead man’s details on it—she leaves in the room she sleeps in, waiting for a tip to point you at it.” I sit back. “You’ve run agents your whole life. Does that sound right?”
He doesn’t answer.
“There’s more. The traffic on the phone you found needed access. Restricted wing. Comms. And I know your logs put her in the restricted wing—six nights, doors her credential was never cut for. So pull the credential itself. It’s menial. It doesn’t open those doors, and it never has. Someone wrote those entries in for her. Run the door controllers against the badge log and the counts won’t match—the hardware never moved her through. I shadowed her a week. She never went near the sites she’s accused of.”
“Unless she knew you were watching.”
“Nobody knows when I’m watching. That’s the one thing I’d put my name on.”
Except her, in the yard. But I’m not delving into that now.
Viktor picks up the bagged phone and turns it over once. “You’re telling me the tip is a plant.”
“I’m telling you it’s too clean. It landed right after she vanished, told you exactly where to dig, and what came up answered every question you had. Real cases don’t close themselves like that. Somebody closed this one for you.”
“Or she got sloppy at the end. Careful people do.”
