Page 161 of Only the Hunter

The formal identification takes another forty minutes. His lawyer negotiates the parameters of cooperation: the driver’s location, the communication chain, the payment records he’s kept—a professional habit, he notes, without apparent irony—that will trace back through three cutouts to a device registered under a name that is not Michael Harridan’s but that KOAN has already mapped to him. He didn’t know Harridan’s name when he was hired. He found it afterward. He makes this distinction clearly, and his lawyer makes it again, and Delgado notes it without expression.

When they take a recess, I step into the hallway and call Rhodes.

“We have a name,” I say when he picks up.

“We have more than that.” His voice has the quality it gets when ARGUS has delivered something substantial—professional, but with an edge of satisfaction underneath. “The payment chain from your intruder. We ran it against the communication patterns we’ve been building since Geneva. There are eleven contact nodes between Harridan and the PAC chair’s operation. Three of them overlap with the DHS authorization signatures on Lina’s transport.”

I lean against the wall.

“You can prove it?” My voice doesn’t shake. I’m almost surprised by that.

“We can prove enough,” he says. “The rest is what Harridan gives up when he realizes what we have.”

The FBI’s Public Integrity Section arrives at eight-forty. Two agents, professional and unhurried, carrying the particular institutional weight of people who have done this before and will do it again. Rhodes must have already routed the ARGUS findings their way—there’s no other explanation for the way they listen. I give them everything I have—the note analysis, the internal terminology, the timeline of Harridan’s documented interventions in my case—and they listen without interrupting, nodding at the right places, occasionally exchanging a glance that means they’re cross-referencing what I’m saying against something they already hold. Confirming, not learning.

Before they leave for Harridan’s building, one of them turns back.

“You can be present for questioning,” he says. “You won’t be in the room.”

“I know,” I say. “I’ll be there.”

They process Harridan in a conference room on the fourth floor of a federal building six blocks away, and I wait in a hallway that smells like industrial cleaner and recycled air. I think about the first time I walked into Michael Harridan’s office as a new attorney in the Violence Reduction section, when he’d seemed like exactly the right kind of senior colleague—attentive, interested, asking questions about my cases with what felt like genuine investment.

I think about the night he showed up at my door unannounced, weeks ago now, ostensibly checking on me after the accident, and asked where I’d really been. The way he’d said, “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”—like concern and surveillance were the same gesture, if you said them in the right tone.

I think about the note in the evidence bag.

The door opens forty minutes later, and one of the agents says I can come in for five minutes, that Harridan has invoked and nothing I say will be answered, and I say I understand.

He’s sitting at the conference table in a suit that probably cost more than the prosecutor’s rent, his lawyer beside him, his hands folded in front of him. He looks exactly like what he is: a man who has spent thirty years being the most composed person in any room he enters.

He looks at me when I come in.

I set the evidence bag on the table. Don’t open it. Just set it there.

“I read it,” I say. “The note.”

His expression doesn’t change.

“Bureaucratic machinery,” I say. “That’s a phrase from a brief I filed eighteen months ago. It’s in my personnel file. It appears nowhere in my public work.”

His lawyer puts a hand on his arm. He doesn’t need it. He wasn’t going to speak.

But then he does.

One sentence. Quiet, almost reflective, the voice of a man who is genuinely puzzled.

“I thought you were smarter than this.”

The words bear no heat. That’s what makes them dangerous. Not anger. Not rage. Just the steady conviction that I have miscalculated.

As if the problem, even now, is mine—my failure to assess the situation correctly, my inability to see what was obvious.

I look at him for a long moment.

I think about Lina in the ravine. About Atlas sitting at my office door. About Gabe on the pavement, still giving orders, and talking me through it.

“You thought wrong.”