Chapter 14 #2
I moved away from the board and paced the room while sipping my coffee.
Flint pivoted to watch me. “What do you think happens when you use that card?”
“A door opens.”
“Which door?”
I just shot him a look. “I don’t know. I figured I’d test it.”
“The only way to test it is to go early.”
“I know.”
“If you use it and it alerts him?”
I’d considered that. It wasn’t the best plan. “Then we learn he’s monitoring the card.”
“And lose the meeting.”
“Maybe.”
He just studied me with this skeptical frown. “You’re comfortable with that?”
“No.” Okay, maybe that came out too fast like his earlier answers. Too fast and maybe a little too defensive.
“Then we don’t test it.” The easy agreement made me suspicious.
“You just said we could clone it.”
“I said maybe.”
“You’re splitting hairs.”
“I’m calculating risk.”
“So am I.”
“No.” His voice hardened as irritation and anger flash fired in his eyes. “You’re calculating access.”
I lowered my cup. “What’s the difference?”
“Risk asks what can happen to you. Access asks what you might get if it does.”
I stared at him.
Flint didn’t look away.
“You sound an awful lot like Brewster at the moment.”
“Maybe Brewster has a point.” He even managed to say it without a grimace.
“That must have hurt.”
“It did.” He returned to the board and uncapped a blue marker. “The access card is one variable. The building is another. The time is another. We can control some of them.”
“We?”
“Yes, we.”
“The invitation says alone.”
He paused, not moving or turning for so long, it was like he’d become a statue. Then in a quiet, brutally sincere voice he said, “I don’t care what the invitation says.”
“He won’t show if he sees surveillance.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Flint, c’mon, he got it into the newsroom under four FBI cameras and two guards to leave that envelope. He’ll know.”
“Then we make sure he sees what he expects.”
I studied Flint. “What have you planned?”
“Nothing you can refuse yet.”
“Not really reassuring there.”
“It wasn’t designed to be.” He marked a small room on the fifth floor. “This is listed as electrical storage. It has active power and no tenant assignment.”
“This is important because?”
“Because the fifth floor is directly above the law office and below a vacant floor. If someone wanted a controllable meeting space without drawing attention, it would work.”
“You think that’s where he wants me.”
“I think it’s a possibility.”
Exhaling a long breath, I studied the rigid line of his back and then nodded slowly. He hated everything about this but he was still working on it and finding ways to make it work for both of us.
“What others have you identified?”
He marked a conference suite on seven, an unfinished office on eleven, and a mechanical floor near the roof.
“Four?”
“Four likely. Nine possible.” He capped the marker as he turned back to me and reclaimed his coffee.
“How many did you visit?”
“None.”
I eyed him. “The garage.”
“The garage isn’t one of the nine.”
I gave him a look.
His expression remained admirably blank despite the puffy little bruise under his eye.
“What happened with the gate?”
He shrugged “It dropped while I was beneath it.”
“Those have sensors.”
“Apparently this one didn’t.” He shook his head. “OSHA violation.”
“Or someone disabled them.”
He paused with the coffee cup halfway to his mouth then shrugged. “That occurred to me.”
“And you didn’t think that was worth leading with?”
“No,” he said almost too easily. “It wasn’t relevant to the discussion.”
My anger sharpened. “It wasn’t—Flint, someone could have been watching you.”
“Yes.”
“Someone may have known why you were there.”
“Yes.”
“You could have been hurt.” Worse. He could have been hurt worse. I didn’t like that he’d been hurt at all.
“Yes.”
Every calm answer raised my temperature another degree.
“You’re standing here lecturing me about risk after walking into a location chosen by a serial killer.”
“I drove into a parking garage.”
“And got hit by a gate that may have been deliberately disabled.”
“It clipped me.”
“You have a bruise.”
“Don’t worry.” A roguish smile creased his mouth. “I bruise attractively.”
The remark escaped so dryly that I almost laughed. Instead, I stepped closer and touched the edge of the discoloration beneath his eye.
Flint went still.
So did I.
His skin was warm beneath my fingers. The bruise followed the upper ridge of his cheekbone, too narrow to have come from a fist. A gate was plausible.
That did not make me feel better.
He watched me without moving.
“You could have told me,” I said.
“You would have wanted to go with me.”
My hand dropped. The loss of contact left an ache behind. Flint’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t step back.
“I didn’t want you going there blind,” he said finally.
“So you went blind first.” I wanted to slug him.
“I went late and stayed in public areas. I told security across the street I was scouting a documentary location.”
“After midnight?” I couldn’t bury the skepticism. “And the security guard believed you?”
“I’m a very good liar,” he said without missing a beat.
“That’s my line.”
“I learned from the best.”
The same words I had used with him days earlier. This time they carried none of the playfulness.
I looked back at the board.
He had taken the invitation seriously enough to replace our entire investigation with a tactical map.
Because he knew I would go. The realization settled painfully beneath my ribs.
“You’re not talking me out of it,” I said.
“I know.”
“Then what are you doing?” With all of this? I wanted to know why he insisted on taking risks?
“Making sure you come back.”
His answer rocked me. It shouldn’t have. But it did. After setting the second cup of coffee down, I folded my arms to keep from reaching for him again.
After a couple of steadying breaths, I focused on doing the job. “How?”
“We start with the card.” He was all business again.
“You said we shouldn’t test it.”
“We don’t. We photograph the chipset, identify the manufacturer, and determine what systems use the encoding.” He drained his—what? Seventh? Eighth?—cup of coffee. “If you’d left it out, I could have already started on that.”
Or just gotten rid of it altogether, which was why it was in the pocket of my sleep shorts.
“I’m going back to my original question. How?”
He just eyed me. “I know someone.”
“Of course you do.”
“You’re not the only person with sources.” Apparently my comment about losing his mojo really had chafed.
So, I went with it. “I’m still better at it.”
“Debatable.”
“False.”
His mouth twitched. A small victory.
“Then the building,” he continued. “Already requested current fire inspection records, active permits, elevator certifications, and security contracts.”
“Have you already checked utility use by floor?” I asked. “You know, if you know someone.”
“Working on it.” Droll and dry, but the corner of his mouth curved upward again.
“Cell coverage?”
“Patchy above ten. Better near the river-facing windows.”
I pointed at him. “You went upstairs.”
He hesitated before he admitted, “Eight floors.”
“You said you only entered the garage.”
“I said I didn’t go inside the building.”
“Stairwells are usually inside buildings.”
“It’s technically a vertical access structure adjacent to—”
“Flint.”
“I went up eight floors.”
I stared at him. He had the grace to look faintly guilty. Not sorry, but guilty. It mollified some of my concern. Fisting my irritation, I fought to get back on the subject.
“Why eight?”
“The elevator required a badge.” He grimaced. “The stairwell didn’t.”
“You climbed eight flights.” I wanted to pinch the bridge of my nose, but I kept my hands away from it.
“Nine, if you count the garage level.”
“With someone potentially watching.” I didn’t bother to hide the fact I gaped at him.
“Yes.”
“Alone.” My disbelief mounted.
“Yes.”
“And you’re angry with me?”
“I contain multitudes.”
I set the mug down before I threw it.
Flint’s almost-smile appeared again. This time I let mine answer it. The tension shifted. Not gone. Never gone. But something warmer moved beneath it.
I walked back to the board. “What did you find on eight?”
“Renovation staging. Plastic sheeting. Framing. No workers. One temporary camera pointed toward the stairwell.”
“Building security?”
“Not according to the numbers.”
“Did it track you?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Did you photograph it?”
He pointed to a close-up taped beside the floor plan.
A small black camera perched near an exposed ceiling beam. No manufacturer markings. A thin cable ran behind the plastic.
“You think it belongs to him.”
“I think it doesn’t belong to the building.”
“Did you look behind the plastic?”
“No.”
I turned my head slowly. “Why not?”
“Because unlike some people, I know when I’ve accumulated enough bad ideas for one morning.”
“That’s deeply hypocritical.”
“Well, fortunately for us, it can be both hypocritical and correct.”
I examined the photograph.
The camera appeared cheap enough to be disposable but placed with deliberate care. It covered the stairwell door and the unfinished corridor beyond it.
If the Auditor had put it there, he knew Flint had visited. If someone else had, we had another problem.
“Brewster needs to know,” Flint said.
“No.”
His expression closed.
“We can’t involve him yet.”
“Because the invitation says alone?”
“Because the first line says I asked the wrong man.”
“That could be manipulation.” Wary or not of the suggestion, he still offered it up.
“It is manipulation.” I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. The Auditor wanted to control his “relationship” with me. That meant he wanted me to follow his rules.
“Then why listen and do this at all?” He knew the answer. He knew it. Because if he were me—he’d do the same thing.
“Because even if he is trying to manipulate me, that doesn’t mean he’s going to lie. A face to face gets me time with him to ask questions and even one kernel of truth makes this worth it.”
He turned back to the board but not before I saw the worry and disappointment vying for dominance in his expression.
I touched the card in my pocket. “You want the Auditor to believe I’m going alone.”
“Yes.” He kept his back to me.