Chapter 52
WASHINGTON, D.C.
It was already after midnight when Jennifer Fields had badge-swiped into FBI headquarters and taken the elevator to her office.
Had the story come from anyone other than a U.S. Secret Service agent and had it not been supported by photographs, and what Fields had seen in the press, she doubted she would have believed it. Certainly not over drinks at the Hay-Adams.
Which had been hours ago, and she had barely moved from her chair except to refill her coffee and make one trip to the ladies’ room.
A legal pad next to her keyboard was filled with names, dates, arrows, and questions written in a hand that had grown progressively sharper as the night wore on. What Shawna Vaughn had told her couldn’t wait until morning.
Three federal agents. Two dead in Connor Jameson’s apartment. One dead at Erin Delaney’s house. And if Vaughn was correct, all had been there to kill.
Fields rubbed one of her temples and looked back at her screen. She had started with Scofield because he’d been the easiest to verify. His credentials had looked good, and within minutes she had confirmed that they were. He was legitimate DHS. The confirmation sent a chill through her.
From there, she had moved to the DSS agent Vaughn had identified from Jameson’s. That trail had taken time, but had eventually locked. The man’s name was Craig Hollis. His partner, also DSS, was Ryan Kessler.
Kessler had been the easiest. Once she had Hollis, his partner had surfaced quickly enough.
They had similar protection backgrounds and almost identical training profiles. They had the kind of résumés that made them useful in dangerous places and, under ordinary circumstances, trustworthy. Which was exactly what bothered her.
Connor Jameson had killed all three of them. Fields knew that. That wasn’t the mystery.
The mystery was why three federal agents had been sent after him in the first place. And once Erin Delaney had entered the picture, why she needed to die too.
That hadn’t happened by accident. Somebody had selected these men. Someone had given them a target and had set them loose.
Fields grouped Hollis and Kessler with Scofield and set her link analysis program to work.
The system wasn’t perfect. It was clunky and took time. Most of what came back was noise—false positives and the bureaucratic exhaust of three men who had spent their careers moving through overlapping federal ecosystems. Sometime after four o’clock, however, a pattern began to emerge.
Scofield had attended a protective intelligence seminar in Baltimore.
Hollis had logged reimbursable travel to the same event.
Kessler hadn’t appeared on the attendee roster, but he had surfaced in the vendor-support records tied to it through a Northern Virginia contractor Fields had never heard of.
She clicked on the company name—Strategis Solutions—and opened its profile.
The website was generic almost to the point of parody: protective consulting, event security, executive support, site coordination, logistical planning, just to name a few.
It was the kind of firm that handled the invisible work around important people and expensive events, making itself useful to government clients, private sponsors, and anyone else willing to pay for discretion and order.
Fields ran the company again, this time against Hollis and Scofield.
Hollis had crossed paths with Strategis Solutions more than once.
Not as an employee, but as outside support on two separate protective assignments—once tied to advance work for a visiting foreign delegation and once at the Baltimore seminar.
Scofield had never been assigned directly to the company either, but he had attended the same seminar and a separate surveillance detection block where Strategis had provided instructors, site support, and logistics.
Fields sat back in her chair.
One hit might have meant nothing. Two were harder to explain. At least five hits, across three different men, from two different agencies, was a pattern. Which meant Strategis Solutions wasn’t just some forgettable Beltway contractor. It was beginning to look like a point of convergence.
She dug into the company’s officer listings, archived event rosters, and subcontractor support records. She was looking less for the loud names than the quiet ones—the facilitators, sponsors, and advisors who often turned up near a company’s machinery without ever directly standing in front of it.
One name surfaced in a buried conference program. Fields clicked on it and got almost nothing back, just a thin metadata stub where a fuller record should have been.
She tried again through a different route but received the same result. Fields frowned and tried a third route in, this time through archived event-support records instead of the conference file itself.
Same result.
At four thirty in the morning, there was no clerk sitting at a desk somewhere, deciding what Jennifer Fields could and couldn’t see. If the record had been walled off, it had been walled off long before she ever came looking.
She copied the name to her legal pad, circled it once, and then went wider with her search rather than deeper.
This time, she went for things like corporate filings, shell entities, and prior names—anything that could possibly tie Strategis Solutions to Hollis, Kessler, and Scofield without relying on a single protected file.
It didn’t take long.
The same name surfaced again in connection with a closed-door protective intelligence forum in Northern Virginia.
It appeared again on an archived sponsorship page for an international security and logistics conference in Singapore, where Strategis had handled event support and coordination.
The buried name had been listed as a liaison.
She pulled up the Singapore conference and began working through the sponsor list. Most of it was what she expected: security firms, risk management outfits, logistics companies, and a host of infrastructure and government-adjacent consultants.
Then she spotted one corporate name she recognized from a counterintelligence brief the Bureau had circulated the year before. It was a Beijing-linked front.
Not openly. Not on paper. But close enough that someone in her line of work would be able to catch a whiff and tell that something was off.
Vaughn had been right to be suspicious. This wasn’t random. Someone had found a way to spot the three federal agents, assess them, and steer them. And that someone had taken pains to make sure the path back was deliberately difficult to follow.
Fields looked at the clock in the corner of her monitor: 4:36 a.m. She reached for her phone and dialed.
Vaughn answered on the second ring. “Tell me you’ve got something.”
“I do,” said Fields. “I identified the DSS agent you recognized from Jameson’s apartment. His name was Craig Hollis.”
A beat passed.
“His partner was Ryan Kessler,” Fields continued. “Also DSS.”
“Jesus,” Vaughn said.
“And Scofield was legit. Actual DHS. That’s why his creds were spot-on.”
The line went quiet again.
“So,” Vaughn said at last, “all three were real.”
“Yes,” Fields replied. “Which means they weren’t pretending to be federal agents. They were federal agents. The question is who sent them after Jameson?”
“And?”
“I started looking for overlap. Hollis and Kessler made sense together. Scofield didn’t. The first place I’ve found where his history overlaps theirs is a Northern Virginia contractor called Strategis Solutions.”
“Never heard of them,” said Vaughn, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “What do they do?”
“According to their website, protective consulting, event support, and logistics.”
“That’s vague.”
“Very,” Fields agreed. “Typical contractor soup.”
“So what are you really telling me?”
“I want to be clear. I’m not saying that Strategis sent them. But it may be where someone found them.”
“Found them how?” Vaughn asked.
Fields swiveled in her chair and looked at the name she had circled on her legal pad. “I’m still working on that part. But Strategis operates in exactly the kind of space where men like Hollis, Kessler, and Scofield could be identified, evaluated, and approached without setting off alarms.”
“Approached by who?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Fields. “But Strategis turns up in records for a security conference in Singapore. One of the sponsors had Beijing ties.”
“Do you think the company’s dirty?”
“I think somebody in or around it may be. Could be someone inside. Or someone adjacent. But every time I push on one associated node, I hit a wall.”
“What kind of wall?”
“Protected records. Thin search returns. Partial metadata where a full file ought to be,” Fields replied. “Somebody took pains to make part of this hard to trace.”
“How bad do you think this is?” Vaughn asked.
Fields looked at her monitor. “I don’t know. Men like Hollis, Kessler, and Scofield don’t all wind up in something like this by accident.”
“You think they were compromised?”
“I think somebody got to them,” said Fields. “How and why is the part I don’t know yet.”
“What do you want me to do?” Vaughn asked.
“Do what you do best. Keep Erin and Connor safe. And keep them hidden. Don’t trust anyone you don’t have to.”
“You think they’ll come again?”
“Yes,” Fields replied. “Somebody with this kind of reach doesn’t leave unfinished business.”
“Understood,” said Vaughn. “What about you?”
Fields looked again at the circled name on her legal pad. “I’m going to keep pulling on Strategis.”
“Do it carefully.”
Fields ended the call and returned to the blocked name on her computer. “Who are you, Tom Olson? And why does somebody want you hidden?”