Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
Noah
The following Monday, Wolfe had put together a planning session for the Gala. I remembered the eighth floor from my previous visit to Three Bears HQ, and it wasn’t like the rest of the building.
The ninth floor had the lived-in warmth of people who spent their off-hours together, but the eighth floor was something different.
It was all business from the offices to what they call the operations center to the conference center where we were meeting.
It had a long table, eight chairs, a mounted screen at one end, and a whiteboard with nothing on it yet.
The kind of room that you could tell was meant for strategy and logistics.
Wolfe was sitting at the head of the table with Hawk and Gator on each side of him.
Diego was sitting next to Hawk with a stack of folders in front of him.
Jackson and I walked in, and he directed me to a chair across from Diego.
I took my seat and looked at the people filing in around the table.
These were the people who were keeping me safe.
Not abstractly. Actually. My safety was literally in their hands.
I knew that, of course, but it landed differently in this room than it did upstairs.
Then the door opened again, and a man I recognized from months ago walked in. He was tall, with dark hair, and the bearing of someone who’d spent years in rooms like this one.
“Chance Kelly,” Jackson said quietly beside me.
I nodded. “I remember him. He asked me a ton of questions last fall, but he was kind about it. He’s kept in touch over the last six months.”
Chance set a leather portfolio on the table and looked around the room, clocking each person, landing on me last. He didn’t make anything of it. Just nodded. “Noah.”
“Agent Kelly,” I said.
“Chance,” he said. “We’ve been through enough together for you to call me Chance.” He said it matter-of-factly, then he sat down. “Let’s get started.”
Wolfe looked at Jackson. “First off, Caden updated the schedule board, and I see that Knox and Maddox are both on out-of-town assignments, so they are out of rotation. Does anyone else have anything coming up that Caden doesn’t know about?”
Hawk chuckled. “No way, none of us wants to get on Caden’s bad side.”
“That’s the truth. How about you, Jackson? I didn’t see any groups on your schedule at the camp for the next couple of weeks.”
“The group from East Texas left on Friday, and I don’t have anyone on the schedule until mid-June, so I’m clear.”
“Good, let’s keep it that way. Diego, how about you? What do you have for us?”
Diego nodded and passed around the folders he had in front of him before opening the one he’d kept, setting it flat on the table. “Gregor Valen,” he said. “I’ve been running his US contacts for the past two weeks. Here’s what I have.”
He walked through it without rushing. Valen moved money through three shell companies registered in Delaware.
They were hard to trace but not impossible.
He had a contact in Miami who handled logistics for him.
Transportation, documentation, and supplies.
The kind of infrastructure you needed when you were moving people rather than goods.
There was a lawyer in New York who’d represented three different companies that were connected to Corvane’s network over the last few years.
And finally, he’d found a property management company in Fort Worth that had leased warehouse space twice in the past eighteen months, both times for short periods, both times paid in cash through intermediaries.
“So not just in Vesper but in Fort Worth, as well,” Gator said.
“Yeah, and I’m sure that isn’t all. That’s just what I found in a week.” Diego shook his head and let out a frustrated sigh.
“Did you find anything in the Fort Worth warehouses?” Hawk asked, and Diego looked at Chance.
“Wolfe turned those over to us. Unfortunately, both were cleared out before we could get eyes on them,” Chance answered. “But the timing lines up with two separate FBI cases pertaining to missing people.”
“That’s all I have,” Diego said. “Like Chance said, from there, we turned it over to them.”
Chance picked it up without missing a beat.
“We’ve been building a parallel picture from our end.
We’ve known about the Miami logistics contact.
He’s been on our radar for four years. Nothing actionable yet because he’s careful, but the pattern is there.
We know he’s connected somehow.” He tapped the table once.
“The New York lawyer is interesting. We weren’t aware of him in connection with this case, but he represented a shell company that came up in an unrelated wire fraud case eighteen months ago.
The wire fraud case went nowhere, but y’all’s work connects him to Valen in a way we hadn’t seen before. ”
“So you have the shape of it,” Gator said.
“We have the shape of it,” Chance agreed.
“What we don’t have is anything that survives a courtroom.
Corvane is untouchable in Selvaris, and he knows it.
Everything he touches in the US is layered enough that you get to Valen, and you stop.
Valen’s loyal because he’s afraid, and scared men don’t flip easily. ”
The room was quiet for a moment.
I looked at the folder I’d gotten from Diego.
At the names and the shell companies and the warehouse addresses, all of it laid out in neat columns.
The infrastructure of the thing that had happened to me.
I’d known it existed. You can’t go through what I went through and not understand that it was organized.
That someone had built a machine, and I, and the others, were nothing more than a product that had been moved through it.
But seeing it mapped out like this was something different.
Something colder. It reaffirmed just how lucky I’d been to be rescued.
As if Jackson somehow sensed my distress, his hand found my knee under the table. Brief. Just there. A reminder that I was safe.
I breathed through it.
“Okay, now let’s talk about the Gala,” Wolfe said, and the room shifted.
Hawk leaned forward. “Freedom Forward. It’ll be held in Houston, and it’s a little over one week out. We had Noah’s name added to the program as a speaker.” He looked at me. “We’re hoping this will draw Corvane out, so we want to treat this as a full operation.”
“Agreed,” Wolfe said. “Which means we plan it that way.” He looked around the table. “Hawk, you’re heading up protection on the ground. Gator, you’re on transport and advance work on the venue. You’ll be working with Diego. I need eyes on the guest list as soon as it’s available.”
“Already requested it,” Diego said.
“Chance,” Wolfe continued, “I’d like your people positioned but not visible. We’re not trying to spook anyone. If Corvane or Valen has any contact attending that event, I want to know before Noah walks in the door, and if we sense a threat of any kind, we get him out of there.”
“I can do that,” Chance said. “I’ll have two agents there in a civilian capacity. You won’t know they’re mine.” He paused. “But I want to be clear… if something develops at the Gala, anything actionable, my people move first, and you guys are there for support.”
I watched Hawk’s jaw tighten slightly. He didn’t argue, but I could tell he wanted to.
Wolfe nodded once, and the hierarchy was established.
The FBI was in charge, and everyone in the room accepted it, even if they didn’t like it.
Which told me something about how seriously they were all taking this.
“Transport,” Gator said, moving on. “We’re not driving Noah to Houston in a civilian vehicle, and I don’t want to put him on a plane, so I’m thinking armored SUV, two-car convoy. We leave from here, we stay together, we bring him back the same way.”
“Sounds good.” Wolfe agreed.
“As far as accommodations go,” Gator said. “I want us in the same hotel as the Gala, if possible. If not, adjacent. I don’t want him crossing open ground between buildings.”
I’d been listening to all of this while they built a plan around me. It was competent and thorough, and I was genuinely grateful for it. But my mind kept going back to something that Wolfe had said that bothered me.
“Can I say something?” I asked.
This group of men, who were going to so much trouble to make this happen, all looked at me, and I took in a breath. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but this event mattered to me, and I needed to make sure they all understood that.
“The reason I’m speaking at the Gala has everything to do with all this.
” I motioned at the file in front of me, but I kept my voice even.
“My therapist asked me to speak because she thought it would help me stop being someone things happened to and start being someone who does something about it.” I looked at Wolfe.
“But all of this is pointless unless I actually give the speech. Not something that gets cut short because someone spots a threat in the room. The full speech.”
Nobody said anything, but Jackson squeezed my leg under the table, letting me know I had his support, and that wasn’t a small thing.
“I’m not being reckless,” I said. “I understand what you’re doing, and I’m grateful for it. But I need you to plan around me doing this thing, not around me being removed if it gets complicated or because you see someone you think is a threat.”
Wolfe looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at Hawk. Then back at me.
“I hear you, Noah,” Wolfe said. “And we’ll do our best to make sure you give the speech.”
I held his gaze. “Okay.”
Chance was watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Then he spoke, quietly and without any of the procedural flatness he’d had for the rest of the meeting.
“For what it’s worth, what you’re doing takes guts.
I’m sure it isn’t easy to speak publicly about what you went through.
” He paused. “But I’ve worked trafficking cases for eleven years, and you should know, the survivors who come forward and put their faces and their voices to it, they do more good than we do most of the time. ”
The room went quiet, but a few of them nodded in agreement.
“Thank you,” I said.
He picked up his pen, and we went back to the plan, but something had shifted in the room. Not the professionalism of it, that stayed, but the weight behind it, our conversation reminding everyone of the reason this mattered.
Wolfe called in Kat, and we spent another forty minutes working through the details. Entry points and exit routes, communication protocols, the positions Hawk’s team would hold during the speech itself, and what Gator and Diego needed from the venue layout.
When it was done and people were gathering their things, Chance stopped beside me and Jackson on his way to the door.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“Better than I was,” I said.
He nodded. “Good.” He glanced at Jackson, and something passed between them, communicating something I didn’t quite catch. Then Chance looked back at me. “One week is fast, but we’ll be ready.”
He left, and the room emptied around us until it was just me and Jackson standing at the long table with the whiteboard covered in the plans we’d made.
Jackson looked at it for a moment, like he was trying to make sure nothing had been missed, before he turned to me.
“You okay?” he asked.
I thought about it honestly. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I actually am.”
“You did good in there,” he said.
“I only said one thing.”
“But it was the one thing that mattered to you.” He picked up the folder Diego had left for him. “Come on. Mika’s making lunch.”
“Okay, but can we stop and talk to Wolfe for a minute first?”
He looked at me. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, I just have something I want to say to him.”
“Okay.” He led me out of the conference room and over to the desk where Caden sat. He waited until Caden looked up and then asked, “Does he have a minute?”
“Yeah, y’all’s meeting is all he had this morning, so just go on in.”
Jackson looked at me. “Do you want me to wait here?”
“No, it’s nothing you can’t hear.”
We walked in, and Wolfe was standing at his window looking out over the downtown area. When he heard us enter, he turned to us. “Is everything okay?”
I took in a deep breath and then voiced my concern.
“Wolfe, I don’t even know how to thank you for what you’ve done for me, but this is a lot.
I can’t pay you, and I feel horrible that you’re going to have to go all the way to Houston like this.
When I insisted on going to the Gala, I didn’t understand what all it would entail, and—”
He raised a hand to stop me. “Noah, first of all, we started this job when Julius was taken, and we see things all the way through. But more importantly, you’re Crowe’s, and Crowe is ours. That makes you one of us, and we protect our own.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I went with something simple. “Thank you, Wolfe.”
Jackson nodded at him, and Wolfe nodded back. It was this weird thing like they’d just had a conversation with no words. Jackson reached for my hand and led me out of the office.
“Well, that was interesting,” I said.
Jackson smiled at me. “I could’ve told you what he would’ve said, but it was good that you heard it from him.”
I followed him across the huge space to the elevator, and as we rode up, I thought about the speech I hadn’t written yet, the people who were going to make sure I got to give it, and the moment I’d stand up in front of a room full of strangers and say out loud what had happened to me.
I thought I might actually be ready in a way I wouldn’t have been before Corvane found me again, because being back here in Vesper reminded me that, while survival mattered, it was the life you lived afterward that was most important.