Chapter 24 - Logan
Juliet has been at the corner table for six hours.
The afternoon light through the office windows went from white to amber to the flat blue of early evening while she worked.
She surfaces at half past five, ledger closed, the annotated columns she's been living inside finally still. She crosses the room and sets three pages in front of me without preamble.
"There's your mole," she says.
I look at the pages. The routing spread is clean now — what had been a tangle of shell companies and access windows resolves into something a child could read.
Inflated gem acquisitions over eighteen months.
Deflated sales. The spread between them moving in predictable cycles, predictable enough that Juliet caught the rhythm in under three days.
"Every transaction clusters in the same access window." Her finger lands on a column. "Tuesday nights, eleven PM to midnight. The same internal terminal, every time. It required specific access credentials. Someone who knew the system well enough to run this without triggering the audit flags."
She has a list. Three names, with two crossed out in red.
The third name is uncrossed.
My gut knows before I finish reading it. The pattern has been there all along — the quiet man, always present, always helpful, always exactly where he was needed. The one person whose competence I relied on so thoroughly I stopped noticing him as a person.
Jimmy Polson.
"You're sure," I say.
"The gem trail confirms it. The access pattern confirms it. Cross-reference the Tuesday window against building entry logs—" She pulls a fourth page from underneath the others. "He was always in the building. Every time."
"Thank you," I tell her. "This is exactly what I needed."
She looks at me for a moment, then takes her ledger and goes back to her corner. She understands what comes next isn't hers to watch.
I sit with the pages for a while.
Jimmy was invisible. That's the word that keeps arriving: invisible, competent, reliable. He brought coffee. He filed reports. He relayed information I needed before I asked for it.
There was a Tuesday three months ago — I remember it now with sudden clarity.
Vendor dispute, a supplier trying to renegotiate mid-contract.
Jimmy had the relevant files on my desk before I'd finished the first call.
I looked at the files. I said good without looking up.
He left. I filed the response and moved on, and I never once looked at the man standing on the other side of my desk. Only the function he performed.
For three years I said good and handled and thanks and looked through him at whatever he was carrying toward me, never at him. Furniture. Well-maintained, useful furniture.
I know that feeling. The silent fixer, the man who holds everything together while everyone looks through him at the problem he just solved. I've spent thirty years being that man for other people, and I understand, with an intimacy I would rather not have, how it feels.
What would it have taken to break me? What combination of years and invisibility and resentment would have done it? If Jorge had taken me for granted the way I took Jimmy for granted —
I seal it before it finishes. Press it flat. It has no useful answer.
What matters is Andrei Cebotari. Andrei followed this thread for weeks. Got close enough that someone inside knew it. Jimmy knew it. Jimmy made a call, and now Andrei is dead and his family doesn't know why.
Whatever broke in Jimmy, whatever the calculation was — Andrei paid for it. That doesn't change.
I'm on my feet before I decide to stand.
I find Gunner in the security room. I say Jimmy's name, and my expression says the rest.
He's already moving.
We find Jimmy at the staff desk near the main floor, working through the afternoon vendor schedule with his tablet — same as every other day, same quiet efficiency, the mask fully intact. He looks up when I appear in the doorway. The professional smile starts.
I say his name differently. Just that. One syllable with the wrong weight behind it.
The mask cracks. Not dramatically — it just stops working. Something behind his eyes recalibrates instantly. He knows I know. The helpful employee goes away, and what's left is a man sitting in a chair who made choices and is now measuring what they cost him.
"Sir—"
"Don't," I say.
He doesn't.
Gunner covers the distance in four steps.
One moment Jimmy is behind the desk, the next he isn't, and Gunner is moving him toward the service corridor with a grip at the back of his neck that communicates without words what the next several hours will look like.
Jimmy cooperates because he's smart enough to know what Gunner will do if he doesn’t.
I follow them to the holding room off the kitchen corridor. Gunner deposits Jimmy in a chair and posts himself by the door. Arms loose. Watching.
"You got Andrei killed," I say.
Jimmy doesn't respond. His hands are flat on his knees. He doesn't look at me.
You almost got Wren killed. I don’t say that out loud because I don’t trust my voice to stay even.
I leave it. There are specifics to extract, and Gunner will extract them. There's something more urgent now.
I'm turning toward the corridor when Gunner reaches into his jacket and checks his weapon. A brief, matter-of-fact movement — chamber confirmed, weight confirmed, holstered. He does it without comment, without looking at me.
But he did it after I said I was leaving. He did it so I would see.
Nine years I've worked alongside him. I understand what the weapon-check means for Jimmy — what his next several hours will involve, what Gunner is willing to do and entirely untroubled by doing.
I look at him standing by that door, stone-faced, already somewhere past anything Jimmy might say in his own defense, and I feel cold resolve settle in my chest. Jimmy chose this.
He chose it when he picked up the phone after Andrei got close enough.
Gunner is the consequence of that choice.
"Get what you can on logistics while I'm gone," I tell him. "What he told them, when, how much they know. Don't finish it without me."
Gunner nods once. That's all.
I step into the corridor.
My phone buzzes before I've reached the stairs.
Nico. I answer walking.
"The Zayas are massing,” he says. "Surveillance has been tracking movement near the building for the last hour. It's not a probe. They have numbers."
I stop at the corridor wall. The building hums around me. "How long?"
"Two hours. Maybe less. They're not being subtle — which is either confidence or a message."
The play becomes clear. Héctor Zayas — patient, grief-driven, relentlessly strategic.
He's watched the Andrei situation go quiet.
He knows we've closed in on the mole, knows we're about to learn exactly what Jimmy told his people.
Jimmy must have fired off a message as soon as I approached him.
This assault isn't coincidence. It's a forcing move — hit La Sirena while Logan is standing in a holding room with his attention divided, make us defend on two fronts, extract whatever they can from the chaos before we can use Jimmy's information against them.
It's the move I'd make. You don't wait for your opponent to convert information into advantage. You force the board before they can.
Thirty minutes.
"I need the non-combatants clear," I say. "Before this starts."
"Agreed. Where?"
"The Gilded Lily." That club is in a different district, the wrong quadrant for Zayas surveillance, with controlled entry. Far enough that whatever's coming won't reach it. "Get it emptied and secured. Marisol, Juliet, the Siren out of this building now."
A pause. "And Wren?"
"Wren goes with them." I push off the wall. "I'll escort them myself."
"Logan—"
"Thirty minutes. I'll come straight back. Have cars ready."
I stop briefly at the holding room door to give Gunner his instructions, then go find her.
She's in the office, dressed again, reading a novel. She looks up when I come through the door and reads the situation before I say a word — the urgency in how I'm standing, the coat already on. She sets the book down.
"How long?" she says.
"Thirty minutes. Maybe less." I cross to the daybed and tower over her. "The Zayas are moving on La Sirena. I'm sending you, Marisol, Juliet, and the Siren to the Gilded Lily. It's secured. My people are already there."
She stands without being told to. "And you're coming back here."
"After I get you settled." I look at her. "Yes."
She holds my gaze for a moment. Not fear — the bright animal fear I know from her, something quieter. She's working out what she can and can't ask for in the time available.
"Who will be with us at the Gilded Lily? None of us can fight," she says.
"Pawlikowski. Ex-military, been with us four years.
He knows you're coming. You go directly to him when you arrive, not the main door — the service entrance on the east side.
" I hear myself translating everything into logistics and recognize it for what it is.
She receives it the same way. "If anything feels wrong — anyone you don't recognize, anyone who doesn't know Pawlikowski's name — you use the back exit and you call this number.
" I write it on a card from my desk, slide it toward her. "That's Nico's direct line."
She picks up the card and looks at it. "Not yours?"
"Mine will be occupied."
A beat. She puts the card in her jacket pocket. "Okay."
The cars are ready.
The convoy is two vehicles. Marisol with her security detail in the second, and I drive the first with Wren, Juliet, and the Siren.