Chapter 6 #2
“She’ll think she found exactly what she came for,” Andi says. “A woman who’s had a tough couple of weeks and is grateful for institutional support.” She looks down at her plate. “That’s what I’m going to show her.”
“And what she actually finds?” I ask, already knowing the answer that’s coming.
Andi looks up. The directness in her eyes means she’s already three moves ahead.
“Someone who’s been waiting for this meeting since the moment she walked into my center,” she says.
The photograph is in my gloves on Friday morning.
I open my locker and reach for them the way I always do—right hand first, checking the fit before I tape—and my fingers find paper.
I pull it out.
Andi and I, asleep. Our bedroom, through the window, the angle of a camera positioned outside the glass.
The image is clear enough that I can read the time on the clock on my side of the bed—2:14 a.m. Recent.
Within the last two weeks, based on the angle the summer light takes through our curtains at that hour.
I stand at my locker for a moment.
Then I close it. I walk through the gym without stopping, go to the parking lot, stand in the August heat, and call Mack.
He picks up on the second ring. I tell him what I found. He listens without interrupting.
When I finish, Mack replies as if he’s thinking out loud, catching up on the conversation but also thinking through the mechanics of this game. “He’s been in the gym.”
“Yes.”
“This locker is in the secured section. Requires a code.”
“Yes.”
Silence. Then, with the flat quiet of a man who has been managing dangerous situations for forty years. “He’s telling you something.”
“I know what he’s telling me.”
Your home. Your gym. Your bedroom. I go where I choose, when I choose, and the measures you take don’t change that.
“I’m going to make some calls,” Mack says. “New codes, new protocols. It won’t stop him, but it’ll slow him down.” Mack pauses before he says my name. “Luke?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s escalating.” A beat. “Not just the methods. The intimacy of his intrusions. He’s getting closer to both you and Andi.” He gives it a moment to land. “I want you to think about that.”
I stand in the parking lot in the August heat, and I think about a man who can enter a gym with a security code, a house that was swept clean that same morning, and a hospital pharmacy.
“I’m thinking about it,” I say.
“Good.” Mack hangs up.
I stand in the lot for another minute. Then I go back inside.
Reyes is waiting on the floor.
“All of you this time,” he says. Not a question.
I roll my shoulders. I think about eleven weeks. About what has to happen in them and what I have to be on the other side.
“All of me,” I say.
I tape my hands, and I get to work.
Mack calls back at two in the afternoon.
Not about the new locker codes. Not about Reeves or the security protocols. Something else entirely, in the voice he uses when he’s decided to say something he’s been sitting with for a while.
“The device,” he says. “The one behind the bookcase.”
“Still there,” I say. “Reeves confirmed it’s still transmitting.”
“I know it’s still there.” Something in his voice changes. “That’s what I want to talk about.”
I wait. Mack doesn’t explain things before he’s ready to explain them, and I learned a long time ago not to push.
“She’s listening to that room,” he says. “Which means she hears whatever you and Andi decide to say in it. You’ve been keeping the important conversations elsewhere. That’s smart. But you’re only playing defense.” He waits. “I want you to think about what you could do if you stopped.”
I stand in the gym parking lot in the August heat and think about what he’s saying.
The device is still transmitting. Evelyn is still listening.
And every conversation we’ve had in that living room since Reeves swept the house has been calculated silence—two people who stopped discussing the things that matter in the room she owns.
But calculated silence is one thing.
Calculated noise is something else entirely.
“I’ll call Andi,” I say.
“Call Bill too,” Mack says. “You need him to know what you’re doing before you do it. This only works if the story holds.”
They come to the house that evening—Mack and Bill, separately, within twenty minutes of each other.
Andi is already home. I didn’t tell her what it was about on the phone, just that Mack had an idea and that Bill needed to be in the room when we talked about it.
She read enough from my voice to be waiting in the kitchen when I arrived, coffee made for four.
We sit at the kitchen table. Not the living room. Never the living room anymore, not for anything real.
Mack puts his hands flat on the table and looks at Andi. Not the way he looks at fighters he’s assessing. The way he looks at things that matter to him personally, which is a shorter list than most people realize.
Andi looks at him. She doesn’t ask what this is about. She waits.
That’s all he needs from her. That’s always been all he needs.
Mack lays it out simply. The device is still active.
Evelyn’s operative has been inside the house twice—once to plant it, once to move the gym bag—which means the device is the one piece of this operation that belongs to them that we still have access to.
Every other advantage they have is invisible to us. This one isn’t.
“You’ve been using it as a negative,” he says. “Not saying things because she’s listening. I want you to use it as a positive. Say things because she’s listening.”
Bill takes it from there. What they need her to believe is simple: that the documentation is incomplete.
That Bill is weeks away from having enough to move on anything actionable.
That Andi and Luke are still in the early stages of mapping her network—building the picture, not yet ready to hand it to anyone.
“She’s been eliminating witnesses,” Bill says, “because she believes we’re close. We need her to believe we’re not. If she thinks we’re further behind than we are, she eases the pressure. She stops moving on people. She waits.” He looks at Andi. “And while she waits, we finish.”
Andi is quiet for a moment. Looking at the table. Then at Mack.
“The conversation has to be natural,” she says. “Not scripted. She’ll hear the difference.”
“Yes,” Mack says.
She looks at me. The directness of her, the thing she does when she’s already decided and just wants me to be in the same place she is.
“Tonight,” she says. “After Bill and Mack leave.”
We do it in the living room at ten o’clock.
We’ve thought about what to say—not scripted, the way Andi said, but shaped.
Grounded in things that are true. Bill is still building the financial picture.
The documentation is real but incomplete.
The witness chain is harder to reach than expected.
We have a name—Evelyn Carrington—but we’re still weeks from having the full scope of what she runs.
These are all true. They’re just not the whole truth.
Andi brings it up the way she would bring up anything she’s been thinking about—directly, no preamble, the way she talks when she’s working through something out loud.
She talks about the documentation. About where the gaps still are.
About how Bill thinks it’ll be another month, maybe six weeks, before they have enough to bring to anyone with real authority.
She says it the way she’d say it to me in any room in this house—the frustrated calm of someone who knows how to be patient and isn’t enjoying it.
I listen. I respond the way I would respond—asking the questions I’d actually ask, pushing back where I’d actually push back.
Saying I think a month is too conservative, that we should be looking for a way to accelerate.
Saying I don’t like the exposure while we wait.
She tells me the exposure is managed. That Bill knows what he’s doing.
That the worst thing we could do is move before we’re ready and give her a chance to reposition.
None of it is untrue.
All of it lands exactly where we need it to land.
We go upstairs at eleven. In the bedroom, door closed, Andi looks at me the way she does when something is done that can’t be undone.
“Now we wait,” she says.
“What are we waiting for?” I ask.
She looks at the door. At the room on the other side of it where the device sits behind the bookcase, still transmitting.
“For her to believe it,” she says. “And then make a move based on it.”