30. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
I don’t take the file back.
I pull the chair from the wall and sit across from her, and I wait.
She opens the file again. She goes back to the first page, not reading this time, something else, more deliberate, the focused stillness of someone who has stopped taking the information in and started pulling it apart.
I’ve watched her do this before, in rooms, at dinner tables, with people who didn’t know they were being taken apart while they talked.
She slows down on the third page. Her eyes move differently there, following it line by line, and I watch her find the channel identifiers and recognize them.
When she closes the file, her hands are flat on the cover.
She looks up at me.
“This is every report I filed,” she says. “Every piece of it. It went directly to them.”
“Yes.”
“Reeves was never running a federal case.”
“No.”
“He was on their payroll.” She says it flatly, not a question. “The entire time. He used me as his source, and I didn’t know.” She pauses. “I didn’t know.”
“I know you didn’t.”
She looks at me. “Two men are dead.”
“Yes.”
“Because of what I gave him.”
I don’t answer that.
She looks back down at the closed file. “I built it carefully,” she says, quieter now. “Six weeks. I was so careful about the sequencing, the sourcing, the way I released it. I thought I was being responsible.” She stops. “I thought I was doing my job.”
“You were doing your job,” I say. “Someone used that against you.”
“That’s not an absolution.”
“I’m not offering one.”
She looks up at that.
“I’m telling you what happened,” I say. “You were run by a man who knew exactly how you work and used it. That’s a different thing from what you think you did.”
“It doesn’t feel different.”
“It rarely does at first.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Outside the window, the light has shifted, later than I realized, the afternoon going gray at the edges. She looks at the file in her hands, then at the window, then back at me.
“The faction used my work,” she says. “My byline, my credibility, my decade of contacts. Everything I spent ten years building.” She exhales slowly. “They were going to use it to go public. To expose you through legitimate press channels.”
“Yes.”
“Through me. Using material I built.”
“Yes.”
She sits with that.
I let her sit with it because there’s nothing I can say that will make the shape of it smaller, and I’m not going to try. She’s not a woman who responds well to being managed through difficult things, and I stopped trying to manage her through anything months ago.
“You knew before your people finished the trace,” she says. “I could see it when you walked in.”
“Yes.”
“You came to me before you went to anyone else.”
I look at her across the table. “Yes.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment. Something in her face shifts, not softer exactly, but different, the way a face changes when a person is deciding to stop holding something at arm’s length.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
The words are plain and direct and cost her something. I can see what they cost her in the way she holds herself while she says them, straight, not collapsing into them.
“I know,” I say.
“That’s not enough.”
“It’s a start.”
She looks at the file. “What happens now?”
“Now I find Reeves,” I say. “And I find out how much of what you gave him they have left to use.”
“And the faction?”
“The faction is already handled.” I lean forward slightly. “What I need to know is whether there is anything else. Anything you gave him that I don’t have in that file. Anything that could still move.”
She looks at me steadily. “I’ll go through everything. Every report, every communication, every date. I’ll give you all of it.”
“I know you will.”