Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The road was where he thought best.
This morning, the road wasn’t enough.
Three miles up the highway from Katherine Townsend’s rental, Jasper pulled his truck off at a turnout and killed the engine.
He let his hands rest on the wheel and stared at the mountains.
September had pushed the aspens into their gold, and the wind moving through them sent yellow light flickering across the windshield.
He liked that color. It was one of the small, ridiculous reasons he’d let himself stay in Montana past the first year.
He should be running her case through his head right now.
The reclassified flag, the two Vance letters, the fact that the second letter was dated the day Vance died.
That last detail had pulled him up short at the kitchen table, and he’d worked very hard to keep his face from showing it.
He should be running all of that. Instead, he was running her.
Not the archivist. Katherine. The curve of her hips when she’d led him to the kitchen.
The way the cuffs of her blazer didn’t quite cover the small bones of her wrists when she reached for her coffee.
Hazel eyes that had stayed level on him through every part of the meeting, flecked with the kind of green that only showed up in good light.
Her teeth that had worried at her bottom lip exactly once, when he’d said if I take your case. She’d caught herself and smoothed her face. He’d filed the moment under things he had no business filing.
He drummed his thumbs against the wheel. She was pretty. Not in the way that announced itself across a room—in the way that sneaked up on a man over the course of a twenty-minute conversation and made him want to see her again.
He’d kept his initial attraction to her suppressed until she’d forced him to sign the NDA. Why the hell was it sexy that she hadn’t even blinked at his resistance? He’d seen the eagerness she was trying to hide in her face, in the rigid line of her posture. Hope, contained by force of will.
When she’d opened that black notebook, he’d been dragged in even deeper.
It wasn’t the system she’d built—although her system was the kind of work he might have spent a quiet hour appreciating under different circumstances—it was how she read the stories behind the words.
The way her finger had paused on her own timeline at the gap she’d flagged, as if she were re-examining the assumption every time she touched it.
The way she’d turned the notebook to face him, instead of reading aloud or summarizing—as if he deserved the same access to the source she’d granted herself.
She trusted documents; she didn’t trust people. Yet she’d shown him a piece of the system she trusted most, and somehow he’d come away from her kitchen feeling like she’d handed him something fragile.
That feeling was a problem.
His professional read of the case said walk away.
The reclassification of her flag was the kind of move someone made when they had reach and exposure in roughly equal measure.
Whoever had buried that flag was senior enough to scrub the routing log without leaving fingerprints, and worried enough to do it fast. That was a person with the means to kill a retired Station Chief and the motive to keep killing if the secret continued to be threatening.
If Katherine kept pulling the thread, that person’s next move would be larger than a reassignment.
If Jasper helped her pull it, he became a thread of his own.
Hell, his personal read didn’t just say walk away, it said run.
Whatever was happening behind his sternum after twenty minutes in her kitchen was not the kind of thing he had time for.
Katherine Townsend was not the kind of woman a man with his set of unresolved questions from his past needed to be in close proximity to.
He’d built a quiet life at the compound for reasons. The reasons were still there.
Both reads agreed: Don’t take the case.
He started the engine and pulled back onto the highway, fully prepared to drive to the compound, walk into his office, send Vivi a polite email refusal, and forget the smell of Katherine’s clean, citrus scent and her damn good coffee.
CB caught him crossing the gravel lot and called something teasing about the speed at which Jasper had driven past the gate cam, but Jasper waved him off and kept walking.
He went straight to office, dropped his leather bag on the desk, then turned around and headed to Vivi’s office. She deserved more than a quick email.
Her door stood open. He knocked anyway.
She looked up from a stack of files, took one full breath while she scanned his face, then set down her pen. “Sit. I’ll make tea.”
“Don’t bother.”
She stood and crossed to the small electric kettle on the side table. “I’m bothering. Sit down.”
Her office was the same as it had been every other time he’d been in it.
Bookshelves crammed with psychology texts and the latest crime novels.
A framed photograph of her and her husband Ian on a hiking trail.
The ridiculous Costco couch she’d defended for four years.
The sound machine on the credenza, currently silent.
As her two parakeets tweeted in their cage behind her desk, she handed him a mug with something that smelled like cinnamon and clove. He took it without drinking and watched her sit down across from him.
“So,” she said. “Ms. Townsend.”
“Yeah.”
“You came directly here after your meeting. You haven’t even taken off your jacket.”
He looked down. He hadn’t.
“Taking the case then,” Vivi said.
He shook his head and gave her a brief rundown: the flagged 2019 memo, the reassignment, the two Vance letters, the second one dated the day Vance died.
He laid out his suspicions with the second letter at the center, because that changed the shape of the case.
A retired Station Chief writing about an active spy who was officially dead, then dying himself before he could finish the letter—that wasn’t a coincidence Jasper was prepared to let live.
Vivi listened, and when he finished, she nodded once. “You think Vance was killed.”
“I think a rational person in our business would assume so until proven otherwise.”
“Katherine doesn’t suspect that?”
“Oh, she does. She’s not saying it out loud yet because she’s careful and has no one else to turn to.”
Vivi sipped her tea. “What’s your assessment of her?”
“She’s unusual.”
Vivi’s brows rose. “How so?”
“The notation system she built is the kind of thing analysts spend a decade refining. She’s also angry, although she’d call it something more dignified. The Agency dumped her here, and she reads it as if it’s Siberia.”
Vivi made a small noise of acknowledgment. “What does your gut say?”
“Don’t take this case.”
“Why?”
He turned the mug in his hands. The tea was the kind Vivi liked, something like chai that he never quite got the appeal of, and he drank it anyway because she’d made it.
“Because if I take this on, the people who buried her flag are going to find me. They’re going to find SPS.
Eventually, they’re going to find her family, friends, whoever they can leverage. ”
“That’s a tactical answer.”
“What else is there?”
“You sound worried. Since when do you back down from a risky proposition?”
He ground his teeth. Vivi waited, a faint smile on her face. One of her specialties—she did it without making him feel like a patient. She did it the way a friend waited.
A sigh escaped his lips. “Katherine trusts the page more than the people. Reminds me of my mom. She used to read the stories behind the words.” He smiled at a memory of her explaining the subtext of his favorite Jules Vern story when he was only ten.
“Katherine reads the facts behind the documents. Same instinct, different tools.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
He considered the question. “It’s a potential hazard. I’m still grieving my mother. Walking into a daily working relationship with a woman who reminds me of her care and insight with the written word is not a clean place to put my head.”
“Can anyone else at SPS do this work?”
“No.”
She nodded as if expecting that response. “Is the case real?”
“Yes.”
“Is Katherine in danger?”
“If she pursues this and catches the Agency’s attention, most definitely.”
“Then your only reason for declining is your discomfort with what she stirs up in you.”
“I don’t want to be on the wrong side of this. That’s the reason.”
She raised her hands in supplication. “I’m not going to talk you into taking the job. I’m only going to ask whether it’s the reason you want to give yourself when whatever happens to that woman happens, and you find out it could have been prevented if you’d been the one helping her.”
He stared at her for a long second. “That’s a hell of a thing to say to a man before lunch.”
“I’ve said harder things to harder men for ten years. Drink your tea.”
He drank the awful tea, stewing over her words. Over Katherine’s half-pleading eyes. Over her chewing her lip.
Vivi watched him over the rim of her cup. After a minute, she said, more gently, “What else?”
He set down the mug, deciding whether to share an underlying worry he had. “The official death, the records that don’t hold up, the institutional silence around the inconsistencies—it’s the same pattern as the secrecy around my father.”
Vivi knew about Ryan Perault. She’d known ever since Jasper had let it slip during a conversation about something else entirely, and she’d never once made it the topic when he didn’t want it to be.
“You think hers is connected?”
“No, not directly. I think it suggests how this kind of cover-up is done at the institutional level, and her case is the closest I’ve ever come to watching one get unraveled in real time. If I help her, I learn something about how to handle mine.”
Vivi seemed to think this over. “That’s another reason to take it.”
“It is.”
“How many do you need?”