Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
By evening, Jasper had decided the sedan was mocking him.
The grainy image sat frozen on the center monitor in his tech room, a dark government-issue vehicle moving past the library at a speed too slow to be casual and too controlled to be lost. The angle of the traffic camera had been just bad enough to make the partial hit irritating instead of useful.
He’d cleaned the image through every enhancement program he trusted, run the visible letters and possible number combinations through more databases than he cared to explain to anyone, and still had nothing solid enough to put a name on the man who’d tried to kill Katherine.
Nothing solid enough was starting to feel like failure, and failure was not acceptable.
He sat forward, forearms braced on the desk, and forced himself to review the facts instead of the feeling.
The plate had the structure of a federal fleet number, but it didn’t match current active assignments.
That meant one of three things: the plate was cloned, the database he’d accessed was incomplete, or the vehicle had once belonged to a federal pool and had been taken out of circulation without disappearing from the world.
The last option had been eating at him for the past hour because government vehicles didn’t always vanish when paperwork said they did.
Sometimes they went to auction. Sometimes they were transferred to contractors.
Sometimes they were written off in one system and quietly kept alive in another because old things had uses if someone knew where to look.
He knew where to look.
Usually.
He scrubbed both hands over his face. On the left monitor, Garrett’s running update thread with Blackridge PD kept blinking new messages.
The department had confirmed the gun was a compact nine millimeter with the serial filed down, the kind of weapon used by both law enforcement and civilians.
The jacket fabric snagged on Katherine’s window had been collected, photographed, and sent for fiber analysis, which would take longer than any of them liked.
The two bullets recovered from the rental had been logged.
The first had gone through the bedroom window.
The second had lodged in the wall over the bed, close enough to Katherine’s head that Jasper had to stop reading the report the first time and stand up before he did something stupid to his desk.
He’d had enough self-control to sit back down. Barely.
On the right monitor, a message from CB updated every few minutes with a location check-in from him and the motorcycle club contacts he’d called in to help sweep Blackridge.
CB’s Outlaws owed him enough favors to put eyes on roads, alleys, motels, gas stations, repair shops, and back lots without making it look like Shadow Point Security had declared war on the Montana town.
So far, no one had spotted the sedan. No abandoned government car, no muddy rear bumper, no nervous man with bruises on his face or glass cuts on his hands.
Jasper had asked CB to watch for someone favoring one leg, too. Katherine had mentioned the scuffing shoe, and after the bedroom fight, the man might have picked up an injury. Maybe from the fall courtesy of Priss. Maybe from Katherine kicking him.
He switched to the window on Caldwell’s consulting firm and opened the file Katherine had flagged.
Matthew Caldwell had been a junior officer in Vance’s private correspondence after the official record had already moved him to State, and that discrepancy kept tugging at Jasper’s attention.
People disappeared from official records for a lot of reasons.
Cover, embarrassment, protection, corruption.
The trick was figuring out who benefited from the disappearance and who’d had access to the eraser.
Caldwell’s public-facing life looked clean.
Too clean, which Jasper had disliked from the start.
He’d left government service in 1996, married Helen Bristol, and started a consulting firm that now handled risk assessment, records compliance, secure document workflows, and historical review projects for government-adjacent clients.
On paper, it was exactly the kind of bland private firm that charged six figures to tell agencies their filing systems were terrible.
On a deeper pass, Caldwell’s firm had contracts with federal offices whose names seemed designed to put readers to sleep before they reached the end of the acronym.
Records integrity. Legacy classification review.
Secure archival transition. Historical risk mitigation.
None of those phrases sounded like assassination, but Jasper had worked around government long enough to know the deadliest words were often the dullest ones.
He opened another database and began cross-referencing Caldwell’s early contracts with Richard Upton’s career timeline.
A knock came at the open room door. Vivi stepped in with two mugs of tea, one of which she set on the edge of his desk without asking whether he wanted it.
“I know you prefer coffee,” she said, “but if you drink more of that, your heart is going to file a complaint.”
“My heart has other priorities.”
“Hmm.” Her gaze moved across the monitors, taking in the sedan, the plate enhancement, the Caldwell file, the Blackridge PD thread, and CB’s check-ins. “Any progress?”
“Not enough.”
“The director’s deadline is inconvenient. It may put SPS in a delicate situation.”
He leaned back in the chair. “I know.” He gestured at the monitors. “The plate doesn’t match any current federal fleet assignment. It has the right structure, but nothing active. I’m digging through decommissioned vehicle records now.”
“Could the plate be fake?”
“It could be cloned—I once found at least a dozen that had been during my time in the teams--but if I were using a fake plate for a hit, I’d use something boring and civilian.
Federal tags draw attention if the wrong person sees them.
Whoever used this either wanted the vehicle to be accepted in certain places without question or had access to old federal assets and got lazy. ”
“Lazy doesn’t sound like the man who got into Katherine’s rental.”
“No, but…” Jasper trailed off.
“But what?”
“This guy wasn’t exactly a high-level assassin. He was bested by an untrained woman and her cat. He lost his gun under the bed. I don’t like it.”
Vivi studied him for a moment. “I noticed. You haven’t unclenched your jaw since last night. Have you considered that the man thought Katherine would be an easy mark and therefore wasn’t expecting her to fight back?”
Of course he’d thought of that. Still didn’t sit right with him. He returned his attention to the monitor. “What did you get on Upton?”
“Not as much as I wanted.” She pulled a chair beside the desk.
“I made a few calls. Upton has a reputation for being effective, discreet, and nearly impossible to pin down on anything that goes wrong. He’s never been operational.
He’s an administrative leader with a deep reach across classification review and historical risk assessment. ”
Jasper’s fingers stilled on the keyboard. “Historical risk assessment.”
“That phrase came up more than once.”
“That sounds like Caldwell’s world.”
She glanced at the monitors. “Upton has chaired or advised on several classified review boards involving old operations, disputed records, and legacy files no one wants declassified at the wrong time. One of my contacts at NSA described him as the man they send in when the past becomes inconvenient.”
Jasper glanced at the Vance timeline taped to the whiteboard near his desk. “Containment.”
“That’s the word I’d use. Any connection to Walter Vance?”
“I haven’t found anything direct yet. Vance retired before Upton moved into senior review positions, but they overlapped in the same institutional ecosystem.
Old Europe desks, Cold War residual operations, Balkan stabilization reviews, embassy asset protection policies.
Nothing I can point to with absolute certainty.
But if Upton wanted a historic anomaly buried, he’d know where to apply pressure. ”
Vivi sipped her tea. “One of my contacts remembers Caldwell’s firm. His company worked on several federal contracts involving records transfer risk. One of them was attached to a review program Upton chaired six years ago.”
Jasper turned fully toward her. “Did you get a program name?”
“Legacy Shield. Government subtlety remains undefeated.”
He typed the phrase into his search window and began running it through the contract archives he’d already accessed. “What did Legacy Shield do?”
“Officially? Identified old records that could create current diplomatic or operational exposure if released. Unofficially, according to the person I spoke with, it made sure embarrassing old ghosts were labeled correctly, routed correctly, and kept away from people who might ask questions before leadership decided what answers were safe.”
“That’s administrative encryption.”
Vivi’s eyes narrowed with interest. “Katherine’s dissertation term.”
“Yeah.” Jasper pulled up a partial contract index.
“Which means whoever buried that Cinder flag either didn’t know her background or thought her position made her manageable.”
Jasper thought of Katherine wrapped in a blanket in the laundry room, pale and shaking the previous night, then negotiating with an Associate Deputy Director before lunch today like she had a blade hidden in every procedure. “Bad read on their part.”
“Very bad.” Vivi stood, but didn’t leave. “Alyssa’s with Katherine in the common room. I asked Alyssa to walk her through it carefully.”
He could see from her expression that there was more. “And?”
“Katherine’s working so she doesn’t have to feel everything.”
“I’m surprised you aren’t in there offering counseling.”
Vivi smiled. “I might have slipped in a suggestion or two.”
Jasper smiled. “Of course you did.”