CHAPTER 15
Jameson
Geneva, Switzerland
Her lock was basic, secure but beatable. I didn’t force it. I picked it clean, slipped inside, and closed the door behind me without a sound.
Her perfume hit first, soft and clean, a hint of citrus with a warmer note I couldn’t place.
I didn’t turn on the lights. The apartment was small, one bedroom, one bath, and an open kitchen. Sparse, but not cold. Nothing extravagant, but everything was in its place, a rhythm that, for someone like me, passed for comfort.
Books stacked in the corners, dog-eared and well-worn.
Mostly nonfiction, political memoirs, economic warfare.
A paperback on psychological operations was so battered it looked like it had crossed borders in someone’s boot.
Three shelves of romance novels were mixed in, glossy covers and swooning titles, enough bare-chested men to form a militia.
Naturally, it fit the pattern.
Her desk looked chaotic at first glance, but it was structured underneath. Scribbled notes layered over digital printouts. Patterns laid out without needing string. Names I recognized and places I’d been. She wasn’t guessing. She was assembling.
I moved through the space like it might react if I pushed it too hard. Nothing within reach. No blade in the drawer or pistol taped under the desk, not even the kitchen knife most people kept close.
What are you doing living like this without a fallback?
In the bedroom, I opened the nightstand drawer.
I still had my primary holstered at my side. The compact SIG I’d picked up earlier in town was a backup, clean, checked, and wrapped in microfiber. I could leave it. If she wasn’t protecting herself, that gap needed to be covered.
Leaving a firearm with someone whose training I hadn’t confirmed violated several rules I had spent years enforcing.
But she was Beckett Hunt’s sister. The odds that she had never handled one were low.
And leaving her with nothing felt worse.
The drawer wasn’t empty. My fingers brushed something smooth and cool.
Silicone.
I paused.
Training told me to close it immediately.
I eased the drawer open another three inches.
Matte black. Not small. Not subtle. Not remotely apologetic about either.
For one second, my brain tried to file it under none of my goddamn business.
It failed.
I shut the drawer halfway and stared at the wood grain instead.
“Well,” I muttered, voice rougher than I liked, “at least you’re not entirely defenseless.”
I checked the chamber again and placed the SIG at the back of the drawer, within reach but not obvious.
Hopefully, if she needed it, she’d be angry enough to use it before asking questions.
I moved back out to the living room and went straight back to her desk. The laptop lit with a soft glow when I touched the trackpad.
Password protected.
Good.
I pulled a drive from my pocket, connected it to the port, and let the program work through the local credentials.
It took forty-three seconds.
Files sat open across the screen. Notes layered over articles, names pulled from different sources and arranged into something that almost made sense.
Dozens of photos. Protests. War zones. Police tape. Hotel corridors. Surveillance stills. Data breaches. Movement. Tension. A narrative without captions.
I shifted the window and opened another tab.
A messaging window sat open beneath everything else.
No encryption, no masking.
Just a handle at the top. The same one she’d used in the discussion post.
threadbare.
My focus narrowed.
I opened the thread.
reinconsulting_m: I’m surprised you reached out after kicking me out of your apartment naked.
threadbare: Maybe if your dick didn’t already have lipstick on it, we wouldn’t be here.
reinconsulting_m: Brynn, are we really doing this?
threadbare: No. I have an actual reason.
reinconsulting_m: …
threadbare: The Baltic leak.
reinconsulting_m: What about it?
threadbare: I went back through everything. Checking sources, etc…
threadbare: They’re gone. My sources are all gone.
reinconsulting_m: Your drive crash or something?
threadbare: No.
threadbare: Like… gone as in Evan Rischard doesn’t exist.
reinconsulting_m: What do you men doesn’t exist?
reinconsulting_m: mean*
threadbare: No records. No filings. No tax history. No archived mentions.
threadbare: Helix Dynamics says they have no employee record for him.
threadbare: It literally looks like I made him up.
reinconsulting_m: You have this right?
threadbare: Obviously. You know me and my double checks.
threadbare: Unless someone turned on the LHC at CERN and rewrote reality, there’s no version of this where I got it wrong.
threadbare: But it’s… wrong, Matt. Like really wrong.
threadbare: Like this guy just went poof.
reinconsulting_m: Send me everything.
reinconsulting_m: I’m not saying you’re mistaken...
reinconsulting_m: But a person can’t just disappear.
They didn’t know what they’d found yet.
But Rischard was too close. Missing records. Corrected employment history. A man who existed one day and didn’t the next.
If the task force was active and knew how close they were getting, neither handle should still have a living person behind it.
My gaze shifted back to the other handle, reinconsulting_m.
I didn’t recognize it.
I’d need to dig into this Matt.
I moved to close the thread but paused, noticing more farther down.
reinconsulting_m: I’ve been hearing things.
reinconsulting_m: You’re not going to like this.
threadbare: Try me.
reinconsulting_m: Word is Rischard isn’t isolated.
threadbare: Meaning?
reinconsulting_m: Other names. Same kind of disappearances.
threadbare: Where?
reinconsulting_m: Multiple countries.
threadbare: Are you being fucking serious right now?
reinconsulting_m: Yeah.
threadbare: …fuck.
reinconsulting_m: I met with a source.
reinconsulting_m: He said if we want the real story, we need to find a guy named Mercer.
reinconsulting_m: Jameson Mercer.
threadbare: Who the hell is that?
reinconsulting_m: I don’t know. I did a preliminary and didn’t find much.
reinconsulting_m: The source thinks Geneva is our best chance of finding him.
threadbare: Why?
reinconsulting_m: That’s the part I haven’t been able to confirm.
threadbare: I’ve been hearing rumblings about some black-tie summit.
reinconsulting_m: Same. If Mercer is following any of this, he may show.
threadbare: So I go & sniff around.
reinconsulting_m: I’d join, but I’m on assignment.
reinconsulting_m: Just be careful, yeah?
I checked the timestamp.
The message had been sent two days before the alert reached me.
Before I contacted Whitaker.
Before Geneva had entered the equation at all.
I was on my feet before I realized I’d moved.
My name sat there on the screen.
Not Caldwell.
Jameson Mercer.
Someone had pointed Brynn toward Geneva before I had decided to go there.
They hadn’t known I would come.
But they had known enough about me to believe I might.
That was nearly as troubling.
I couldn’t follow that thread. Not yet.
My focus shifted back to Brynn.
She was already in this deeper than I’d accounted for.
And now she was connected to me in a way I hadn’t foreseen.
I glanced at the firearm still holstered at my side.
One firearm on me and one hidden in her drawer wouldn’t be enough if someone was already moving against her.
I shut the system down, locked everything behind me, and left to build a plan that did not depend on improvisation.
She was still at the club, which gave me a window.