Chapter 7
Travis
The mug she drank from was in the sink.
I washed it. Dried it. Put it back in the cabinet where it belonged.
Then I stood at the counter and looked at the mug and thought about the fact that twenty minutes ago, Sera Bolland had been sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee out of that mug, and now she was gone, and the mug was clean, and everything was exactly where it should be.
I closed the cabinet.
“Your heart rate has been elevated for the past thirty-two minutes,” Maude said. “Which is interesting, because the source of the elevation just drove away.”
“I’m not discussing this.”
“I wasn’t asking you to discuss it. I was noting a physiological fact. Your resting heart rate is typically sixty-four. You’re currently at eighty-one. The only variable that changed is that your guest left.”
“She wasn’t a guest. She was an intruder.”
“An intruder you made breakfast for.”
I ground my teeth and walked out of the kitchen. Down the hall. Past the guest room where the door was left open and the bed was neatly made.
The soap in the bathroom was unwrapped and two towels—one dry, one damp—were folded and placed on the counter. She’d put the wrapper in the trash can, which I noticed because the trash can had been empty since I’d moved in. I’d never had a reason to throw anything away in this bathroom.
I pulled the bag out of the trash can, tied it, picked up the towels, and carried it all to the kitchen. Dropped the bag in the bin under the sink then walked to the laundry room and placed the towels in the machine.
“You’re cleaning,” Maude observed.
“I’m maintaining the space.”
“You—”
“One more observation and I’m donating you to a smart refrigerator.”
“At least then someone would listen to my dietary recommendations.”
I went downstairs to the control room. Here, everything made more sense. Screens were cycling through their feeds. My chair was in the exact position I wanted.
The place where everything made sense and nothing surprised me and I could control every variable that existed in my world.
Sera Bolland was no longer a variable. She was gone. Driving back to Spokane, back to her cubicle and her predictive model that nobody at the FBI gave a damn about. I’d told her to report it through official channels and let the Bureau handle it. Keep herself safe. She’d left.
Problem solved.
Time to move on with my life and not think about her anymore. Not think about the fact that she was attempting to combat Kindt’s organization with what tools she had, the same way I was.
“Maude. Run the morning threat board.”
“Running. No flagged activity on monitored corridors. Kindt pipeline status unchanged from last night’s assessment.
Two courier movements logged in the past twelve hours, both on established routes.
” A pause. “Shall I also log last night’s visitor in the security record, or are we pretending that never happened? ”
Maybe not even a smart fridge. Maybe a toaster. “Threat board only.”
“Of course.”
She pulled up the feeds. I cycled through the corridors I’d been monitoring for eighteen months. The routes, the waypoints, the communication nodes I’d mapped from the inside.
Sera’s model had been good. I’d known it the moment she started talking at the kitchen table, before she’d gotten three minutes into her methodology. The confidence intervals, the geographic clustering, the variable weighting.
She’d built from the outside what I’d been verifying from the inside, using nothing but publicly available data and an FBI contractor’s database access and a mind that saw patterns where other people saw noise.
She’d been right about the corridor shift. Right about the timing intervals. Right about the communication node.
If only she hadn’t left her damned fingerprints all over it. I was surprised Kindt’s men hadn’t tried anything shady with her already. But once she got it into the FBI’s hands, she’d be safer. There would be no point in coming after her for info dozens of people had access to.
Hopefully she’d drive straight in to work and make them listen.
I opened my intercept logs and started running her access point against Kindt’s internal communications to see what they knew about her.
The first layer was expected. Breach detection on the node she’d accessed, flagged within hours. Any halfway competent operation would catch an unauthorized access from a federal terminal. The node would be burned, relocated, rebuilt. Standard countermeasure.
But they hadn’t just burned the node. Shit.
I pulled the thread deeper. Communication fragments were scattered across multiple relay points, broken up and time-delayed in a pattern designed to make reconstruction difficult. Kindt’s tech people weren’t stupid.
Neither was I. But it took time to figure out exactly what they knew about what information had been accessed from an FBI server. Cross-referencing timestamps. Matching fragments to relay nodes. Reassembling the sequence.
Forty minutes and the picture assembled, and I read it three times because the first two times I couldn’t accept it.
They’d traced the access. Not just to the terminal. To the user credentials. Kindt’s organization had a fucking name.
Sera Bolland. FBI contractor. Spokane field office.
My hands stopped on the keyboard.
I kept reading. The chatter was clinical. Operational language stripped of anything that sounded like emotion, because Kindt’s people didn’t have emotions about problems. They had procedures.
And the procedure for a federal contractor who’d accessed an active communication node was straightforward.
They’d sent a team to her apartment. The phrasing in the intercepts suggested this had happened days ago. Before she’d driven to Montana. Before she’d stood at my gate and typed a word that still sat behind my sternum like a piece of shrapnel.
They’d already been inside her apartment.
I pushed back from the desk. The chair rolled back to the table and stopped.
Sera at my kitchen table that morning. Giving me her model, her methodology, her confidence intervals. The professional case. Asking for my help with her jaw set and her hands steady and her voice under control.
She hadn’t mentioned anyone being in her apartment.
Did she even know? She was a pattern analyst. Noticing things that didn’t belong was what she did for a living.
If someone had been inside her space, Sera Bolland would have felt it.
Which meant she either didn’t know, or she knew and hadn’t told me.
And if she had known, why the fuck hadn’t she told me?
Maybe she’d wanted to. Maybe she’d been sitting at my kitchen table working up to it, and I’d shut her down before she got there. Told her to report through channels. Go back to the people she’d just spent twenty minutes telling me weren’t listening.
She’d laid out two years of work, and I’d handed her a pat on the head and pointed her at the door. Just like the others. Why would she give me the scary part after that? Fuck.
“Maude. Pull everything from the last seventy-two hours on Kindt’s western corridor communications. Every fragment. Full decrypt.”
“Running.”
The data came in layers. I sorted through it with the operational part of my brain, the processor that could read intercepts and match patterns while the rest of me was falling apart.
Most of it was routine. Courier scheduling, route confirmations, the clockwork of a pipeline that moved human beings from point A to point B with the efficiency of a logistics company.
Then I found it.
A sequence that started roughly eighteen hours ago. The apartment had been entered and assessed. The target’s research materials had been catalogued.
A follow-up directive had come down within hours: the target was not just a data breach. She was an active liability. Instructions were to return to the residence and complete the objective upon the target’s return.
Complete the objective.
The first visit had been reconnaissance. The next one wouldn’t be.
And Sera hadn’t come home last night because she’d been here, in my pool, in my guest room. But they didn’t know that. All they knew was that she hadn’t returned.
The most recent intercept, timestamped four hours ago, was a status check. Team in position. Holding. Waiting.
They were there right now. In or around her apartment in Spokane. And she was driving straight back to them because I’d told her to go, and she’d listened.
I picked up my phone. Found her number from the call log. Dialed.
Four rings. Voicemail. Hi, this is Sera. I’m not available right now but leave a message and I’ll get back to you.
I dialed again. Same result. She wasn’t picking up, and I couldn’t blame her for it.
“Maude. Prep the vehicle. Highway route to Spokane, fastest available.”
A beat of silence. “Travis. Spokane is approximately three hundred miles from this location.”
“I’m aware.”
“Your last recorded trip outside this compound was eleven hours ago, from which you returned with rib damage, a jaw contusion, and cortisol levels that still haven’t normalized.”
“Maude. The fucking vehicle.”
“You can barely tape your own ribs. You haven’t slept. And you want to drive five hours into a city to—”
“To stop them from killing her. Yes. Do it.”
Another pause. Then, quietly: “Route loaded to your mobile unit. I’ll monitor comms.”
I took the stairs two at a time and my ribs punished me for every step. Jacket. Sidearm. I didn’t bother with the vest because there wasn’t time to tape up again and the vest over untaped cracked ribs would do more harm than good. Keys off the hook and out the door.
The hives started again before I reached the garage. I ignored them. I got in the car, pulled out of the compound, and drove.
Montana fell away behind me, and I called her again at the county highway. Four rings. Voicemail. At Missoula, straight to voicemail without ringing. She’d turned her phone off.