10. The Rothman Connection
The Rothman Connection
Steve
Alexander Rothman sits opposite Victor with his wrists secured and his expression arranged into something close to boredom.
It doesn’t convince me.
Dimitry rests against the wall, waiting for the questioning to start.
Jan sits beside Victor, a folder open in front of her. She hasn’t said much since we came down, but I know that look. She’s read every note Matthias sent, every reconstructed chart, finding meaning in drug names that would mean nothing to the rest of us.
Rothman glances at Jan, then at the syringe in her hand.
His mouth curls faintly. “Who’s this? A new interrogator?”
Jan doesn’t answer.
She steps close, taps the vein inside his elbow, and slides the needle in with enough precision to prove she knows exactly what she’s doing, and enough bite to prove she isn’t feeling charitable.
Rothman hisses through his teeth.
Jan withdraws the needle, presses gauze to his arm, and finally meets his eyes.
“I’m the person who understands what your drugs are doing to Bliss Fontaine.”
She returns to her seat. “And she isn’t the only one.”
Victor doesn’t look up from his tablet. “Meridian Memory Institute.”
Rothman’s expression barely changes.
“Dr. Aaron Strauss,” Victor continues. “Elizabeth Holt. Proprietary compounds supplied through a Rothman pharmaceutical subsidiary.”
No answer.
Jan lifts one sheet from the folder and lays it on the table.
“Bliss Fontaine. Twenty-eight. Admitted voluntarily for PTSD treatment. Six weeks later, she’s showing confusion, emotional flattening, memory fragmentation, and dependency responses consistent with chemical conditioning.”
Rothman’s gaze flicks to the paper despite himself.
Jan sees it. So do I.
“You reduced her to a formulation,” she says, voice quiet. “I want you to tell me how to reverse it.”
Finally, Rothman looks directly at her.
“I don’t know her protocol.”
“No,” Jan says. “But you know the compounds.”
His jaw shifts.
“You know the supply chain, the stabilizers, the dosing intervals, and the formulation changes Holt authorized for Strauss.”
Victor’s eyes move briefly to Jan, then back to Rothman.
The bastard’s composure doesn’t break, but it thins.
Jan slides another page forward. “Strauss changes dosage every seventy-two hours.”
Rothman says nothing.
“He doesn’t trust anyone else with patient adjustments.”
Still nothing.
“And if a cycle is missed, the active compound begins degrading before the reinforcement dose can lock the conditioning in place.”
Rothman looks away.
There’s the tell.
Jan closes the folder. “Thank you.”
His eyes narrow. “I didn’t answer.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Victor leans back slightly, and the room shifts with him.
“Legacy Initiative.”
Rothman’s gaze snaps to him.
“You’ve been digging.”
Victor places a single printed page on the table, face down. “Council of Twelve.”
A tiny pause.
“There isn’t a formal title,” Rothman says.
Victor’s mouth curves. “Then we’re getting somewhere.”
Rothman’s eyes drop to the page as Victor turns it over.
I can’t see the whole document from where I stand, but I recognize Grayson’s formatting from the LI_Council_12 partition.
Rothman recognizes something else.
His face loses color.
“Does your family hold one of the twelve seats?”
“Yes.”
Victor lets the silence linger.
“The Rothmans.”
“Yes.”
“Sterling.”
Rothman’s eyes shift before he can stop them.
Victor sees it. So does Jan.
“I only knew our side,” Rothman says.
“But you recognize the name.”
A pause.
“Yes.”
“Technology?”
“Yes.”
Victor studies him.
“There isn’t a formal title?”
“No.”
“Who gives the orders?”
“Our directives came through intermediaries.”
“Did you ever meet them?”
“No.”
Victor nods once.
“Compartmentalized.”
“Yes.”
“Your own Council?”
“Our seat,” Rothman says. “Our directives. Our intermediaries. That’s how it works.”
“Did you ever hear any names?”
Rothman hesitates.
“First names. Surnames. Titles. Anything.”
“No full names,” he says. “Only references. A surname once or twice, maybe. Never enough to identify anyone with certainty.”
Victor’s expression doesn’t change, but I know him well enough now to see the calculation behind his eyes.
Every family sees its own corner.
Nobody sees the whole machine.
Jan gathers the medical pages with steady hands.
“We have what Matthias needs,” she says.
Victor nods once.
Rothman looks between them, finally understanding what just happened.
“You’re going into Oregon.”
I step forward.
“We’re bringing Bliss Fontaine out.”
His smile returns, smaller and uglier. “If Strauss hasn’t already made her forget why she wants to leave.”
Jan rises from her chair.
“She’s remembering,” she says.
Then she walks out before he can answer.
I follow her, leaving Victor with the man whose family helped build the drugs tearing Bliss and God knows how many other people apart.
Outside the basement, Jan stops in the corridor and draws in one slow breath.
I keep my voice low. “You alright, love?”
She looks through the glass, back at Rothman.
“No.”
Her fingers tighten around the folder.
“But now we know where to cut.”
Blackstone Ventures HQ, San Francisco. 1200 hours
By noon, Rothman’s answers are on the evidence map.
Names, routes, fronts, shell companies, drug suppliers, and encrypted server fragments spread across the screen in clean, brutal order.
Meridian Matchmaking. Meridian Wellness Retreat.
Meridian Talent Agency. Executive Solutions.
Veterans Support Network. Culinary Institute.
Innovation Labs. Global Aid Foundation. Memory Institute.
Nine fronts. Nine different masks. One machine.
Jan stands beside the table, the folder still in her hand. She hasn’t moved much since Rothman confirmed the dosing weakness. But I know her well enough to see she’s already somewhere else, running the medical consequences through her head and turning every answer into something Matthias can use.
Victor taps the screen.
“Two confirmed Legacy families,” he says. “Rothman, pharmaceutical. Sterling, technology.”
The Sterling file expands beside the Rothman thread, drawn from Grayson’s server data. Company holdings, inherited trusts, venture capital routes, research foundations, and enough Silicon Valley polish to make exploitation look like innovation.
“That’s two of twelve,” Victor says.
No one celebrates. Two of twelve still leaves ten.
I stare at the wall, at the empty spaces around the structure we’re only beginning to see. Ten more families with money, reach, and enough insulation to keep Meridian running across continents while the rest of the world files missing women under coincidence.
Jan’s voice cuts through the quiet. “Rothman’s confirmation helps Matthias now.”
Victor nods. “Yes. If Strauss misses the reinforcement cycle, the compounds begin losing stability. Matthias can use that.”
“And Sterling?” I ask.
“Not for Oregon,” Grayson says from the laptop on the side table. His voice is rough from too little sleep. “I’ve only opened part of the Council partition, but Sterling is embedded in the architecture behind it. Alcott’s server touched their systems more than once.”
“Tech support for the empire,” I mutter.
“More like infrastructure,” Grayson says. “Surveillance, data routing, access control, predictive modeling. Everything Meridian needs to identify, process, and contain targets without leaving obvious fingerprints.”
Felicity’s expression hardens beside him. “That’s why Alcott had access, not ownership. He was using a Sterling-built layer.”
The room absorbs that.
Rothman gave them chemistry.
Sterling gave them visibility.
And Meridian turned both into a business.
Victor reduces the screen until only the two surnames remain lit.
Rothman. Sterling.
Ten blank spaces sit beneath them.
I look at those empty slots and feel the shape of the war ahead. Not one rescue. Not one mission. Not one front we can burn and walk away from.
A board.
Twelve seats.
Twelve families.
Felicity’s interactive map makes the scale harder to dismiss. The old evidence wall used to show us damage after the fact, women we’d found, women we’d lost, and fronts we’d already burned.
This is different. This moves. It breathes with incoming data, widening every time Grayson finds another server trace or Faith follows another financial route. The enemy isn’t a line of photos anymore. It’s a living system.
And ten of the families are still hiding in the dark.
Blackstone Ventures HQ, San Francisco. 1230 hours
Matthias comes through on the secure line at twelve-thirty, and the low conversation around the table cuts off before he says a word.
His face appears on the wall display beside Felicity’s interactive map. He looks composed, but the strain sits in the fine lines around his eyes and the way he keeps his voice lower than usual.
“I have numbers,” he says.
Victor straightens. “Go ahead.”
“Bliss plus four others on active experimental protocols. Five immediate extractions.”
Jan’s pen stops moving.
Five.
Small enough to fit inside a plan. Large enough to change everything. “Are there more?” I ask.
“Yes,” Matthias says. “But not all are part of Strauss’s current memory-alteration program. Some are standard trauma patients. Some may be victims who don’t yet understand what’s happening. I can’t sort everyone safely from inside without triggering a review.”
Victor nods once. “So, five confirmed.”
“Five at immediate risk,” Matthias corrects.
“Bliss, Maribel Reyes, thirty-two. Naomi Bell, twenty-nine. Iris Chen, thirty-four. Camille Laurent, twenty-seven. All four show evidence of memory disruption, dependency conditioning, and structured emotional flattening. Bliss is deteriorating fastest because Strauss keeps altering her dosage.”
Jan’s jaw shifts, but her voice stays even. “What’s the extraction risk?”
“Medical more than tactical.”
The map behind Matthias changes as Felicity pulls in the Oregon compound layout. A low building appears among trees, softened by paths, treatment gardens, and guest lodges designed to look harmless.