Chapter 7 Norah
NORAH
Two days later, freezing rain lacquered K Street in a slick, restless sheen.
Wipers thumped in slow rhythm outside the plate-glass windows of Atlas the server left. A man in a slate suit took the table behind them, opened a laptop, and started a video call at a volume that suggested he’d never considered he wasn’t the main character.
Norah leaned in. “The ledgers where I found the initial problems were . . . corrected. But I keep finding more breadcrumbs. Real estate mostly.”
“What about it?”
She waved a hand. “Several properties that shouldn’t be worth anything being valued like they’re gold-plated. Money moving through them like clockwork. Have you ever heard of—”
His eyes flicked up. “No names. Not here.”
She shook her head, her eyes wide. “There are shell companies attached to other shell companies,” she said quietly. “Some of them lead nowhere. Some loop back on themselves. But the money keeps flowing through them.”
He leaned back, absorbing the code beneath her words. “Timing?”
She nodded. “That’s the weirdest part. Everything happens on Friday nights or long weekends. Sign-offs come through at 11:56 p.m. on federal holidays. The signatures look clean, but the rhythm’s off—like someone’s hoping they slip through the cracks.”
Something flickered in his expression—understanding, and something else she couldn’t name. “You have screenshots?”
“Some,” she admitted. “I’ve got handwritten notes and a folder named Marketing Review with screenshots of the original analysis living in the cloud.”
A pause. The man behind them laughed too loudly at his laptop. A spoon clattered against tile. The noise grounded her, barely. She took another sip of coffee.
“You told me not to carry anything home,” she said finally.
His gaze softened, the worry leaking through the armor. “Do you think you’re being watched?”
“I got a system alert on my laptop I’ve never seen before,” she admitted. “Then the numbers cleaned themselves up like it was a glitch in the Matrix. I could almost convince myself that I imagined the whole thing. But I have the screenshots.”
He nodded slowly, the muscle in his jaw tightening. “You’re not imagining it,” he said.
She hated that relief flickered through her. “I know.” Marshall was confident and steady, even in the face of something that had her unsettled.
Their server passed again. They both went silent, synchronized. The server kept walking. Norah’s shoulders dropped one notch she hadn’t realized they’d climbed.
“Why did you call me?” he asked finally, voice low.
She’d been asking herself the same question since the first text message. Despite their messy past, Marshall had a certain . . . safety in her mind. She didn’t know who he was working for, but it seemed like he knew far more about what was going on than she did.
“Because you’ve never lied to me,” she said. “And because the person I would normally take this to told me to give it air.” She stared into the coffee. “And because I don’t know what I don’t know.”
“The person you’d normally take it to,” he repeated, with just a hint of the question.
“Richard told me to trust my gut and give the facts time to catch up. He’s not dismissing me. He just . . . wasn’t alarmed.”
“From what I can tell from the outside, Richard is very good at not being alarmed,” Marshall said. “It’s part of why people trust him.”
That was very true. Richard was like Marshall in that way. Unflappable.
The rain threaded harder against the glass, a thin percussion. A pair of consultants slid past, arguing about a deadline. Norah watched them until they disappeared and then forced herself back to him.
“I reached out because I need a second set of eyes,” she said. “I don’t want to be out on a limb all alone.”
“My team is the best,” he said with a tip of his head.
She nodded. “I need to know if what I’m seeing is a pattern or a phantom.”
He considered her for a long moment, gaze steady, almost gentle. “It’s a pattern.”
“Then I’m not done piecing it together.”
His mouth tightened. “I don’t want you to be the one who proves it.”
There it was. Control dressed as care. It hit exactly where it always had.
“You don’t get to decide what costs I carry,” she said softly.
“I know.” He didn’t look away. “But I am asking you not to pay them alone.”
The tone disarmed her more than the words. She covered the reaction by smoothing a nonexistent wrinkle out of her sleeve.
“What does together look like?” she asked, wary. “Because if together means I hand you a problem and you disappear it, that’s not a partnership.”
He didn’t flinch. “Together means you talk. I listen. My team does what they do. Together means you stop logging in from your office to run those tests because they’re probably capturing your keystrokes and building a picture of your curiosity.
Together means you let me set a buffer between your name and whatever this rolls up to. ”
“Which is?”
He didn’t answer. There was still so much he wasn’t telling her.
“You still want me to quit,” she said, as if tasting the bitterness would make it less potent.
“I just want you alive,” he said, like the admission pained him.
“You always say things like that,” she snapped, sharper than she meant. “Like I’m some asset to be moved off the board.”
Some of the light left his eyes. “I called you an asset before.” He sounded like he’d been thinking about it since. “I shouldn’t have.”
An apology, unadorned. Her chest did a small, traitorous thing. She hated that, too.
“I’m not resigning from Summit,” she said, carefully.
“Even if I wanted to, leaving would make things look worse. And—” She hesitated, staring at the cup until his reflection steadied there.
“Richard is not dirty. I won’t let anyone use this to smear him or Summit.
Part of the reason I’m doing this with you is so I can prove that he’s not involved. ”
“Loyalty isn’t a flaw,” he said. “It just makes you easier to hit.”
She held his gaze. “Enough. I get it. Just tell me what to do.”
He scrubbed a hand over his jaw and sat back a fraction, as if giving her an inch cost him.
“You keep your hands off original files. You build clean summaries that could be defended in a hallway conversation if you had to. You write questions, not conclusions. Joey will replicate on our side with independent sources.”
Norah’s mind ran ahead, mapping the safer path even as part of her bristled at the word safer. “I can route requests through Compliance without raising flags. Vendor lists, assessor records, recorded deeds. Public documents. If there’s a mismatch, it’s not me saying so—it’s the county register.”
“Good.” He glanced past her shoulder and his attention sharpened. “Incoming.”
A woman in a hot pink pantsuit appeared at the edge of the table, rain-speckled and smiling. “Norah! Oh my word, hi! I thought that was you. Of course, I thought surely I was mistaken. But here you are!