Chapter 9 Marshall
MARSHALL
It was really unfortunate that the bad guys didn’t take weekends off. There was nothing worse than being called into the office on a Sunday afternoon. It had been nearly impossible to pull himself out of bed after finally catching a few hours of sleep.
Marshall leaned against the end of the table, watching the monitors flicker through Joey’s data feeds. NorthBridge. Summit. The spiderweb of shell companies. And Norah, right in the middle of it—her name now typed into the reports like she was one of theirs.
He hated that.
She wasn’t one of theirs. She was a civilian who’d stepped into a minefield because her moral compass pointed due north. She hadn’t learned that truth could blow up just as easily as lies.
Joey sat nearest the screens, laptop half-open, her fingers in constant motion. Miranda was across from her, calm and composed, a legal pad already filled with tight, even notes. Ryder leaned against the window, tossing a stress ball and pretending not to listen while tracking every word.
None of them wanted to be here.
But Joey had made a breakthrough on Saltykova. And Norah had delivered what she promised on the roster of shell companies.
“Okay,” Joey said briskly, filling the silence. “Sidarov update, then NorthBridge. Let’s do the broad picture first. Jackson, you guys there?”
Jackson’s face was in the corner of the screen, on video call. “We’re here. It’s 10 PM here, though. I need my beauty sleep.”
Marshall blinked in surprise. He’d all but forgotten that his brother and Will had been dispatched to Geneva. President Coulter had asked for Ross to send them. Apparently, he wasn’t feeling quite as confident about the trade summit as his press secretary had claimed.
Joey keyed a sequence. The screen flipped to the black-and-white photograph of the same severe, older woman they’d seen before. Ksenia Sidarov.
Joey’s voice was steady. “I’ve been learning everything I could about Sidarov. Her only son died in the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. Official story? He was ‘one of many brave soldiers lost in service to the Motherland.’” She dropped the fake accent and the eye-roll that almost came with it.
“Translation? Andrei Sidarov was a twenty-year-old kid shoved into a five-day war nobody remembers. Basically, Russia used him as a pawn, and American-trained Georgians made sure he didn’t come back.
So now, as best as I can tell, Sidarov blames both governments for the body she buried.
She’s been stockpiling her revenge ever since.
And considering her Rolodex of billionaires and politicians, she’s got the firepower to pull it off. ”
Ryder let out a low whistle.
Miranda’s pen resumed deliberate strokes. “So she somehow . . . profits if tensions escalate. Both targets take a hit. Then what?”
Joey shrugged. “That’s the part missing from the slide deck. She’s not exactly publishing a manifesto.”
“Stay with what we can prove,” Marshall said. He forced the words to stay level. He refused to look at the empty chair across from him where he could picture Norah sitting, jaw set, saying It’s a pattern.
Miranda flipped to a clean page. “What are NorthBridge’s ties to Sidarov’s web?”
“Besides Trip Harrington and our friend from Texas? Someone is pushing hard internally for Summit to take ownership of NorthBridge. But the NorthBridge Energy portfolio isn’t exactly on the up-and-up. Norah sent over intel on the shell companies she has identified.”
Joey swiveled her laptop toward the big screen. “And—because the universe loves symmetry—the shell names rhyme with two we’ve seen before.”
Miranda, already taking notes, didn’t look up. “What do you mean, rhyme? Is this poetry hour?”
“Structure, not sound.” Joey tapped her fingers and pulled up another set of documents. “You know how fake accounts on a message board all sound the same? Two random nouns, maybe a city name and a color? This is the shell company equivalent of seeing DenverGray328 replying to SeattleBlue912.
“CedarBlue, RiverStone, HarborCrest.” She pointed to the list. “That’s our pattern. Different names, same formula.”
She zoomed in. “But it isn’t just the name. We’ve got the same registered agent, same timestamps within minutes of each other, same Luxembourg routing. It’s like someone hit refresh on their shell company generator five times. They put different decals on the same getaway car.”
Joey flicked to another document, showing the connections lighting up in red. “So yeah—different handles, same user. And we wouldn’t have had any idea if we didn’t have someone flagging the NorthBridge files.”
Ryder rolled the stress ball from palm to palm. “You’re saying Summit is working for her?”
“I’m saying someone inside Summit is,” Joey said. “Norah just happened to be the first one who noticed the smoke.”
Miranda’s pen stilled. “And now she’s standing in the fire.”
“Well, I’m afraid it’s going to get hotter. We need more. I need inside that server.”
Marshall shook his head. “It’s locked down. I can’t get in.”
“No, you can’t.” Joey pressed her lips together. “But she could.”
“No way,” he argued. “We’re not asking her to do that. She’s already risking too much.”
Joey threw her hands up. “What do you want me to do? If we are going to unravel the Syndicate, I need more information. Trip Harrington is our canary—but I think Summit is the coal mine. I need to see what he’s got hidden there.”
Every muscle in Marshall’s body was screaming at him, denying the option that Joey had laid out.
“She’s right,” Miranda said. “Norah’s our best option for getting inside.”
He shook his head.
“At least leave it up to her. Tell her what we need and let her decide if she wants to risk it.”
Could he do that? It sounded an awful lot like surrendering control. And he already knew Norah would do whatever it took. She didn’t do anything by half measures.
The words landed harder than they should have. Marshall looked at the map again, pretending it helped. “I won’t leave her out to dry,” he said more to himself than anyone else.
“She’s got instincts,” Joey countered. “And she’s sitting in the one building where Sidarov’s fingerprints actually mean something. If we lose this connection, we lose the thread.”
“She’s also a civilian with no clearance, no contingency plan, and no backup,” Miranda shot back.
“She’s the reason we even have this data,” Joey said, finally looking up from her screen. “She’s not a liability. She’s the linchpin.”
The two women stared each other down. Ryder glanced between them. “Wow, I missed church for this.”
Miranda didn’t look away. “Marshall, decide. Asset or liability.”
Every pair of eyes turned to him.
He bit the inside of his cheek, wishing he didn’t have to say what he was about to.
“She’s an asset,” he said at last. “But she’s off-the-book. No digital trail leading back to her. Joey, I want her communications sandboxed and her workspace mirrored for shadowing. If anyone inside Summit starts poking around, I want to know before she does.”
Joey nodded, already typing. “You got it.”
Miranda exhaled softly. “You can’t protect her from every angle, Marshall.”
He looked at her. “Watch me.”
It came out quieter than he meant, and the room didn’t miss it.
Jackson’s smirk was immediate on the sceen. “You realize that’s not what objectivity sounds like, right?”
“Objectivity’s overrated,” Joey muttered, still typing.
“You’ve all lost your minds,” Miranda said, but there was no real bite in it.
Marshall scrubbed a hand over his jaw and turned toward the board.
The network diagram glowed against his face, Summit’s clean blue lines intersecting NorthBridge’s blood-red ones.
Somewhere in that tangle, Norah was sitting at her desk, still chasing data because she believed truth was an equation that could be solved if you worked hard enough.
He envied her for that.
Jackson leaned forward, closer to his camera. “Marsh, you sure you’re not too close to this?”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting,” Jackson said mildly. “Just observing. You’ve been wound tighter than a bomb tech since she walked back into your life. You tellin’ me that’s coincidence?”
Marshall ignored him. It was easier than admitting he wasn’t wrong.
Joey saved him from answering. “Let’s table the personal commentary, gentlemen.
Ask Norah and we’ll go from there. For now, we’ve got bigger villains.
” She tapped another file. “Sidarov’s timeline is accelerating.
If she’s funneling through Summit, we’ve got a three-way problem — corruption, defense contract infiltration, and foreign leverage.
Your little visit to Geneva is showing us that much.
President Coulter is at the European Summit. Things aren’t going well.”
The door opened behind him. Connor stepped in, soaked through, his expression tight. “Sorry I’m late. Chicago went sideways.”
Joey’s head snapped up. “Sideways how?”
“The buyer from Citadel never showed,” Connor said. “And the decoy files we planted surfaced in the wrong channel before the op even started.”
Miranda’s pen stilled again. “What?”
“I’m still not sure,” Connor said. “Stephen is running forensics now.”
Ryder pushed off the wall, all humor gone. “Why didn’t they bite?”
“Too soon to tell,” Connor said. “It’s like they knew it was a honeypot.”
Ryder pressed the stress ball between his palms. “Action items. Joey, replicate the NorthBridge trail with independent data—county records, assessor databases, utilities. No Summit credentials, no Summit IP. Build a three-tier alias tree for any subpoenas we might have to route later.”
Joey’s fingers were already moving. “On it.”
“Connor,” Ryder continued, “spin a discrete counter-intel sweep on Chicago comms. Assume contamination. Figure out who the heck keeps blowing our ops.”
Connor dropped himself into a chair. “Yes, sir.”
“Tank,” he said, “you’re on the shadow rotation for Norah. No contact unless Marshall requests it. Pull in Landon and Pierce, as needed.”
Tank nodded. “Copy.”
Ryder turned to Marshall. “You okay with all this? I know ops can get sticky when there’s someone you care about involved.”
His words reminded Marshall of how Ryder had ended up playing bodyguard for Flint’s little sister, Fiona.
“It’s not the same,” he insisted. “We agreed to some rules of engagement.”
Jackson couldn’t help himself. “Rules like don’t die and don’t make eye contact with your ex-fiancée?”
“We were never engaged,” Marshall said, automatic.
“Semantics,” Jackson sang through the video chat.
Joey saved him. “Oh, one more thing, guys.” She pivoted the screen to a new slide—Saltykova’s network map widened, two faint lines pulsing from NorthBridge’s transport vendor toward a defense-contract node labeled QuinTech.
“If Norah keeps pulling, she is going to hit a name we’ve already bled for once. ”
Ryder read the label, jaw setting. “Derulo.”
Marshall felt the map settle in his head Norah in the center, lines tightening around her position. He rubbed his thumb along the crease in the folder to keep from clenching a fist.
“Thanks, Joey. Everybody go home, get some rest. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long week.”
Chairs scraped. People stood. Tasking turned into motion.
Ryder caught Connor at the door. “Text me whatever you have on Chicago. I want the timestamps.”
They spilled out into the hallway, voices fading into the hum of the building.
Marshall lingered alone for a moment with the screen.
NorthBridge glowed in white. Summit in blue.
Two red threads pulsed toward a name they’d chased for a year.
A helpless feeling churned in his chest like acid reflux.
How could he control the game at this rate?
The board was shifting so quickly, his grasp on the situation was tenuous at best.