Chapter 11 Marshall
MARSHALL
An hour ago, Norah had texted him “Parking garage. Fifteen minutes.” He hadn’t moved since.
Marshall inhaled as Norah slid into the passenger seat. Her perfume reached him first—something light, familiar, expensive enough to belong in Summit’s marble halls. She didn’t look at him right away. Just drummed her fingers on her leg.
“I sent everything I found,” she said. Her voice was steady, but her fingers weren’t. “Everything I could reach without tripping an audit trail, anyway.”
Norah leaned back against the seat, eyes closed. She inhaled deeply. He could tell something was wrong—the hard lines around her eyes, the tension in her shoulders. But he could be patient.
He watched the shadowy line of her throat when she swallowed hard. He remembered her like this—too brave to cry, too proud to look away.
She opened her eyes again. “What do you know about Senator Morris?”
He didn’t hide his surprise. Not at Morris being involved. She was one of the first thread of the Syndicate that Black Tower had unraveled. In fact, he thought they’d snipped it and thoroughly discouraged her involvement. “I know enough. Why?”
“She’s involved. She’s driving the NorthBridge acquisition. Using Summit so the optics are clean for a presidential bid.”
Marshall bit back a curse. He couldn’t imagine something worse for his country than that woman at the helm.
The Senator was greedy and underhanded. More divisive than any politician he’d ever seen actually reach office in DC.
And she was willing to do just about anything to keep her claws in the power she had acquired over the years.
As evidenced with her involvement in the attack on Fiona Raven.
“And where does that leave you?” Marshall asked.
Norah shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t agree with her, and I don’t understand why Richard is so determined to support her. But I still don’t think he realizes how dirty it is. I want to keep looking, see what else I can find.”
Marshall thought back to Joey’s comments. About what else she needed to nail NorthBridge. And apparently Senator Morris.
“If you do this much longer, you won’t be able to explain it away and go back to things as they were.”
Norah sighed. “I know. I’m starting to think my life is going to be divided into before and after I found the falsified data.”
He huffed a laugh. She wasn’t wrong.
“Norah, I hate to do this. But I promised my team I would ask.”
The wrinkle between her brows deepened. “What is it?”
He sighed. “The day you first saw me at Summit, we were trying to get access to the internal servers. Joey needs physical access for a backdoor into the system.”
Norah’s eyebrows lifted, her mouth dropping into the most adorable O shape. He tore his eyes away from her lips.
“I wasn’t able to get it that day, so we’ve been working with what you could give us. But if we had more . . .” He trailed off, trying to let the implication settle.
“You want me to help Joey hack into Summit Capital? Are you crazy? I could lose my job. Heck, I could go to jail.”
Marshall waved away her second concern. He’d never let her go to jail. And he liked to think President Coulter wouldn’t either. Not if she was helping take down the Syndicate.
“I wouldn’t be worried about prison. And to be fair, you’ve probably already done enough for Summit to fire you.”
She glared at him. “Thank you for that reassurance. You’re such a good friend.” Sarcasm dripped from every word.
Friend. The word sat uneasy in his gut.
Marshall swallowed, the muscles in his jaw tightening. “I’m not trying to make light of it,” he said, quieter now. “I’m trying to be honest about the stakes.”
“Honest?” she echoed. “You’ve been watching me from parking lots and rooftops. You warn me off but only in vague, shadowy terms. I don’t think honesty is what we’re doing here.”
“That’s different.” His voice came out low, rougher than he intended.
Her eyes flicked up. “Why?”
Because I love you. Because I never stopped. Because every time you walk into a building tied to Morris or Hale or whoever’s pulling the strings, I feel like I’m watching you balance on the edge of a live wire.
He didn’t say any of it.
“Because you’re in danger,” he said instead.
“Tell me why. You keep saying this is deeper than I understand. If I’m going to do this for you, I want to know what’s at stake.”
Marshall couldn’t help but admire her at that moment. She was exactly right. She did deserve to know. Every single operative at Black Tower who was putting their life on the line knew exactly why.
He dipped his chin in acknowledgment. “Okay. I’ll tell you what I can.
And you can decide what you’re willing to risk to help us.
We’re not just talking about some accountant cooking books to skim bonus money.
This is political. Global. The kind of operation where people vanish for asking the wrong questions. ”
Norah swallowed hard, but she didn’t look away.
He took that as permission. “There’s a network funneling money through a lot of innocent-looking conduits. Hedge fund transfers. Corporate shells. Real estate that doesn’t exist. And it’s all leading toward one outcome—elevating the people who want to steer this country into open conflict.
“It started years ago. We’ve all heard wind of the Syndicate for a long time, but they started feeling more .
. . deliberate. They assassinated President Waters.
They were behind the Marshand chemical spill.
They have sown division into our politics deep enough that people are busy looking at their neighbor as the enemy instead of realizing it's the people in power that are exploiting them. We’ve uncovered link after link of the Syndicate quietly making moves, positioning themselves to claim huge power and profit when their plan falls into place. ”
“What plan?”
He glanced out the window, realizing how crazy this whole conspiracy sounded when you laid it out in one go.
They’d spent years piecing together everything they could on the Syndicate.
But this? It was still a guess. “Everything we have points to a global conflict. Likely involving the Russians, based on who we believe is leading the group.”
“Who?”
Marshall debated, wondering how far down the rabbit hole he should take Norah.
“When President Waters was murdered, we captured the assassin. A man by the name of Yuri Kuznetsov—also known as Darkshade. While he was in our custody, he wouldn’t shut up about someone named Saltykova.
He begged us to protect him and insisted that Saltykova wouldn’t let him live after being captured. ”
Marshall’s eyes fell to his lap. “Turned out, he was right. We couldn’t protect him, and a sniper took him out before he could talk.
Saltykova? We believe she’s Ksenia Sidarov.
Russian oligarch widow, old money, old loyalties, and a reputation most men wouldn’t earn in a lifetime.
Brutal. Calculated. She’s been linked—quietly—to hostile takeovers, missing political donors, and a handful of ‘unfortunate accidents’ in Moscow’s elite circles. She is beyond ruthless.”
Norah shook her head slowly. “This is crazy, Marshall. You hear yourself, right? I feel like I’m in a Tom Clancy novel.” Her breathing turned shallow, her eyes scanning the parking garage as if the Syndicate might materialize out of the dark.
“I know it’s a lot,” he said gently.
“Geez, Marshall. I thought you were in the military. Not the . . . the freaking OSS or KGB or whatever.”
“Yep. And I thought I signed up to babysit rich debutantes and handle ransom negotiations when I left the Army and joined Black Tower. But here I am. I probably shouldn’t be telling you all this.
But I need you to understand that this isn’t just an Excel error or a bad quarterly report.
These are people who erase witnesses who say things they don’t like.
You’ve already been flagged. But you’re still not a real threat. Unless you keep going.”
Her throat worked as she swallowed. “And you think giving your hacker a doorway into Summit is going to help?”
“I think it’s the only way we stay ahead of them,” he said bluntly. “We’re running behind. Joey’s flying blind. Every breadcrumb you find is something they left there by accident—or to bait you.”
Norah’s gaze sharpened at that. She was too smart not to recognize the truth in it.
“So that’s it?” she whispered. “I keep digging? I hack Summit? I just . . . cross the line?”
Marshall hesitated, then lowered his voice further, the words almost pulled out of him. “I want to be the one to cross the lines. Not you.” A beat. “That’s my job. It was never supposed to be yours.”
She shook her head, half frustrated, half fond. “You’re impossible.”
A corner of his mouth lifted—the ghost of a smile. “So I’ve been told.”
“I’ll do it,” she said.
Marshall wasn’t sure if he was pleased, frustrated, or just plain terrified at her decision.
Maybe all three.
Marshall watched her, the way her fingers twisted in her lap, the stubborn line of her jaw, the fear she was trying—failing—to hide.
He knew that look. He’d seen it on soldiers before missions they weren’t sure they’d come back from.
And seeing it on Norah made every breath feel like gravel in his lungs.
He shifted closer, lowering his voice. “If you’re going to do this, you can’t just walk in like an accountant pulling overtime.”
“I know that,” she whispered.
“Good.” He forced calm into his tone. “Because we need to plan this right.”
Her eyes flicked to his, wide and unsure, like she wasn’t sure which part of him she was talking to—the soldier or the man she used to love.
He hated that he’d made that a question.
Hated that he’d drawn so many lines between them she now had to guess which version of him she got at any given moment.
He pulled in a breath. “Listen carefully. You’re going to treat this like any other evening when you are here late. You’re here late a lot, right? It won’t seem strange to anyone.”
She nodded. He held out a keycard.
He leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees. “When you get to the server room, you’ll need to swipe this card, enter the pin 4574, then wait half a second before pulling the door. If you go too fast, the secondary sensor flags it as a forced entry. Too slow, and it logs a suspicious delay.”
She blinked. “How do you even know that?”
“YouTube tutorial,” he said dryly.
Her lips twitched. “Liar.”
The truth was, Joey worked for Raven Tech before Black Tower. And Marshall had seen that Summit still used Raven Tech physical security systems. They were none the wiser about the convenient little backdoors Joey had left herself in all the hardware.
“You’ll put this thumb drive into a USB port somewhere out of sight.” He slipped the small silver stick into her trembling fingers.
Marshall’s hand lingered before he thought better of it, brushing his knuckles over the back of hers. She startled—not because the touch was unwelcome, he didn’t think, but because it had been years since they’d sat this close and talked about danger like it was ordinary.
“Norah.” His voice lowered. “If anything feels off, you walk. I don’t care what Joey needs. I don’t care what data we lose. Your safety is the only thing that matters.”
She stared at him, eyes searching. “You really think they’d hurt me?”
He didn’t sugarcoat it. “If they think you’re a threat? Yes.”
A shiver went through her, delicate and painful to watch. He cupped her hand fully now, thumb sweeping once, slow, deliberate—comfort he couldn’t say out loud.
“I’ll be outside,” he murmured. “The entire time. The second you say something’s wrong, I’m coming in.”
“And if I don’t say anything?” she whispered.
“Then I’m still coming in,” he admitted. “Just quieter.”
For a moment they didn’t speak. They just breathed, close enough the world narrowed to the space between them.
“Marshall . . .” she began.
He shook his head, stopping the words he knew were coming. “Not tonight,” he said softly. “Tonight we focus on getting you in and out alive. You can tell me whatever you want when you come back out.”