CHAPTER 17
Cole
It’s late morning, clear skies, and the port is fully alive.
Cargo cranes swing overhead in slow, mechanical arcs, flatbeds idle near loading bays and longshoremen in reflective vests move between stacks of containers.
There’s nothing covert about our presence here today. We’ve been hired by port authorities to access security vulnerabilities and daylight tells you what darkness won’t, such as camera angles, blind corners, traffic flow and obstructions.
“Port of Seattle had three anomalous manifest discrepancies in the last six weeks at this terminal specifically,” Josie says as her eyes roam over her screen. “Cargo logged out that doesn’t match what cleared customs. Workers who don’t appear on any union roster clocked in on payroll.”
“Ghost workers,” I say, watching a forklift operator maneuver a container into position.
“Could be payroll fraud.” She scrolls to the next page. “They want a vulnerability assessment before they escalate. Camera placement recommendations. Entry and exit choke points. Access control flaws.”
“Standard recon,” I say.
“Standard recon,” she agrees, finally setting the tablet down to study the perimeter fencing and existing pole-mounted cameras. Malik wanted two sets of eyes in full daylight for redundancy and thus the reason I’m here. I feel bad for leaving Tessa behind, but it can’t be helped at this point.
I slow the SUV near the main vehicle gate, taking in the badge reader, the barrier arm, the pedestrian turnstile off to the right.
“No offense,” I say conversationally. “This is kind of boring.”
She glances at me sideways. “It beats whatever you were going to do today.”
“I was going to watch Tessa argue with her laptop for three hours and then convince her to eat.”
Josie makes a sound that’s equal parts sympathy and amusement. “How’s she doing? Really.”
I turn onto a crossroad heading east across the terminal. “She obviously hates being cooped up. The good part is that she’s been working hard on writing the actual article and that’s coming along.”
Josie’s head turns my way. “I didn’t ask what she’s doing but how she’s doing.”
I glare at Josie. “She’s stir-crazy and you know it as well as I do.”
“She told me.” Josie pulls her jacket tighter as I slow the SUV to a stop beside a maintenance building and kill the engine. “The houseplant comment was particularly vivid.”
I exhale a quiet laugh despite myself. “She said that to you too?”
“She has a gift for imagery.” Josie unclips her seat belt. “For what it’s worth, she’s not wrong to be frustrated. Five days is a long time for someone wired the way she is.”
“I know,” I say again, because I do. I’ve been watching it build since day two—the way she moves through the Jameson floors with too much energy and nowhere to put it, the way she refreshes her email compulsively, the way she looks at the lobby doors sometimes with an expression she thinks she’s hiding.
She’s not hiding it.
I get out of the SUV and move around to the back, pulling out a digital measuring tape from the field kit. Our job today is to observe and notate what improvements can be made. It’s a job that Josie could probably do on her own but two eyes—two fields of perception—are always better than one.
I inhale, noting the air at the waterfront has a different quality than the rest of the city—salt and diesel—which is more than unpleasant.
“Northeast corner first,” Josie says, studying the site map on her tablet. “There’s supposedly a camera blind spot between the secondary warehouse and the container staging area. That’s where the manifest discrepancies are concentrated.”
“Lead the way,” I say.
We move along the eastern fence line, the stacked containers forming a natural corridor between the perimeter fencing and the warehouse wall.
Workers in high-visibility vests move through the open lanes twenty yards away, too focused on cargo schedules and handheld scanners to care about two consultants studying infrastructure.
Josie is three paces ahead of me, reading the environment and recalibrating her mental map every time a truck blocks a lane or a crane shifts its arc of motion.
“Camera here,” she murmurs, pointing at the corner of the secondary warehouse and typing notes into her tablet.
She studies the wall above us, not just for height but for sun exposure, glare bounce, and how the afternoon light will shift the image quality over the course of the day.
“If we mount it at approximately eleven feet, we get a one hundred and forty–degree view of the staging area and the access road, and we avoid direct sun flare during peak hours.”
“Blind spot on the south side,” I note, scanning the layout where a double stack of containers temporarily blocks the line of sight from ground level.
“We can put a unit on that container crane housing,” she says, pointing to her left. “Overlapping fields. No dead zone once both are live.”
“I like it,” I say and follow her to the next building.
“So,” she says conversationally, her voice barely above the chorus of dock noise, “when are you going to tell her?”
“Tell who what?” I lean against a container as Josie takes a series of measurements.
“Tessa is the who and the what is that you’re in love with her.” She says it the same way she’d report a data point. Flat. Factual. Completely without mercy.
“We’re working,” I say drolly. “Let’s keep this professional.”
“We’re making a game plan of where to mount cameras,” she corrects. “I have plenty of bandwidth for this conversation.”
“Josie.”
“Cole.” She mimics my tone precisely enough that I can hear her smiling without seeing her face. “I’ve watched you for five days walk around that building like a man who’s been handed a package he’s terrified to drop. It’s very sweet. It’s also slightly exhausting to witness.”
“I’m not—”
“You set a mug out for her before you leave in the morning,” she says. “Every single day. Before she’s even awake.”
I don’t respond.
“Tessa told me,” she adds. “It matters to her that you do that.”
“It’s common courtesy,” I mutter. “She’s a guest in my home.”
Josie rolls her eyes and we move toward the container crane housing, skirting the edge of the staging area where two workers are moving a pallet jack near the far wall. Neither of them looks our way.
I wait for her to hit me up again, trying to force conversation about Tessa. And while I pushed her off once, to be honest… I’m kind of interested to know what Josie thinks. She and Tessa have bonded.
“She’s almost done with the article,” I say, reopening the door.
“I know,” Josie says. “She told me. Two more days, maybe three.” A pause as we reach the base of the crane housing and she studies the mounting options above us. “Then what?”
“Then we push it to the police,” I say. “We have Malik’s FBI contact standing by.
The evidence package is as solid as we’re going to get it…
financial trails, shell corporations, Pelham’s connection to DelRey, and I assume we’ll be able to tie Vega to SAPG.
It’s not everything a prosecutor would want, but it’s enough to open a federal investigation at a minimum. ”
Josie nods, hands moving over the crane housing surface, finding the right mounting position to notate. “And the article drops at the same time?”
“The article will drop first, then we’ll hand all the evidence over to the FBI. Public pressure plus a federal investigation running simultaneously. DelRey won’t be able to buy his way out of both.”
“She’s the one, you know,” Josie says, not looking at me.
“I know,” I say quietly.
“Then stop treating it like a problem to solve and start treating it like a fact to build on.” She turns to face me, eyes dead serious. “You’re good at building things.”
I don’t have an answer for that so I watch the perimeter instead, scanning the angles between the containers as if they might have the answers. Across the staging area, an object catches my eye.
A section of the secondary warehouse wall holds a bracket for a camera, but it looks broken and without an actual device. The angle would cover the door if it were functional.
I point at it. “Is that on the manifest?”
She follows my eyeline, then scrolls on her tablet. “It says a camera should be there. This wasn’t an area we were to evaluate.”
“Well, someone took that camera down by force.”
She pulls out her phone and photographs it without moving closer, then opens her site map and zooms in on that section of the warehouse wall. “That’s weird.”
“What?” I ask, looking over her shoulder.
“The door isn’t there. I mean… I see it’s there, and you see it’s there, but it’s not on the list of areas for us to look at. I’ll cross-reference the building permits and the original construction plans when we get back. It might be nothing more than a modification that wasn’t filed.”
“Could be a modification that was deliberately not filed,” I say.
She nods, already making notes. Her eyes are sharp and calculating, the intelligence specialist and the field agent operating simultaneously without friction. “I’ll dig into it.”
We finish the remaining checks over the next forty minutes, working our way methodically through the blind spots Josie had mapped in advance.
She’s thorough and efficient and she asks good questions—not just about camera placement but about sightlines and approach vectors and the kind of operational detail that tells me she’s thinking several steps past a simple threat assessment.
On our way back to the SUV, we pass a section of dock that overlooks the Duwamish Waterway. Josie stops for a moment, hands in her jacket pockets, looking out across the sound.
“Can I tell you something that has nothing to do with cameras or RainVest or any of it?” she asks.
“Sure,” I say.
She’s silent for a second, her expression hard to read.
“I chose Seattle because I thought it would be a quieter existence. The NSA was everything to me. Every single day was consequential. Every piece of intelligence you touched had weight to it.” She pauses.
“I loved it. But I was thirty-one and I realized I didn’t own a single piece of furniture I’d picked out myself.
Everything in my apartment was functional and nothing was chosen. ”
I listen without filling the silence.
“I wanted to choose,” she says simply. “Furniture. A neighborhood. Maybe a person eventually.” She exhales a quiet laugh. “I’m aware that’s embarrassing given what I do for a living.”
“It’s not embarrassing,” I say.
“It’s a little embarrassing.” She turns away from the water and starts back toward the SUV.
“The point is—those things are important. Maybe more so than what we do for a living and the people we help.” She stares at me pointedly.
“Don’t wait until the threat is neutralized to figure out what you want, Cole.
Threats don’t end. They just change shape.
The mug on the counter every morning should be all the reminder you need for that. ”
I pull open the driver’s door and look at her across the roof of the SUV. “When did you get so wise?” I ask.
“I was born wise, baby,” she says without missing a beat and gets in.