CHAPTER 21
Cole
The FBI meeting runs long because Special Agent in Charge, Dennis Hara, is thorough without regard for anyone else’s schedule.
I sit across from him in a conference room on the fourth floor of the federal building and walk him through everything—the financial trails, the shell corporations, the damning emails between executives, the Pelham–DelRey family connection, the SAPG link, and Vega identified among the breach team.
He listens and asks precise questions, writing notes in a leather notebook.
He takes it all very seriously, which is exactly what I was expecting.
“When can I get this actual evidence that you proclaim to have?” he asks, closing the notebook and pushing it to the side. “These are very serious allegations.”
“Soon,” I say.
“How soon?” he pushes.
“Not until Tessa publishes the article.”
“Why not now?” he asks, but I can see he already knows the answer.
Still, I indulge him. “You and I both know the minute I hand this stuff over, you’re going to kill the article so it doesn’t hamper your investigation. She’ll provide it as soon as the article goes live.”
Hara crosses his arms on the desk, leans forward with a no-nonsense look on his well-lined face. “This could be considered obstruction of justice, failing to provide this information.”
I mimic his actions, leaning in. “Dennis… we both know how this game is played and we’re doing you a solid by presenting the knowledge we have right now.
Nothing is stopping you from moving forward and starting your own investigation.
I know you’d like for me to make your job easier, but you’re going to have to have a little patience. ”
He sighs and leans back, tapping his fingers on the table. “Fine. Can you give me an approximation when I’ll have your evidence in my grubby little hands?”
I can’t help but chuckle. “The article is with her editor and if it passes their legal review, I imagine it will go to print very soon. A few days at most.”
He has no choice but to accept that and by the time we shake hands in the lobby, it’s four twelve.
The drive back to Pioneer Square takes the usual thirty minutes because of the start of rush hour and I replay the Hara meeting in my head, noting what he responded to, what made him curious and wondering how long before federal wheels will start turning in a meaningful way.
I enter the lobby of Jameson from a back corridor connected to the garage. Josie looks up from the communal table where she normally sits with Tessa.
“How’d it go?” she asks.
“Productive,” I say, scanning the table filled where Tessa normally works. “Where is she?”
Josie glances at the empty chair across from her. “She was here when we went into the two o’clock meeting, gone when we came out.” She shrugs mildly. “Assume she’s upstairs.”
That makes sense. She’s been working in the lobby for the most part but maybe she just wanted some quiet. Maybe a nap, and it wouldn’t be horrible to find her in bed where I would decidedly join her.
“Catch you later,” I say as I turn for the stairs, but Josie’s already forgotten me.
The quiet of the apartment hits me as soon as I enter. Not the type of quiet that says she’s napping in the bedroom but rather an ominous stillness that tells me without a doubt that she’s not here. I move through the living area, checking the kitchen, the bedroom, the guest room.
As my gut told me, empty. All of it.
It doesn’t worry me, though. Plenty of other places she could be, as she has free range of the building, except for the command center down in the sub-basement.
The communal kitchen is empty and Reid’s the only person in the gym, hard at work on the rowing machine, although he tells me he hasn’t seen Tessa in a while. The training bay is dark, not that Tessa would be in there, but I’m looking for anyone who might know where she is.
I stand at the bottom of the stairwell and feel the first cold edge of anxiety settle into my chest.
I can’t find her.
I take the stairs down to the main level, two at a time, heading straight for Malik’s office. I push the door open without knocking, which tells him everything he needs to know before I say a word. He’s on his feet before I’ve fully crossed the threshold.
“Tessa,” I say. “I can’t find her anywhere in the building.”
Malik is moving before I finish the sentence, stepping out of his office and snapping his fingers twice in Josie’s direction. She’s up immediately, snagging her tablet off the desk without breaking stride, falling in behind him without question or reserve.
Reid materializes from the stairwell, and Malik points at him. “You. With us… now.”
We move to the secured elevator at the end of the north corridor—a brushed steel door set flush into the wall with no visible means to enter other than a sleek, obsidian rectangle to the right.
Malik raises his hand to the biometric panel that reads palm geometry rather than fingerprint and it pulses once with a cool blue light as it scans, then shifts to white.
The door opens without a sound.
The elevator is compact and fast, dropping one level in under seven seconds, and when the doors open again, we’re in another world.
The air is cooler, climate controlled to a precise degree, and you’re immediately surrounded by a faint electrical hum of serious computing infrastructure running at sustained capacity.
Sub-Level One.
I’ve been down here hundreds of times and it still does something to my baseline when the doors open.
The space is enormous relative to what the building suggests from street level.
It’s a full floor carved out beneath Pioneer Square’s historic foundation, ceilinged at fourteen feet.
The walls are lined with glassed-in intelligence suites that glow with the cool blue-white light of active workstations.
The floors are polished black concrete with recessed lighting strips running along the baseboards, throwing clean lines of illumination upward that make the whole area feel space age.
The centerpiece is the operations wall—forty feet of seamless LED displays running the full length of the north side, currently showing a tiled array of city feeds, satellite imagery, active case maps, and real-time data streams that Josie’s systems maintain around the clock whether or not anyone is down here.
In the center of the room, a curved tactical console sits on a raised platform, its surface embedded with touch interfaces and secondary screens, surrounded by a semicircle of workstations that face the main display like an amphitheater.
Josie moves to the primary console before the rest of us have fully cleared the elevator, her tablet syncing to the main system as she pulls up the internal camera grid on the operations wall.
The tiled display populates instantly—every common area, corridor, and stairwell in the building above us rendered in crisp high-definition feeds.
It gives us eyes on the whole building at once, except for the agents’ private quarters and bathrooms.
We come to stand behind her chair, watching as Josie moves through the feeds systematically, fast but thorough, her eyes tracking across the wall with focused intensity. My eyes are scanning too, looking for any sign of Tessa.
Lobby. Empty.
Communal kitchen. Empty.
Second-floor corridor. Empty.
Training bay, gym, receiving area, garage level.
Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty.
The cold surge of anxiety spreads in my chest.
“Door logs,” Malik says.
Josie switches screens, bringing up the access log in scrolling columns of time stamps and entry points. She scans the data, far quicker than my brain can follow, and then she stops.
“Service exit,” she says. “East corridor. One fifty-four p.m.” Her fingers tap the keyboard. “Let me pull up the camera feed.”
And there it is. The service corridor footage with a time stamp one fifty-four p.m.
And there’s Tessa in her jeans and cute blouse that I told her looked beautiful on her this morning, moving through the frame with the deliberate unhurried walk of someone who doesn’t want to appear to be hurrying. She pushes the exit door without breaking stride and then she’s gone.
“Son of a fucking bitch,” I growl, my hands curling into tight fists.
“She planned it,” Reid says in awe. “She waited for the team meeting and walked right out the service exit.”
“Where would she have gone?” Malik asks, turning to me.
I scrub a hand over my face in frustration. “Fuck if I know. But give me two minutes.”
I quickly make my way back to my apartment, which feels all kinds of wrong when I push through the front door. Her absence now carries a heavier weight than it did a mere fifteen minutes ago when I thought she was just in another room.
My eyes scan the apartment, taking in everything. Her mug on the counter. Cold. Her tennis shoes by the couch. Her novel face down on the coffee table. Her laptop open on the dining table, screen still on.
I cross the room and look at it, surprised she left the screen open. It had to have been deliberate.
I scan an email that she has pulled up, my heart leaping into my throat when I see it’s from Adrian Schwartz. I scroll the entire exchange, my blood pressure skyrocketing.
She went to fucking meet Adrian Schwartz.
I pull out my phone and open the tracker app with hands that are steadier than they have any right to be, because if I let them shake, I won’t be able to do what comes next, and what comes next is all that matters.
The signal populates on the map. It’s stationary on SR 522, which leads up to Monroe. What the fuck does that mean?
I stand at the dining table with Tessa’s laptop open in front of me and the tracker showing me a bracelet on the side of a road and I give myself exactly five seconds to feel what I’m feeling.
Absolute, utter terror.