Chapter 13 Emma
Chapter Thirteen
EMMA
I reached for Coleman before I could stop myself. His side of the bed was empty, and the sheets were cold.
After getting dressed, I went to the kitchen. He was at the counter, with his phone to his ear. He’d showered and was fully dressed. A bowl and a glass sat rinsed in the sink, which meant he’d been up for a while.
He covered the mic when he saw me. “Morning. How’d you sleep?”
“Good. Go ahead, finish your call.”
The bag he’d carried in last night was on the dining chair. I set up at the table, with my laptop open and the stack of folders I’d brought home, then flipped to my notes from the meeting with Naomi and started organizing them into action items.
His voice on the phone was clipped. He spoke in short sentences and long pauses, where the other person did most of the talking. Coleman was usually unhurried on calls, easy, half a step from a joke. Not this time.
He hung up and pocketed his phone without saying who it was and came to the table. He didn’t touch my shoulder on the way past or make a comment about my hair. He opened his laptop across from me.
“So. How can I help?”
I had the words I’m fine formed, but caught them. The last time I’d leaned on that reflex, I’d ended up in the ladies’ room at my office with mascara running down my face.
“I don’t know where to start.”
He closed his laptop, came to my end, and sat beside me. “Read me what you’ve got.”
As I read, he made notes.
When I was done, he seemed lost in thought. His eyes were on the paper, but he was no longer reading it. The pause lasted two or three seconds before he blinked and raised his head.
“The personnel assessments. Due Monday?” he asked.
“Tuesday at the earliest.”
“The interagency memos. Time-sensitive or backed up?”
“Backed up. They got rerouted while I was on leave.”
“So Monday.”
I nodded. “Correct.”
“The OMB figures. Brad already did the work?”
“He cross-referenced them. They’re in my inbox. I need to review, not rebuild.”
“That’s an hour, maybe less,” he said as he made a note next to it.
“Also correct.”
Each time I said “Monday” or “Tuesday” or “it’s not urgent,” I was admitting that the world wouldn’t end if I didn’t finish it all today. He wasn’t making decisions for me. Each question prompted me to sort the pile myself.
By the time he’d finished, the day was down to two main tasks.
“Give me one.” He tipped his chin at the screen. “Whichever doesn’t need your signature.”
“The enforcement quarterly. Brad fixed the narrative, but I haven’t reviewed it.” I forwarded the draft to his email.
We worked without talking. An hour passed, and it was the most productive morning I’d had since before someone put a fake bomb in my kitchen.
He finished the quarterly before I was halfway through the briefing. His edits were clean. He’d caught a disbursement total on page three that was twelve thousand dollars off from the summary, a mistake I’d missed twice on my own.
Once those were done, he pointed to the next items on the list.
“How about a break?” I asked.
“We’ve got momentum.” He was already reaching for the next folder.
This was a man who’d walked into the women’s bathroom to talk me into going home last night. He’d run me a bath and told me to stop pretending the day hadn’t broken me. Now, I wanted ten minutes, and he wouldn’t stop.
“Coleman?”
“What?”
“All you’ve done is tell me to slow down. Now, I want a break, and you’re reaching for the next folder.”
“The subcommittee revisions. Signature required?” he asked as if I hadn’t said a word.
“Coleman?” I repeated.
“I’m fine.”
I didn’t believe him. Something was off, but my gut told me not to push.
“Emma? Do the subcommittee revisions require your signature or not?”
His tone stung, but I was determined not to engage. If he had something to get off his chest, he needed to make that decision for himself. I wasn’t about to pull it out of him. “Yes, but you can read through and flag anything that needs rewriting.”
I stood to get a glass of water. Before I poured it, my phone rang with a call from my mom. I cringed.
“What?” he asked.
I held up the screen so he could see the caller ID. “If I let it go to voicemail, she’ll call again in three minutes.”
“Go ahead and take it.”
I answered on the second ring. “Hi, Mom.”
“How are you, sweetheart?”
“Busy. What’s going on with the architect?”
I braced for the onslaught—the tile options, the contractor’s deadline, the decisions she needed from me yesterday.
“The meeting went well. She brought three proposals, and I picked two I think you’ll like. She sent them via email, and I’ll forward them when you think you’ll have time to review them.”
I held the phone away from my ear. When I think I’ll have time to review them?
“Did you just say when I have time?” I waited, wondering if this was when the sarcasm would start.
“No rush, sweetheart.”
My mother had never once said no rush. Sherry Sinclair operated on a timeline that required everyone near her to keep pace or get left behind. It was part of her personality that made her an extraordinary project manager but a relentless parent.
“Who is this, and what have you done with my mother?”
She was quiet long enough for me to check the screen. Then she chuckled. “I might as well come clean. Coleman called me last night.”
I glanced over to the table where he sat, reading the subcommittee revisions, with a pen in his hand and his head down.
“He told me you’d had a rough day and wouldn’t be available for a meeting. I tried to argue, but he politely let me know he wasn’t asking; he was telling.”
That sounded right.
“Then he said something I didn’t love hearing.” Her voice softened. “He said I was adding to the pile without knowing there was a pile. He was right, Emma. Worse, he said you didn’t feel as though you could say no to me.”
My throat tightened. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Don’t be sorry. Tell me the truth, Emma.”
“I don’t like making you worry.”
“I’m your mother. I’m going to do it, regardless.”
“So if I say no, you won’t pester me until I give in?”
She was quiet again, but not for as long. “If I do, you can hand the phone to Coleman, and he’ll set me straight.”
I laughed. “Is that right?”
“Maybe by the third or fourth time, I’ll get the message and figure it out for myself.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said, “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank that man of yours.”
I set my phone face-down on the table after the call ended.
Not only had Coleman helped me prioritize the work I felt buried under, but he’d called my mother. No one had ever stepped up for me like that before. People added to my list. Coleman had walked into my life and started taking things off it.
“Your mom okay?” he asked without raising his head.
“She’s great. Apparently, some guy called her last night and sorted out her whole approach to the renovation.”
He turned a page. “Sounds like a helluva guy.”
“He’s all right.”
He grinned and kept reading.
We worked for another twenty minutes when Coleman’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, set it down, and it buzzed again. He typed something on the screen, and a few seconds later, it vibrated again, this time with a call.
“Yeah.” He paused. “Copy. Give me thirty.”
“Everything okay?” I asked when he stood and shoved it in his pocket.
“Gunner needs a hand with something.”
This was the man who hadn’t left my side in weeks. Now, he was leaving on a Saturday because Gunner needed help with something.
I didn’t press. Whatever was up with him, he’d share when he was ready.
He typed something on the screen, then waited for a response. “Luke’s on his way. Fifteen minutes.”
“Coleman, I don’t need a babysitter.”
“You’re under K19 protection. That’s not negotiable.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” He came to my end of the table and kissed my forehead. “I’ll be back soon. Luke knows the code to get in, but he’ll text you when he arrives.”
He walked out, and the front door closed behind him.
Luke arrived twelve minutes later, texted first as promised, then came in. “Mornin’.”
“So, Kodiak calls and you jump?”
“Pretty much.” He opened his laptop and sat across from me. “Although in this case, his timing couldn’t be better. I’ve been working on something all morning that may help our investigation.”
“What’s that?”
“Something more telling. I’ve been digging deeper into the monitoring system Alice found. It’s worse than we thought,” he said.
He turned the laptop so I could see. Alice had found a doorway. Luke had mapped an entire architecture on the other side of it, including credential traces layered across secondary systems and access queries buried inside legitimate maintenance logs. Someone had spent months building this.
“We both know that Derek’s the only person with credentials at that level,” I said.
“The badge-in logs confirmed it.” He opened another window. “The earliest access queries were built during off-hours. I cross-referenced those timestamps against building entry records. Derek badged in during each one. His direct reports didn’t.”
I pushed my chair from the table. “That narrows it to his floor. It doesn’t prove he was at a terminal.”
“Keep going.” He scrolled down. Timestamp after timestamp, badge record after badge record. The same credential on each query, authenticated during periods when Derek was the only senior leader in the building.
I’d spent my career following numbers. Numbers didn’t have loyalties or histories or thirty-year friendships with your dead father.
“He was my father’s college roommate. He was in my parents’ wedding.”
“I know.”
“Derek was the one who suggested I apply for a job at Treasury when I left the bureau. He—” I stopped. Luke knew all of this, and it changed nothing.
“I’m showing you what the data says,” he said. “How you respond to it is your decision.”
“Not mine alone. It’s K19’s.”
He nodded.
I dragged the laptop closer and read it line by line, hunting for the hole—the misread, the alternative explanation that would let me believe the man who’d stood beside my mother at my father’s funeral wasn’t the one behind this.
I didn’t find one.
“We need Alice,” I finally said.
Luke had her and Admiral on a video call within five minutes. Alice filled one half of the screen. Admiral was beside her with his arms crossed.
“Walk her through what you found,” Luke said.
Alice had been running her own traces from K19’s side. Where Luke mapped the architecture, Alice had gone after the credentials themselves—how they were used, from where, and whether anyone else could have generated them.
“The routing masks weren’t built with a cloned credential or a spoofed login,” she said. “Derek’s admin profile was authenticated from devices registered to his office. His hardware, his login, each session.”
“Could someone have accessed those devices without his knowledge?” I asked, because I had to.
Admiral answered. “The authentication logs show active sessions, not passive access. Whoever sat at those terminals was logged in and working. For months.”
Alice shared her screen. More credential traces appeared from secondary systems. Access logs that mirrored Derek’s known work schedule—the hours he typically badged in, the days he was in the building alone.
Routing records showed the surveillance infrastructure being expanded and modified over time.
This wasn’t a onetime breach. Someone had been tending this system the way you’d maintain a garden.
Pruning it. Growing it. Making sure nobody tripped over it.
None of us spoke. We’d all arrived at the same conclusion, and no one wanted to be the first to say it.
I forced myself to be the one who did. “What do we have that’s admissible?”
“Enough for a confrontation,” Alice said. “Not enough for prosecution. The digital evidence is strong, but it’s internal system data. A defense attorney would challenge the chain of custody on half of it. Brenna will need to make that call.”
“Brenna can’t handle this right now.” This wasn’t worth risking complications to her pregnancy. On the other hand, could it wait?
“She has to,” Admiral said. “This is her investigation.”
He was right. I didn’t like it.
“I’ll talk to her Monday. In person.”
Alice nodded. “We’ll have a full workup ready. Everything organized and sourced, so she can make the call without digging into raw data.”
When the video conference ended, Luke closed his laptop and leaned his chair onto its rear legs.
“You all right?”
No. Something had been nagging at me since Alice shared her screen, and I couldn’t figure it out until the room was quiet enough for me to think.
Everyone on this call—Alice, Admiral, Luke, me—had been asking the wrong questions.
Who built this? How did they build it? Whose credentials, whose devices, whose schedule?
“Open the laptop.”
Luke brought the chair down on all four legs. “What are you looking for?”
“The surveillance targets. Not who built the system. What it’s watching.”
He opened it and pulled up Alice’s data. I came around to his side of the table and read over his shoulder. The monitoring architecture was laid out in layers—access triggers, alert thresholds, the files and systems it was designed to flag if anyone touched them.
I’d spent three weeks inside the VA disbursement accounts. I could recite the file paths in my sleep, had mapped the shell NGOs, the routing numbers, the transaction timestamps.
None of it was here. The surveillance system wasn’t pointed at the disbursement accounts or the VA payment infrastructure or the NGO routing tables or anything connected to the money I’d been tracking.
Derek’s system was watching internal files I recognized from a different investigation, records I’d been given access to when I was named acting deputy secretary.
“Emma?”
I read it again. And a third time. The target list didn’t change.
“Luke, this has nothing to do with the veterans’ fraud. This is so much worse.”