Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Two hours ago, the words hit on Fallon had rearranged Isaac’s entire world.
Ian had moved fast. Within thirty minutes he’d pulled a full Rogue Division team off other assignments and put them on this situation. Within an hour, the conference room had filled with analysts and operatives building a case file from scratch.
By the time Isaac sat down at the long table with Fallon beside him, a photo was already on the screen and the room was running hot.
Dominic Kessler was the name of the contract killer. Mid-forties, close-cropped hair, a face built to disappear. Zodiac had been aware of his existence for some time, although they had never truly crossed paths. Kessler and his team tended to work internationally.
The room was tight with people and tension. Ryder sat across from Isaac and Fallon, leaned forward on his elbows, his hands clasped on the table. Ian stood near the door with his arms at his sides, his focus on the screen absolute.
Cassandra’s face filled the left half of a split screen on the wall, lips pressed together, worried eyes behind her glasses.
Peter was on the right half, both keyboards going, his eyes flicking between his monitors and the camera.
He’d spent the last two hours pulling everything Zodiac and Rogue had on Kessler, and what he’d found had put the edge in his voice that Isaac was hearing now.
“Kessler doesn’t just kill people.” Peter leaned toward his camera. “He enjoys the process. Past targets have been found in conditions that suggest he took his time with them. This isn’t a man who puts a bullet in someone and moves on. He likes the work.”
He let that land. The room didn’t need long.
“And he doesn’t stop. Once he’s contracted, he stays on it until it’s finished.
If he can’t find his primary target, he goes after anyone connected to them.
Family, friends, acquaintances. He uses them as leverage, or simply as punishment.
People around the target start getting hurt until the target surfaces.
Collateral damage isn’t a side effect for Kessler. It’s a tool.”
Isaac kept his eyes on Fallon. She was staring at the screen, and her face had gone blank. Not calm. Emptied. Everything pulled inward to a place no one in this room could reach. Her left hand was flat against her thigh. Her right, still wrapped at the wrist, rested on top of it. Neither moved.
“Zodiac has crossed his path twice,” Ian said from the door. His voice was low and hard. “Both times we were working adjacent to something he was involved in. We knew him by reputation and by what he left behind. We’ve never engaged him directly.” He paused. “This would be the first time.”
Peter clicked to a new slide. A list of locations. Cities, dates, apartment addresses.
“This is what he’s already found. Multiple previous apartments of yours, Fallon. Different cities, different aliases. He’s been retracing your path, and he has momentum.”
Fallon’s left hand curled into a fist against her thigh. The movement was small, controlled, and Isaac was the only person close enough to see it.
Cassandra took over from her side of the screen, her keyboard audible in the background.
“I traced the money.” Three new photos replaced Kessler’s. Two men and a woman. “Victor Lindholm, Raymond Caulfield, Margaret Voss. They financed the hit. They’re all former targets of Fallon.”
She didn’t linger on the individual faces.
“Pharma fraud, real estate bribery, insurance claim denial. Different industries, different cities. Three wealthy, disgraced people independently started looking for whoever destroyed them, found each other, and pooled their resources to hire Kessler. Between the three of them, they have more than enough money to keep him and his crew working this indefinitely.”
“They want to make you two pay for making them pay,” Isaac said.
Cassandra’s voice shifted. Tighter. The professional distance she’d been holding cracked at the edges. “Yes. They know I exist. They don’t have my name or my face yet, but they’re getting closer. The probes are sophisticated. Whoever is running them knows what they’re doing.”
Isaac looked at Ryder. Ryder’s hands had separated on the table, his fingers spread flat against the surface. He was watching Cassandra on the screen, and every trace of restlessness had left his body.
“Can you hold them off electronically?” Ryder asked. The casualness he usually carried was gone. “Go to ground. Unplug your computer? Hell, take a fucking sledgehammer to it.”
“I wish it was that simple. I’d be the first person to toss my laptop out the window.” Cassandra met his gaze through the screen. “I didn’t leave much of digital footprint to begin with, so the fact that I’m being traced means some pretty sophisticated hackers are on my trail. I’m safe for now.”
“But that for now has an expiration date.” Ryder tossed back.
Cassandra shrugged, trying to seem a lot more casual than she was obviously feeling.
The room kept going. Ian was already talking to one of the Rogue operatives about resource allocation.
Peter had pulled up another database on his half of the screen.
Cassandra was still on screen too, her fingers moving across her keyboard, running whatever countermeasures she had against the probes.
Everybody was working hard to figure out how to keep Fallon alive.
Everybody but Fallon. She hadn’t spoken in the last ten minutes. Hell, hadn’t said much of anything since she’d found out about the hit.
She sat with her hands in her lap, her shoulders drawn in, her whole frame condensed.
She looked smaller in that chair than she had any right to.
The room was full of people working to protect her, screens lit, voices overlapping, and she was sitting in the middle of all of it like someone who’d wandered into a language she didn’t speak.
A woman who’d operated alone for three years, who’d never had a single person standing between her and danger, and in the space of two hours an entire compound had mobilized around her.
Instead of relief, what Isaac saw on her face was the quiet drowning of someone who’d never learned to accept a hand because no one had ever offered one.
Isaac touched her arm. “Come with me for a minute.”
She looked up. Her gray eyes were flat, turned inward, holding everything at arm’s length. She stood without a word and followed him out of the room.
The corridor was empty. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. A water cooler burbled against the far wall. Isaac pulled the conference room door shut behind them and turned to face her.
She leaned against the wall. Her arms crossed over her chest, her wrapped wrist cradled against her ribs.
“Maybe it’s better if I leave,” she whispered.
“Leave where?”
“Here. All of this.” She shook her head, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped. “Cass is in danger because of me.”
“Cass is in danger because three people with too much money hired a sociopath. That’s not your fault.”
“It is my fault. I’m the one who went after them. I’m the reason Kessler exists in their lives.”
He stepped closer. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t lean in, either. She held her ground against the wall with her arms locked across her body, her chin up.
“Where would you go?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Somewhere that doesn’t have a whole compound full of people rearranging their lives because I picked a fight I couldn’t finish.”
“You’d go back to running alone. Back to handling everything yourself, with a body that’s still healing and a professional killer tracking your path and getting closer every day.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. He watched the argument stall out.
“I don’t know how to let people help me.
” The words came out raw, stripped of performance.
“My whole life, the people who were supposed to protect me couldn’t.
My father couldn’t protect himself. My mother couldn’t protect either of us.
I learned early that if something needed to be done, I did it myself or it didn’t get done.
And now I’m in a building full of people who are volunteering to do what no one in my life has ever been able to do, and I don’t know where to stand.
I don’t know what my role is when I’m not the one carrying everything. ”
Isaac wrapped his arms around her. Pulled her against his chest and held her there. She resisted for one second. Two. Then her forehead dropped against his shoulder and her arms uncrossed, and her hands gripped the front of his shirt, and she let him take her weight.
He pressed his mouth against the top of her head.
“Your role is to let us help. That’s it. That’s the whole job right now.”
Her fingers tightened on his shirt. He could feel her pulse through the thin fabric, fast and shallow, and the careful way she was breathing, measured pulls that kept everything locked down.
“This is the safest place you can be right now. These people know what they’re doing. Ian built this compound for exactly this kind of situation.”
Her voice was muffled against his shoulder. “And if I can’t stay? If it gets to be too much?”
“Then we go together.” He said it without hesitation. “If you really want to leave, we leave. Both of us. I’m not letting you disappear alone again.”
She was still against him. He ran his hand down her back once, slow, and felt the rigid line of her spine ease by one reluctant degree.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay you’ll stay?”
“Okay I’ll stay.” A breath. “For now.”
He held her for another long moment. Her grip on his shirt loosened, finger by finger, until her hands were resting flat against his chest instead of clutching.
“We’re going to handle this,” he said. “All of us. Together. We’re not going to stop until you’re safe.”
She pulled back. Looked up at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry, and the set of her mouth had firmed. She nodded once.
He took her hand and led her back to the conference room.
Ian and Ryder looked up when the door opened, read something in Fallon’s face, and didn’t comment.
Isaac pulled out a chair for Fallon and sat beside her. “We need to go on the offensive. We have a short window to catch Kessler by surprise, and we need to take advantage of that.”
Ryder leaned forward immediately. “Agreed. I was about to say the same thing.”
“Right now, Kessler is hunting a woman he thinks is alone, or at best, with one other computer specialist. He doesn’t know she’s aware of the hit.
He doesn’t know she has Zodiac behind her.
” Isaac gestured at the room, the compound, everything beyond the walls.
“That advantage has a shelf life. Every day we sit here, he gets closer. And if he can’t find Fallon or Cassandra, he starts hurting anyone connected to them. ”
“So we don’t wait,” Ryder said. “We strike while he still thinks he’s the predator.”
Ian looked between the two of them. Isaac could see the calculation running behind his gaze. Options weighed against risk, timelines measured against threat.
“We need to draw him out,” Isaac said. “Set a trap. Make it look like Fallon has surfaced somewhere. Give him a breadcrumb trail he can’t resist following.”
“Do it,” Ian said. “Build the trap.”
Cassandra leaned toward her camera. “A breadcrumb trail. That’s my wheelhouse.
” She actually sounded excited. “If we want Kessler to believe Fallon has surfaced, we need to build a digital footprint that looks organic. Not a single ping. A pattern. Alias activity on a utilities account. A lease application that gets partially processed before it stalls. A credit inquiry from a bureau that pulls from the same databases Kessler’s people have access to. ”
Peter’s energy shifted on the other half of the screen. The grim intensity he’d carried through the Kessler briefing fell away, and what replaced it was something electric. He adjusted his glasses and both keyboards started going.
“The timing has to be staggered,” he said.
“If everything shows up at once, it reads as planted. You need a natural accumulation. A utility deposit three days before a lease inquiry. A forwarded mail request that hits the postal system forty-eight hours later. Each data point individually unremarkable.”
“And we layer in imperfections,” Cassandra continued.
“A misspelled street name on the utility form. A phone number that rings twice before going to a generic voicemail. The kind of small errors a real person makes when they’re setting up a new life in a hurry.
A perfect trail looks manufactured. A messy one looks human. ”
Peter jumped back in without missing a beat.
“We seed the ISP records. Route partial traffic through a residential node in whatever city we choose. It won’t hold up under deep forensic analysis, but it doesn’t have to.
It just has to hold long enough for Kessler to commit resources to the location.
Once his team is on the ground, they’re exposed. ”
“And we build in a decay pattern,” Cassandra said. “The alias starts generating activity, then goes quiet for thirty-six hours, then picks back up. Intermittent, not constant. It tells Kessler that his target is trying to stay hidden but slipping. That’s irresistible to a hunter.”
They were finishing each other’s thoughts.
Two technical minds locked into the same frequency, building something in real time that nobody else in the room could fully follow.
Peter’s hands flew across his keyboards.
Cassandra’s glasses reflected the glow of her monitors as she pulled up tools and databases on her end.
Ryder tilted his chair back. “I’m going to need subtitles.”
The weight on Fallon’s face broke. Not a smile, not quite, but the tension around her mouth released, and her eyes softened as she watched Cassandra work.
For one unguarded second, the hit and the mercenary and the three targets who wanted her dead fell away, and all that was left was a woman watching her best friend be extraordinary.
Isaac looked at her. She looked at him. The corner of her mouth curved, barely there, and the warmth behind it was real.
They had a plan. It was going to work.