Chapter 9
Dozer
Somewhere past the state line, doing sixty in a car we've swapped twice since the motel, I do the thing I hate doing and run the list through my mind again.
It’s a list of who. Who knew our route. Who had access to Hunter's op file closely enough to hand it to the people who hit our convoy and then send two more men through a motel door six hours later. What am I missing?
Hunter. Ruby, who runs comms and knows everything by design. I trust them with my life and they’ve saved it before. They are automatically off the list. The two junior operators who were briefed the same as me. Reyes, dead now, which takes him off the list in the worst possible way. And Kenzi.
I don't like putting her name on that list. I put it there anyway, because not putting it there would be the kind of mistake that gets people killed, and I've buried enough people this week already. One is too many.
The road stretches ahead of us in long, dark ribbons, headlights catching reflective markers every few seconds.
Kenzi is beside me, laptop open across her thighs, one boot tucked beneath the other leg.
She's been quiet for the better part of twenty minutes, which tells me she's either working or thinking.
With Kenzi, those are usually the same thing.
I keep my attention on the road. She'd been read into the file before the ambush.
She knew the route as well as I did. She was the newest name in a room full of people I'd bled next to for years, and I know, because I've run this exact calculation a hundred times on a hundred other operations, that new names are where you start looking first, not last. No matter how much you don't want to.
That last part is the problem. I don't want her on the list, not because she doesn't belong there, but because I don't want to look at her and wonder if she's the reason Reyes is dead.
I don't want to question everything she's said since we met.
I don't want to wonder whether the way she handed me her phone tonight was an act. I don't want to believe she could be part of this. My gut tells me it’s not her, but I have to know, beyond a doubt, that it’s not.
My gut is rarely, if ever, wrong but I have to be diligent and make sure my brain knows it as well.
And wanting has nothing to do with operational reality.
People I trusted have died because somebody let wanting override evidence.
I won't make that mistake again. She’s a stranger I’ve barely known for twenty-four hours.
But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like I’ve known her my entire life.
It feels like we fit in that satisfying way that occurs when you put the final puzzle piece down and complete the picture.
I don't say any of it out loud. Not yet. I need to work it through properly and either rule her out clean or have a real reason not to. But something in how I go quiet must carry more weight than I intend, because twenty minutes later she closes her laptop. Not dramatically. No sigh, no exaggerated movement and I’m glad she’s not the dramatic type, just a soft click as she folds the screen down and sets it across her lap. Then she looks at me sideways.
"You're doing math about me right now."
How the hell did she get to that conclusion? My hands stay steady on the wheel. "Everyone's on the list until they're not."
"That's not a denial."
"It's not supposed to be." I glance at her once, quick, gauging.
Her expression isn't hurt, not exactly. She's watching me with that same sharp intelligence she brings to everything else, like she's already figured out three possible answers and is waiting to see which one I give her.
"You knew the route. You're the newest variable.
If I didn't run you through the same math I'm running everyone else through, I wouldn't be doing my job. I won’t ever lie to you, Kenzi. "
I expect an argument. I'd understand one.
Nobody likes being suspected of getting people killed, and Kenzi has earned better than suspicion after the ambush, after the motel, after every clean, sharp read she's handed me since we left Hunter's office.
I brace for the version of this conversation where she gets defensive, where she tells me I'm an asshole, where I spend the next hour managing hurt feelings on top of everything else currently trying to kill us.
To my utter shock, she doesn't give me that version. Instead, she reaches into her bag, pulls out her phone, and sets it on the console between us. Then she pulls out the laptop, opens it, files and all.
"Check everything,” she tells me. I glance at her.
"Call logs, browser history, location data, whatever forensic trail you want to pull off these.
I can walk you through my own metadata faster than anyone else you'd bring in to do it.
" She gestures toward the devices. "And I'd rather you actually verify I'm clean than sit there being polite about it while you quietly decide I'm not. "
I look at the phone. Then at her. "You're not even going to be insulted."
"I'm a little insulted." The corner of her mouth lifts, barely there, a ghost of the woman who spent the first three hours of this mission talking about road-trip snacks and her cat.
"But I'd rather be insulted and trusted for real than comforted and trusted for show.
" She looks back at me. "Fake trust doesn't keep either of us alive. Real trust might."
That hits somewhere deeper than it should.
I don't have a response immediately, which doesn't happen often.
I've spent years learning to read people fast and mostly right.
Before that, the Army taught me to trust behavior over words.
People lie. People perform. People tell you what they think you want to hear.
But behavior gets harder to fake when the stakes get high.
I've never had someone hand me the evidence against themselves before I'd even asked for it.
Not unprompted and without a flicker of resistance.
Definitely never without trying to control what I looked at or how I looked at it.
"You could be handing me a clean phone," I say, mostly to see what she'll do with it. "Second device somewhere. This one's just for show."
She gives me a look I’m not expecting. She’s not offended, not nervous, almost amused.
"I could be." Then she shrugs. "You'd find that out fast enough if you actually looked.
" She taps the laptop. "I don't have the tradecraft to fake a second device convincingly under this kind of scrutiny, and neither do most people.
" Her voice turns more serious. "Digital forensics cuts both ways, Dozer.
I know exactly how thin a cover story has to be before it falls apart under someone who knows what they're looking for.
" She holds my gaze. "I'm betting mine holds. "
I believe her. Not because of the logic, though the logic is sound.
I believe her because of the way she offers it.
No hesitation with just the flat willingness to be checked.
Innocent people generally want the truth found.
Guilty people want to control the search.
That's not an absolute rule, I've lived long enough to know there are exceptions to almost every rule, but it's a damn good starting point.
I pick up the phone anyway. "Don't take it personally."
"I won't."
"You're going to hate this." I tell her.
"I've spent nine years doing digital forensics for people who assume they know more than me because they have a clearance." She settles back against the seat. "I've developed coping mechanisms."
"What kind?"
"I judge them silently." She stares at me without blinking.
"Silently?" I ask her.
"Extremely."
For half a second, I almost smile. Almost. Then I pull over into the parking lot of a McDonalds and I focus on the phone.
I go through it properly. Call logs. Message threads.
Location history. Application activity. Cloud synchronization.
Recent searches. Deleted files where I can access them.
I don't skip because I trust her. I don't skip because I don't. I do it because doing the job properly matters more than the feeling in my gut.
Kenzi doesn't watch me. That's another thing I notice. She could sit there waiting for every reaction. She could ask what I've found. She doesn't. She gives me room to work.
Twenty minutes later, I set the phone back on the console.
The laptop follows. Clean. No unexplained communications.
No suspicious location anomalies. No hidden device activity.
Nothing that connects her to the leak. Nothing that gives me a reason to keep her on the list. I back out of the McDonalds and hit the road again.
"You're not the leak." I say confidently. I knew she wasn’t but now I had proof. Once again, my gut didn’t fail me. I’m not sure how I would have felt if the evidence had pointed to her.
"I know."
I look at her. "You didn't know I'd find that out so quickly."
"No."
"You just knew you weren't hiding anything."
"Same thing, from where I'm sitting."
I drive for a while without saying anything else.
Her words stay with me. Same thing. From where I'm sitting.
It's a simple statement, but it tells me more about her than the phone did.
She doesn't need me to believe she's innocent.
She needs me to verify it. There's a difference.
I've worked with operators who couldn't manage that kind of transparency about their own gear, let alone themselves.
Kenzi Sullivan hands me the keys to her digital life and waits for the truth to come back.
I realize something else, too. She's not asking me to trust her because she's likable. She's asking me to trust the process. That's harder. And better.
"Thank you," I say eventually.
She looks over. "For what? Not being a Russian asset?" The humor is back, thin, but there.
"For handing me the truth instead of asking me to just believe you. For what it’s worth, my gut told me I could trust you. I needed to prove it right."
Her expression changes. The joke fades. She looks down at her hands, folded loosely in her lap.
"That's the whole job, isn't it?" I glance at her.
"Trusting the evidence over the story people want you to believe.
" She pauses. "I don't know how to do it any other way.
" Her gaze comes back to mine. "Not with a body on a table. " Another beat. "Not with you."
My grip tightens slightly on the steering wheel.
I don't answer. I don't trust myself to.
Because that sentence has nothing to do with the mission, and everything to do with the line we've been approaching since she climbed into this vehicle. It’s a thin line between professional and personal, the line between protecting an asset and protecting Kenzi, the line between trust and something that feels dangerously close to wanting. Wanting her to be mine.
I look at the road. There’s a leak out there that we still haven't found.
A crime ring powerful enough to put shooters on a county road and send men through a motel door after midnight.
Somewhere ahead is the location to which we're supposed to meet the team and switch vehicles, they still have the body. I spoke with them earlier and they’ve had smooth traveling, which begs the question…
is it the body they want or whatever evidence she found?
All I know is there is a trail of blood following us that keeps getting longer.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this is the woman sitting beside me.
I trust her and now I know I can do it with both my head and my gut. That should make things easier. Instead, it makes everything more complicated, because now I have something else to lose, and I don't know if I'm ready to admit how much that scares me.
I keep driving. For the first time since this mission started, I stop running the math on Kenzi. I don't need to anymore. I know exactly who she is and who I want her to be. Mine.