21. Chapter 21
Coffee. Two mugs on the table. Maren in the chair she'd been in the night before. Jace in his. Theo at the laptop. Declan reading a county map he didn't need. Freya with her tablet propped on her knee.
The wall screen was on the gate feed because nobody trusted the morning yet.
Maren had her hand around her mug for the warmth more than for the drink.
The radio crackled.
Freya, into it: “Yeah.”
It was Brennan from the gate post. Voice low.
“We've got a visitor.”
Maren put the mug down.
“Morales?”
Freya was already tapping at her tablet, swinging the camera feed up to the main screen.
She shook her head.
The feed went big.
A black SUV Maren had seen the day before was sitting on the apron of the gate.
Same one. Same plate. Brock Bastian was already standing on gravel in a charcoal coat with no hat against the cold and the morning sun on the wrong side of his face.
His driver was at the wheel of the lead SUV with the engine running.
Two of his mercs out of the second SUV behind him. They had not stepped past the front bumper of his vehicle.
Jace was already on his feet.
He'd been at the guard shack since before dawn.
The mug in front of his chair at the war room table was the second mug, the one Elena had brought down to the shack at six and that Theo had carried back up with him at seven-thirty when Jace had told him to head in.
He had not sat in the war room this morning at all.
The feed showed him already at the gate post, walking out of the shack as the SUV pulled up.
Coat on. Theo on his right shoulder, having gone back down at the radio call.
Brennan a half-step behind on his left, near enough to the post that the post's intercom was in Brennan's hand and the wire ran back inside.
She picked the radio up off the table.
She kept it in her hand.
She watched.
Brennan's voice, then, through the radio in the war room: “There's a Brock Bastian here. Says he's here for a pick up.”
Maren's thumb pressed the button.
She kept her voice level.
“Tell him there's nothing for him here.”
On the screen, Brennan said something to Brock that Maren couldn't hear because Brennan had keyed the intercom off for it. Brock's mouth moved and his hand came up.
The intercom picked back up because Brennan let it.
Brock's voice came through the radio in the war room now, hot and close to the mic.
“Maren. Give me my books. NOW.”
She didn't answer.
She watched Jace take a quarter step forward. Not aggressive. The body of a man making sure his frame was noted.
Brock saw him do it. Something in Brock's mouth tightened.
“Maren,” Brock said again. “Last time.”
She pressed the radio button.
“I said there's nothing for you here, Brock.”
Half a held second.
Then Brock realized.
She watched it land. The little motion at his jaw where the calculation he had been running in his head (that she was one cabin walk away from breaking, that yesterday had cracked her, that he had a deadline working for him) failed to match what he was hearing on the speakerphone.
And there it was, the thing she should have read at the marker and was only reading now.
A man with the cards he claimed to hold did not drive to a gate at dawn and stand on gravel and say give me my books into a guard-shack intercom.
He sent lawyers. He sent letters. He let the deadline do the work.
Brock Bastian had come in person, twice, because Garrett had walked, the snatch had failed, and the clock he kept threatening her with was his clock, not hers.
This was not a man closing a trap. This was a man out of better moves, spending the worst one he had left.
She filed it, and the thing that had sat under her sternum since the marker loosened by a degree.
He didn't hide it well.
His face did a thing.
Then his arm came up and the intercom handset came with it and he threw it sidearm against the corrugated wall of the guard shed where it cracked and bounced off and skidded into the gravel.
“Big mistake, Maren,” he said, loud enough that the gate-post mic still on the post's main pickup caught him through the war room radio. “Your dogs will pay.”
He turned to walk back to his SUV.
He pulled his phone out of his coat as he turned.
Brock’s thumb came down on a screen already lit. A number already up.
Jace’s wolf made the call before he did.
Jace's body went the distance between him and Brock in a flash.
He was at Brock's back inside of two seconds with his hand closed around the front of Brock's throat from behind.
The alpha turned him and brought him in close until the collar of Brock's coat was up against the heel of Jace's hand and Brock's heels were not solidly on the ground anymore.
Brennan and Cade had been a half-step behind Jace's shoulders when Jace moved. By the time Jace's hand was on Brock's throat, both of them had guns out.
Cade had one in each hand. One trained on the closer of the two hired mercenaries at the second SUV. One trained through the windshield of the lead SUV at Brock's driver, who had not had time to get either of his hands off the wheel.
Brennan had one in each hand on the second merc.
Four pistols total. Three Brock-people on the wrong end of them.
The mercs' hands had been on their weapons before Jace finished the turn.
The mercs' hands stopped on their weapons.
The driver's hands stayed at ten and two.
Jace's other hand came up off his side.
It was open.
Palm out toward the mercs.
It said stay where you are.
The mercs were professionals. They saw the angle. Their client’s neck was inside an arm-length of a man whose hand they could not get a clean line on. They had pistols on them before they had cleared their own holsters. They kept their hands where they were and kept completely still.
Jace's lips moved.
Maren couldn't hear it. The intercom handset was on the gravel six feet away.
Brock could hear it. The blood went out of Brock Bastian's face, evidence that he believed whatever threat was in Jace's words could very much come to pass.
The mercs were watching Brock's face. They were professionals. One of them, the older one, looked at the other one. They exchanged a glance. They each took a step back. Then another step back.
Jace finished saying whatever he had been saying.
He let go.
Brock shrugged his collar back where it had been the way a man tried to get a coat right after another man had roughed him up.
He walked. He didn't run. The walk was stiff. He pulled the phone the rest of the way out of his coat and hit a number and started yelling into it before he was at the SUV.
At the door of the SUV he stopped.
He turned.
He shouted something at Jace.
Jace took one step toward him.
Brock's hand fumbled at the SUV's door handle. He got the door open. He got himself inside. He pulled the door shut hard enough that the second slam was a worse slam than the first.
The SUV peeled out of the apron in a long fan of gravel that hit the back of the second SUV. Its driver got it into reverse without dignity and followed.
Both vehicles were gone around the curve in under fifteen seconds.
The gravel apron was empty except for the cracked intercom handset on its side and Brennan walking over to pick it up.
On the screen in the war room, Jace turned to the gate-post camera.
He looked into the lens.
He smiled.
He couldn't see her.
She smiled back anyway.
Maren put the radio down on the table and let out a breath that had been in her ribs since seven fifty-four.
Theo, very quietly, beside her: “Well.”
Declan: “Yeah.”
Freya, dry: “Whatever he said to him, I want it written down.”
Maren did not think Jace was going to write it down.
She thought she'd ask him later anyway, in bed, when his guard was the rest of the way off. She thought she would maybe not get an answer. She thought she would be okay with that.
The radio: “Second visitor.”
Freya pulled the gate feed back up.
A black SUV with government plates rolling slow up the fire-road.
Two people inside. The driver lowered her window at the gate post and held a badge wallet open against the glass for Brennan's read.
Mid-forties, hair pulled back, the same Pacific Northwest in her cheekbones that had been in the voice on the speakerphone the afternoon before.
Maren watched the badge come up to the camera.
“Morales,” she said.
“Morales,” Theo said.
On the gate-feed Jace was still at the guard shack. He had not started back up to the war room yet. He stepped to the driver's window. The two of them spoke briefly. Jace dipped his chin. Brennan waved the SUV through.
The SUV came through the gate slow and rolled up to the lodge porch.
Two figures in dark blue windbreakers. Three large yellow letters across the back of each.
Got out. Morales the shorter of the two.
Her partner was a tall Black man, mid-fifties, the kind of standing-still a person learned by being the second person at a doorway for a long while.
Jace walked up from the gate behind them.
They came inside.
Morales did not sit in the war room for long. Coffee from Elena, taken. Standing near the door with her partner setting a hard-shell evidence case on the corner of the table.
She shook Maren's hand. Mid-firm. Brief. The handshake of people who had already done their introductions in another medium.
Morales: “Ms. Palmer.”
Maren: “Agent Morales.”
“Mr. Holbrook.”
Jace, dipping his chin: “Agent.”
Morales took the room in once. Theo. Declan. Freya. Cade in the doorway. The screens. The mug count. She didn't comment on any of it.
“Here's how this goes. We drive out to Cedar Junction now.
Mr. Holbrook tells me his pack's brought their own escort, that's fine, my windbreaker rides up front in your lead vehicle.
We do chain of custody at the unit. Your father's bio-lock, your thumb, your hands on the box first, my hands on the box second, gloves on from there. Time-stamp on the seal, signatures from all of us. Clear?”
Maren: “Clear.”
“Anything Mr. Bastian's people on the road want to do about a federal vehicle in this convoy is between them and a charge of obstruction. I'd be surprised if any of them want it that badly. We move in twenty minutes.”
Maren picked her coat up off the back of the chair.
Pack lead-SUV with Theo driving, Morales in the passenger seat with the FBI on her windbreaker visible through the windshield. Maren and Jace in the back of that vehicle. Morales's partner driving the FBI vehicle behind them. Cade and two of his wolves in a third SUV at the rear.
A black SUV was sitting at the turnout where the fire-road met the asphalt. Two of Brock's mercs in the front seats. Both of them watching the convoy come down.
The mercs saw the FBI on the windbreaker through the windshield of the lead vehicle as it passed them at the speed limit.
They did not move.
The convoy went south on the asphalt and the mercs stayed where they were and one of them put a phone to his ear before the lead vehicle was a quarter mile past.
Morales did not turn her head.
Cedar Junction storage facility. Mid-morning. The gravel lot in front of the gate.
A few of Brock's men were watching from their SUVs in the distance. Two vehicles, parked at separate ends of the frontage road. Far enough off the property that nobody was going to call it trespassing. Close enough that they could see who got out of which vehicle.
Morales got out of the lead vehicle and adjusted her coat so the FBI on the back of her windbreaker was the most visible thing in the gravel lot. Her partner did the same.
The men in the SUVs didn't move.
The roll-up door for unit 217. The biometric pad above the hasp.
Maren stopped in front of the door.
“I don't know what's in here.”
Jace squeezed her shoulder.
Morales glanced sideways at her partner to make sure he was recording, then nodded toward the biometric lock.
“Do it.”
Maren took a deep breath and put her thumb on the pad.
The pad read her print and lit green.
She pulled the door open.
Inside the unit, a single metal shelf held an external storage drive. A laptop. Three accounting ledgers stacked beside it. On top of the ledgers, an envelope with her name on the front in her father's handwriting.
Morales moved past her toward the ledgers. Her partner came up behind with the evidence case open and gloves on.
Morales picked up the envelope by its edges. She held it out to Maren.
“I'll need that back for evidence.”
Maren took it.
She carried it out into the hallway and sat on the concrete floor with her back against the corrugated metal of the unit next to her father's, and she opened it with her thumb under the flap the way her father opened envelopes her whole life.
Three lines.
I'm so proud you are my daughter.
I love you.
Dad.
She read them once. She read them twice. She touched the page.
What came up wasn't grief. It was pride.
Morales gave her the time. Didn't push. Her partner photographed the contents of the unit in place while she waited.
When Maren was ready, she folded the page back into the envelope and handed it to Morales. Morales sealed it into an evidence sleeve. Time-stamp. Signature. Maren's signature underneath. Morales promised the original would come back to her when the evidence release allowed.
Then the rest of the contents went. Drive, laptop, ledgers, all bagged, time-stamped, signed.
Before her partner bagged the ledgers, Morales opened the top one with two gloved fingers and went still over it.
“These are copies,” she said. “Duplicate accounting ledgers.
Your father reproduced Bastian's own books, line for line.
Shell companies. Transit dates. Every trail that runs out of those companies and doesn't come back.” She nodded at the drive already in its sleeve.
“And there's an affidavit on that drive.
His sworn statement. A man who builds an archive this clean writes down what it's for.”
She didn't make Maren read it on a concrete floor. She read her the two lines that mattered. That the archive was authentic, and that if it was used the way Elias had built it to be used, the women in Bastian's manifests would come home.
Roll-up door pulled back down. Padlock back on the hasp.
The men in the SUVs were gone by the time the partner closed the evidence case on the tailgate.
Convoy back to the compound. Morales rode up front with Theo again.
At the gate she and her partner transferred to the FBI vehicle. Evidence case in their custody.
Morales, hand on the driver's door: “We'll be in touch.”
Maren: “Thank you, Agent Morales.”
The FBI vehicle headed south toward Boise.
The pack convoy stayed.