16. Julian
SIXTEEN
JULIAN
Early the next morning, the secure landline rang twice before Declan picked up.
“Hey, it’s me. Julian.”
"Jules. Tell me you're alive."
"I'm alive."
"I'm putting you on speaker. Nolan's here."
"I figured."
The line clicked. The small change in the air on the other end told me they were in the conference room with the door closed. I heard a soft clank — It must be Nolan placing his cup of coffee down.
"Talk to us, Jules."
I talked.
I sat on the edge of the safehouse bed in the white shirt I had been wearing for two days and the pants I had pulled on at 6:00 a.m., and I told my partners every piece of it.
The shell-company architecture I had been mapping for six months.
The judge. The fourteen matches between Conrad's payments and Whitlock's dismissals.
The drug-trafficking case in March of 2021.
The racketeering charge in June. The organized-crime defendant in October.
I told them I was not sitting on a financial crime.
I was sitting on a RICO case, and the people on the other end of those dismissed indictments did not hire lawyers when they found out who had built the paper trail.
Then I told them about the garage.
The shot. The pillar. The text on my phone forty-five seconds later.
Then I told them about Leah.
Her name. The Bureau. Five months. The monitoring software on my laptop. The photographs of my private archive. The fact that the woman I had hired in eleven minutes in March had been a federal agent for the entirety of those eleven minutes and every minute since.
I left out the personal.
That was for me.
Declan was quiet for a long second.
"Let me get this straight, Jules. You are telling me your assistant is a federal agent. Someone shot at you. And you are in a safehouse in Brooklyn."
"Yes."
"And you did not call us for two days."
"My phone got confiscated. It’ll be returned soon."
A beat.
"By whom?" Nolan said.
"The federal agent."
The silence on the other end was the silence of two men deciding which of three possible reactions to start with.
Nolan went first. He always went first when the other one was trying not to lose his temper.
"Tell us what you need from us, Jules."
I told them. Conrad's play, what I understood of it. Destabilize publicly. Trigger a regulatory inquiry. Pick up the pieces through shell companies once the firm's value cratered. The article in the financial press yesterday was the first move. There would be more.
Declan exhaled.
"We get ahead of it. Voluntary disclosure. We self-report on the founding-era irregularities. We hire counsel today. We make the firm the cooperator, not the target."
"Agreed."
"You're not coming in until the Bureau clears it, Jules."
"Dec — "
"You're not coming in until the Bureau clears it. We are not losing you to a sniper because you wanted to sit in a meeting. Nolan and I will run point. We will come to you for the architecture. The architecture is the part only you have."
"Okay."
"Jules."
"Yeah, Dec."
"I am very angry with you."
"I know."
"For at least three different reasons."
"I know, Dec."
"We will discuss them when this is over."
"Okay."
"Stay alive, Jules."
The line went dead.
I sat with the receiver in my hand for a second longer than I needed to.
I set it back in the cradle.
Leah was in the doorway.
She had her shoulder against the frame and her arms folded loose across her chest. Her dark hair was pulled back at the nape in the low knot.
"You okay?"
"Yeah, I am."
She crossed the room. She stopped in front of me at the edge of the bed.
"We're going to nail him, Julian. He is not getting near your company."
I reached for her hand.
She let me take it.
I pulled her toward me. She stepped between my knees. I wrapped my arms around her waist, and I pressed my face against her stomach through the wool of the sweater. Her hands came up into my hair slowly.
We stayed there.
Quiet.
She leaned down and kissed the top of my head.
I tilted my face up.
I kissed her properly. Slow. Warm. My hands sliding up her back over the wool of the sweater. She braced one hand on my shoulder. I pulled her down onto my lap and her knee came up beside my hip and she settled on me with her arms around my neck and kissed me deeper.
My hand found the bare skin of her lower back under the sweater.
"I could get used to the safehouse life."
"Don't."
"Too late."
A knock at the door.
She was off my lap and across the room with her right hand on the holster at the small of her back before the second knock landed.
I stayed where I was on the edge of the bed.
She crossed to the door. She checked the peephole. Her body changed.
It was not the alert change I saw in the garage.
It was not the operational change I watched when I told her to stay.
She did not pick up her phone and call for backup.
This was a heavier thing. The shoulders went down a quarter-inch.
The jaw went tight. The hand on the holster did not move, but the arm around it relaxed.
She unlocked the door.
She opened it.
The man who walked in was tall.
Dark hair, cut short, gray at the temples. A charcoal jacket. A white shirt with the top button open. Dark trousers.
I knew him.
Rafael Torres.
I had stood across the lobby of my own building days ago and watched him put his hand on the side of her face on the sidewalk through the glass.
He came in. He dropped a duffel bag inside the door. He did not look at her first. He looked at the apartment — the layout, the windows, the kitchen, the bedroom door, and the couch. The whole thing in two seconds. Then his eyes came to her.
"Cal."
"Rafael."
He looked at me.
He crossed the apartment. He extended his hand.
"Mr. Cross. Rafael Torres."
I stood up. I shook his hand. His grip was firm. His left hand stayed at his side.
"Julian."
He nodded once. His eyes moved past me, past my shoulder, and to the bedroom door behind me.
The bed was unmade. Her boots were beside my shoes on the floor. There were two glasses of water on the nightstand.
His face did not change.
He had seen it.
"Let me brief you both."
He sat at the small table by the front window. He pulled a folder out of the duffel and laid it open in front of him. Leah pulled out the chair across from him and sat. I took the third chair, beside her.
Torres opened the file.
"Conrad's network. The Bureau's moved on three fronts since yesterday afternoon.
Shell companies frozen pending review — eleven entities across four jurisdictions, all of them pulled out of the photographs Calder sent.
Accounts flagged at six correspondent banks.
The judge is under preliminary investigation through the OIG, quietly, until we have enough for a public referral.
The forensic team has the bullet from the garage.
The lab pulled rifling marks consistent with a Russian-manufactured suppressed rifle, model SVU. We're running the procurement chain."
Leah's voice changed when she answered him.
It was the voice from the garage. Operational.
Acronyms I half-knew. Case references I did not know at all.
"That's consistent with the Markelov network out of Brighton, isn't it?
The procurement chain through that channel ran the Petrov case in '21.
Has financial done a full sweep of the secondary couriers? "
Torres answered in the same vocabulary.
They had a rhythm. They finished each other's sentences. He referred to a case from four years ago by a single name and she nodded once.
I sat beside her.
I did not say anything.
I watched the woman I had been sleeping with for two days become fluent in a world I did not belong to.
I watched her shoulder lean toward Torres an inch when she leaned forward to look at the page in front of him.
I watched him point at a paragraph with his right index finger, and her dark hair brushed against his sleeve.
I did not compete with words. I had never been the man at a table with the most words.
I competed with presence.
When she sat down, I sat beside her. My hand went to her knee under the table. She did not move her knee away. When she got up to make coffee in the galley kitchen at the back of the apartment, I followed. I took the mug out of her hand at the counter.
"I'll do it."
"Julian — "
"I'll do it."
I made it just how she liked it. Milk. No sugar. The bad Bureau coffee did not deserve either, but it did not matter. I handed her the mug.
She took it. She did not say thank you.
Torres was watching us from the table.
He saw it.
I did not look at him. I did not need to.
I followed her back to the table. I sat down beside her again. My hand went back to her knee.
Her knee remained under my palm.
Evening. The light through the curtain had gone orange. Torres was in the other bedroom on his own laptop.
Leah was on the couch with her head in my lap.
I had Declan's email pulled up on my phone in my left hand — the draft of the voluntary disclosure he wanted me to review by morning — and my right hand was in her hair.
She had her eyes closed. Her dark hair was loose across my thigh.
The watch on the inside of her wrist ticked against the cushion.
My right hand moved from her hair to her shoulder. To the line of her jaw. The pad of my thumb ran along the bone there. She turned her face into my palm and kissed it without opening her eyes.
Her phone rang on the coffee table.
She opened her eyes. She sat up. She picked it up.
"Calder."
She listened.
"Confirmed?"
She listened.
"When."
She listened.
"Understood."
She set the phone down on her thigh. She turned her head and looked at me.
"Conrad's passport hit a private airfield outside the city three hours ago. He boarded a chartered flight to Geneva. The plane is wheels-up. He is gone."
"Gone?"
"Out of jurisdiction. With his banking infrastructure frozen and the judge under investigation, his next move will be from outside the country, through proxies. The immediate physical threat is reduced. With Conrad out of the country, the shooter risk drops significantly."
I waited.
"Harlow is recommending you return to your apartment with periodic Bureau check-ins. You can go back to the office in the morning."
I should have been relieved.
I was relieved.
She was sitting on a Brooklyn safehouse couch, and her head had been warm on my leg ten seconds ago. Outside this apartment, we were not two people on a couch. Outside this apartment, we were a billionaire and the federal agent who had lied to him for five months.
"And what about us, Leah?"
"The case is still active. I'm still assigned to it."
"That's not what I asked."
She looked at me.
"I know."
She set the phone down on the coffee table. She turned her body toward me. She lifted her hand to the side of my face. Her thumb on my cheekbone. Her gray eyes on mine.
She didn’t say anything anymore.
She kissed me instead.
Slow. Her mouth opened against mine. Her hand was on my jaw. Her other hand slid up to the back of my neck and into my hair. This was a goodbye kiss in slow motion.