Chapter 25
ROGUE
Armen is in the operations room when we get back.
He's at the whiteboard, jacket off, which means he's been here awhile. Fischer's name is on the board with a question mark beside it. Sting drops into a chair. Vi leans against the doorframe. I stay standing because I like standing.
"Fischer?" I ask.
"Found him," Armen says. One of the south utility rooms. He'd moved his things. Made himself a smaller space, harder to find."
"Scared," I say.
"Very. He knows something is going on. He won't say what."
"He'll say it eventually," Sting says.
Armen nods and puts down the marker, and Vi pushes off the doorframe. "There's something else."
We ook at her.
"Mara and Kade. They came to find me when we got back. They want to talk to us."
Armen nods once. "Bring them in."
Mara and Kade come in together. Mara has a piece of paper in her hand, folded once. Kade stands half a step behind her, not deference, I don’t think, but rather, he's letting her lead.
"What’s up, guys?" Vi asks.
Mara holds the paper out.
"Kade found this," she says. "He was watching the spy or whatever we’re calling him, and saw him make a handoff near a maintenance tunnel. Something passed between him and another guy Kade didn't recognize. After the handoff, the second man dropped the paper in a trash can and walked away."
"Dropped it in the trash," I say.
"Straight in," Kade says. "Didn't look back."
"Fucking idiot," Sting says.
Coming from Sting, delivered completely flat, that hits us harder than if it came from anyone else. Laughter ripples through the room.
"You retrieved it without being seen?" I ask Kade.
"Of course I did."
I like this guy more every time he opens his mouth.
Armen unfolds the paper and I look over his shoulder. There's an address, a street and a building number, and beside it, a name. Not the law firm's name. A person's name. An actual name, the kind that belongs to someone who exists. Unless it’s bogus like the law firm.
Below that, in smaller writing, is a reference to the firm.
There it is. The connection. The spy wasn't reporting to a ghost, he was reporting to a real person who uses the law firm as cover. Someone with an address. Someone findable. Hopefully.
Armen passes it to me. I pass it to Vi. She reads it slowly, and I watch her hold a breath and release it.
"Whoever this is," she says, "they're connected to the firm. And the firm connects to the ceiling."
"First real name we have," Sting says.
"First real address," I say. “At least I hope it’s a real address.”
"The ceiling," Vi says quietly. "We're getting closer.”
Nobody argues with that.
"They don't know we have this," Kade says.
"No," Armen says. "And that's how it stays. Nobody does anything with this until we've thought it through. The ceiling has been careful for a long time. We don't hand them a reason to move faster than us."
Kade nods. Mara looks at Vi, who gives her a small nod back. Twenty years of friendship in one look.
"Good work," Armen says to Kade. Then, after a beat: "Both of you."
Mara straightens slightly. Kade doesn't react, but something shifts in his eyes, like maybe the look of a person getting confirmed somewhere they weren't sure they belonged.
They leave together.
"A real name," Vi says. "My God. My father never got this far."
"Maybe he did," Sting says. "Maybe that's why he disappeared."
The room goes quiet.
It's the thing nobody has said out loud yet. Not like this, not this directly. Vi's father didn't just get close to the ceiling, he might have gotten this close. A real name. A real address. And then he was gone.
Vi looks at the paper. "Then we finish what he started," she says.
Armen looks at her for a moment, then picks up the marker and turns back to the whiteboard.
“They don't know how much we've found. We need to keep it that way," I say.
The meeting breaks up. Armen and Sting stay to work the whiteboard. Vi heads out and I follow because I've been following her out of rooms all day and at this point, I’m not sure I can do anything else.
I am so fucked.
She's in the corridor, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey."
"Long day."
"Very." She looks at me. "We found out a lot today."
"We did."
"The suite that doesn't exist. The firm connected to the spy. A real name."
"Yeah."
"My father was right," she says. Quiet. "He was right about all of it and he couldn't prove it and someone stopped him. But he was right."
"Looks like it,” I say.
She holds that for a moment, then pushes off the wall and takes the two steps between us to kiss me.
Not desperate. Not urgent. Just deliberate, the way she does everything when she's decided to do it. Her hand finds the front of my shirt and I get mine in her hair. We just stand in the corridor and kiss.
When she pulls back, she looks at me. "Thank you," she says. "For today."
"You’re welcome," I say.
She almost smiles. Then she turns and heads down the corridor toward her room.
I watch her go.