Chapter 30 #2
I check the study. She's right about the cabinet. The files have been read and replaced in order, but slightly too aligned—the way someone organizes when they're being careful, rather than when they live there.
I stand in the doorway of the study for a moment.
Every instinct in my body is pointing in a specific direction.
Six months of a camp that turned my reflexes into something precise and fast, a year of accumulated threat toward the woman I love, and right now, the thing I want most is to have someone in front of me to direct it at.
That's honest. I know it's not useful, and I know it's what the people running this would want—a reaction, a report, a story—but it's honest. I’m a highly skilled and trained boxer.
While I have a right to defend myself, using my talents on a regular civilian can result in criminal assault charges and suspension from the boxing commission.
I choose what to do with it instead. I go back to the kitchen. Andi is watching me when I come in. She's reading me the way she always does—the set of my shoulders, the particular control in my movement when I'm managing something.
"Are you okay?" she asks. Specifically asking me.
"No," I say. Which is the right answer.
"Same." She looks at the laptop. "They're not going to stop. We're close enough now that they're willing to risk this. That changes the timeline."
"How?"
"We need the documentation before they figure out we don't have it yet.
" She closes the laptop. "Once they know we're working on pattern and inference rather than actual proof, they'll reposition.
New approach. Different pressure points.
" She looks up at me. "We lose the element of them thinking we're further along than we are. "
I sit down across from her.
"There's one more thread," Andi says. She turns the laptop toward me—a section I haven't seen, something she's been pulling separately from the governance organization research. "The bus line in the transcript. The one you said was harder to trace."
"You found the source?"
"I found the connection." She points to a name on the screen. "The Southeastern Governance Initiative has a donor list that's partially public. One of the names is Carrington." A pause. "Evelyn Carrington. Katelyn's mother's older sister."
I sit with that for a moment.
Katelyn, who shared a bus with Andi for five months.
Who was in her room when Andi said the words that ended up in the transcript.
Who talked to her aunt the way you talk to family—complaining about Travis singing with an independent artist, passing along things that seemed ordinary, the texture of the tour.
"She didn't know," Andi says. Not a defense. A fact she's already decided matters. "Katelyn has no idea what her aunt does or what she was feeding into. She was just talking."
"And Evelyn knew exactly what to listen for."
"She always does." Andi closes the laptop. "That's the methodology. She doesn't ask people to do things. She stays close enough to the people who are close enough to the information."
I think about Syndi's offhand comment from months ago in Vegas—Katelyn's been aggressive about placing those images. She has a contact somewhere in the commission communications office. I filed it. I didn't understand what it connected to.
It connected to this.
"Katelyn's commission contact," I say.
"Also, Evelyn's network." Andi nods. "Katelyn thought she was calling in a favor. She was being used as a placement mechanism." She looks at me steadily. "She's not part of this deliberately. She's just someone Evelyn kept close because of who she'd be standing next to."
I look at the table. At the full architecture of it. Marin through Brandon. Katelyn through the tour. The auditor through professional adjacency. The PR firm through Garrett Cole. Every relationship was a thread Evelyn could pull, held by people who did not know they were being held.
I look at my hands on the table. These hands that have been trained to end things quickly and cleanly, that just spent six months being refined into something more precise than they were before.
Hands that are sitting flat on a kitchen table because the threat in this situation has no body, no address, no place to put force.
That's the specific frustration of fighting an institutional machine. You can't out-punch it. You can't impose your will on it in the ring. All you can do is outlast it with better information.
"I don't know how to find him," I say.
"I have an idea," she says.
I look at her.
"The sealed filing from 2011," she says. "If Daniel was inside Jackson's operation, he was there when it was created. He would have known what it was. If he built his own file as insurance—" She pauses. "He'd want to be found when the time was right. He'd leave something."
"Where?"
"Somewhere connected to the original. Connected to what started this." She looks at me steadily. "I think Bill knows more than he told me. I think he's been waiting to see if we'd get close enough to hear the rest of it."
I think about the sedan. The dark car idling at the curb outside the gym, months ago, that I noticed and filed, and never found an explanation for.
"Someone's been watching a long time," I say.
"Yes." Andi looks at the table. "I think they've been waiting for us to be ready."
The house is quiet around us. Outside, Atlanta does what it does on a late July morning—the sprinklers, the neighbor's dog, all of it completely ordinary in a way that feels strange now.
Someone was in this house. Someone who is connected to a woman who has been running operations against the people I love since before I knew their names.
I reach across the table and cover Andi's hand with mine.
She turns her hand over and holds on.
"Tomorrow," she says. "We're going to see Bill tomorrow."
"Together," I say.
She looks at me. "Together."