Chapter 36
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
ANDI
Idon't sleep again.
I lie in the dark and think about the details of what Evelyn knows.
She knows we have her name. She knows we've mapped the methodology. She knows we're looking for documentation, and we don't have it. She knows Daniel is the thread we're pulling and that we don't know how to find him.
What she doesn't know—because we haven't said it out loud in that room—is that I've already been back to Bill. That he's already confirmed the history of the Strategic Crisis Consulting Group. That the 2011 sealed filing exists and that someone who was inside knows where the original documents are.
We've been careful about that. Not deliberately—we've had those conversations in the car, in the kitchen, in hushed exchanges at the center. Just not in the living room.
Which means she has most of the picture. Not all of it.
I think about what she'll do with what she has.
A woman who has run institutional operations for thirty years, who has never needed to escalate beyond the methodological, who has repeatedly failed to neutralize the same target—she'll make a calculation.
The institutional approach has a finite window.
The documentation, if it exists, represents an existential threat to everything she's built.
And we're close enough that she can hear us getting closer.
At some point, the calculation tips.
Not toward exposure. Toward removal.
I don't say this out loud. Luke is breathing steadily beside me—whether asleep or running the same math I am, I can't tell. I don't say it because saying it in this room would be overheard, and I need to hold it in for a few hours while I figure out what it means for tomorrow.
It means tomorrow I go to the center the way I always do.
And it means I don't go alone.
LUKE
I don't want her to go.
I say it once, clearly, at seven in the morning over coffee. Not as a demand—I know better than to make demands of Andi Morgan—but as a stated position.
"I don't want you going to the center alone today."
She looks at me across the kitchen table.
She's already dressed. Leg brace, crutches, and the specific competence of someone who has made the physical limitations part of her routine.
She looks like herself. She also looks like someone who slept for about ninety minutes and is running entirely on resolve.
"I know," she says. "But if I change my routine, she knows the device has been found."
"If you get hurt—"
"Luke." Her voice is steady. "She's been trying to hurt me institutionally for eight months, and it hasn't worked.
Moving to something physical is a risk for her—it creates evidence, it creates witnesses, it changes the nature of what she's done.
She won't do it unless she's decided the institutional approach is completely exhausted. "
"She heard us say we're looking for Daniel," I say. "She heard us say we don't have documentation. She knows the window she has."
Andi looks at me.
"Yes," she says. "So come with me. I’m not stupid, you know."
I walked right into her plan.
The center is twelve minutes from the house. I drive. Andi sits in the passenger seat with her crutches angled against the door and her phone in her hand, not looking at it, watching the neighborhood streets give way to the commercial stretch that leads to the youth center’s block.
"Front entrance," she says when we get close. "Mrs. Alvarez will be in."
"I'll park and come in with you."
"Don't." She looks at me. "Go around the block. If someone's watching, I walk in normally, and you're not visible."
I don't love this plan. I also can't argue with the logic of it.
I arrive at the front entrance. She steps out with her crutches—slowly and carefully, handling it without complaint or drama. I watch her walk across to the door. Mrs. Alvarez is visible through the glass, already approaching the entrance.
I pull around the block.
I circle once. Park on the side street with a sight line to the back entrance. I sit there and watch the building for ten minutes, and nothing moves except a city maintenance truck that passes twice and a woman walking a dog.
Then I see the car.
Dark sedan, idling at the curb on the far side of the lot. Not in a space. Just there, engine running, two car-lengths from the back entrance. The windows are tinted so dark that I can't see the occupants.
The same sedan I saw across the street from the gym. Or one that looks exactly like it. I don't move immediately. I watch it. It doesn't move either.
Three minutes.
Then the back entrance opens, and Andi comes out—not the way she came in, and not the way I'd expect, which means Mrs. Alvarez sent her out the back for a reason or Andi made the decision herself.
She's moving faster than her crutches allow, which tells me she saw something inside or knows something I don't.
The sedan's engine changes. Not moving yet. The specific sound of a car gear changing, being put into drive, and is about to move.
I'm out of the truck before I've made a decision.
I cross the lot at a run—not toward Andi, toward the sedan. I’m closer; I can get there first. The driver registers me when I’m ten feet away. The window starts to come down, and I plant myself directly in front of the vehicle, close enough that moving forward means hitting me.
The car stops.
I stand there.
My hands are at my sides. My breathing is controlled—the way Mack taught me, the specific steadiness of someone who is ready and not performing ready.
I'm looking at the windshield, at the shape of the driver, and I'm doing the calculation that I've been doing since I was still in the bedroom at two in the morning.
I know what I could do to this car and the person inside it.
I know what that would cost.
I stand still.
"Luke." Andi's voice, behind me. She's made it to the edge of the lot. Not close—she's stayed back, which is right.
The sedan idles.
Thirty seconds.
Then it reverses. Smooth, unhurried, the movement of a professional being pragmatic rather than frightened. It pulls back, turns, and moves down the block without exceeding normal speed.
I watch it go.
I stay where I am until it's out of sight. Then I turn around.
Andi is standing fifteen feet away with the crutches and the expression she has when something has landed, and she's adding it to the map.
"You knew," I say.
"I saw the car when Mrs. Alvarez was walking me to the door," she says. "I sent myself out the back because I wanted to see what it would do." She holds my eyes. "I didn't expect you to be in the lot."
"I didn't leave."
She looks at me for a moment. Something moves through her face—not gratitude exactly, something more complicated. The specific feeling of someone who has been handling things alone for a very long time being handled and not resenting it this time.
"I know," she says. "I know you didn't."
I cross to her.
I don't say anything. I just stand beside her and look at the empty space where the sedan was.
"She escalated," Andi says quietly.
"Yes."
"Which means she's more afraid than the institutional approach suggested." She's already working through it. "She's been running this methodology for thirty years, and it's never failed completely. We're the first time it's failed completely."
"And now she's improvising."
"Improvising people make mistakes." She looks at the block where the car disappeared. "Luke. She sent someone. That means she used a person. A person who can be traced, can be identified, can be interviewed."
I look at her.
"The sedan was here before," she says. "You said you saw it across from the gym when the first news alert went out. The same profile." She pauses. "If it's the same asset, there's a pattern. And patterns are evidence."
I look at my hands.
Both the frustration and relief of being in a parking lot after doing the right thing rather than the satisfying thing. I didn't touch the car or the driver. I simply positioned my body between them, stood there, and let them make their decision, which turned out to be correct.
That's the fight I'm capable of now that I wasn't capable of a year ago.
"We go to Bill today," I say.
"Today," she agrees. "Not tomorrow. Today."
"And the device stays in place."
"Until we have enough that it doesn't matter anymore." She starts toward my truck, slow and steady on the crutches. "Come on. I want to be in Bill's office before noon."
I fall into step beside her—slightly behind, slightly to the left, the position that puts me between her and the street.
She notices. She doesn't say anything.
That's how we walk to the car.
ANDI
In Bill's office, I tell him about the device.
He listens without expression, which is how Bill receives information he's already begun to process. When I finish, he asks two questions: when we found it, and what we've said in that room since the break-in.
"Everything," I say. "Her name. The operational history. That we're looking for documentation."
"What haven’t you said?"
"That you've already confirmed the firm. That we think someone has the original documents." I pause. "That we think that person is about to make contact."
Bill looks at his desk.
"The sedan," he says. "You have no plate?"
"No."
"Description of the driver?"
"Male. Dark jacket. That's all I saw through the tinted window." I pause. "Luke was closer."
Luke gives the description. Bill writes it down. It's not much.
"It's a beginning," Bill says. "The escalation from institutional to physical is significant. It tells us she's made a calculation—that the documentation risk outweighs the exposure risk of a direct action." He folds his hands. "That's a woman who has decided the window is closing."
"She's right," I say.
Bill looks at me.
"I think the documentation is coming," I say. "I think we're days away, not weeks. Something in the last week told whoever has it that the moment is now."
"What made you think that?"
Something surfaces that I've been filing without knowing I was filing it.