Chapter Eight #2
Jackson spoke. Quietly. Carefully. Each word chosen with the precision of a man walking through a minefield he’d mapped himself.
“When the Peterson operation was running, they had contractors. Outside people. Paid for access and information. Never formally connected. Never arrested because they were never named.”
Sterling looked at Jackson for a long beat. The kind of look that contained an assessment, a recalibration, and something warmer underneath that I was starting to recognize as respect.
“That’s what I think too,” Sterling said.
Jackson nodded. The tight nod of a man who was hoping to be wrong and had just discovered he wasn’t.
From the end of the table, Cruz spoke without inflection. “Then they’re cleaning up.”
A beat. The room held its breath.
“Before the trials get close enough for testimony to matter,” Cruz added.
Sterling said, “Yes.”
Cruz said nothing else. He didn’t need to.
Ten words, delivered in that deep, gravelly voice that carried the weight of absolute certainty, and the table absorbed them the way it absorbed everything Cruz said: completely, without debate, because arguing with Fernando Cruz was the same as arguing with gravity, and gravity had better manners.
Caleb set a fresh plate of cinnamon rolls in the center of the table. Steam rose. Nobody reached for them.
I reached for one because someone had to. Morale was a thing. Leadership was a thing. And if the choice was between letting a plate of perfect cinnamon rolls go untouched during a security briefing and making a principled stand for baked goods, I was going to make the stand.
History would vindicate me.
Caleb gave me a look. The Look. The one he’d been perfecting since we were nine, pleasant and patient and completely immovable.
I took the roll with the dignity of a man who had considered the alternatives and found them lacking.
Then Caleb sat down. Folded his hands on the table.
Looked at Sterling with that quiet, steady focus that made people forget he was five-six and built like someone who could be knocked over by a stiff wind, which he couldn’t, because Caleb Pruitt had the core strength of a man who dug garden beds for fun and thought nothing of it.
“If these are contractors without a current employer,” Caleb said, calm as anything, “the question is who hired them again, and what do they want?”
Same tone he used for crop rotation problems. Practical. Measured. Like the answer was just a matter of applying the right logic to the available data, and if we all sat down and thought about it clearly, we could probably have it sorted by lunch.
Rawley looked at Caleb like he was recalibrating something. His eyebrows did that thing—the slight lift, the reassessment—and I watched him file Caleb Pruitt into a category he hadn’t been in before, and the category was probably something like: Unexpected. Useful. Keep.
Macon almost smiled. Not the full thing. Just the corner of his mouth, twitching once, like he’d heard something that pleased him and was trying very hard not to show it.
Burke pointed at Caleb. “Him. I want him in all my briefings. From now on. Every one. He asks the question everyone else is thinking and says it like it’s about planting schedules, and I find that extremely calming in a crisis situation, which this is, so he stays.”
Caleb said, “I’ll consider it if you stop eating directly off the serving tray.”
Burke looked at his hand. He was, in fact, holding a cinnamon roll he had not put on a plate. He set it on a plate with great dignity, rearranged it twice for optimal presentation, and then looked at Caleb like he’d solved a complex equation.
“Better?” Burke said.
“Marginally,” Caleb said.
The conversation circled. Productive, the way these things went when you had the right people in the room.
Burke read the boot print placement as surveillance only—too exposed for anything operational, too deliberate to be random.
Rawley wanted to know about the Miller’s delay, and Sterling said he’d already sent someone to ask, which meant he’d handled it approximately six seconds after discovering it, because that was how Sterling operated.
Jackson flagged the greenhouse northeast corner blind spot he’d been meaning to fix. Sterling said fix it today. Jackson said he was going to say that. Sterling said he knew, he just wanted it said out loud. Jackson said, dry as bone, “Noted.”
Cruz, still at the end of the table, said, “The northeast blind spot is the approach I would use.”
Everyone looked at him.
Cruz looked back. “I’m just answering the question.”
“I didn’t ask a question,” I said.
“Someone was about to,” Cruz said.
He was probably right. Cruz had a way of hearing the questions before they got asked, which was either extremely useful or extremely unsettling, depending on whether you were on his side, and today I was very grateful to be on his side.
I’d been quieter than usual through all of this. Not my natural state. My natural state was somewhere between “opinionated” and “incorrigible,” and the fact that I’d made it through fifteen minutes of security briefing without a single terrible joke was its own kind of record.
The reason was Sterling.
I’d been watching him run the room. Steady. Unhurried. No heat, no urgency, just clean forward motion, laying out what he knew, acknowledging what he didn’t, asking the right people the right questions in the right order.
His voice never rose. His jaw never tightened beyond its usual set. He sat at the head of that table like a man who had done this a thousand times and found no reason to make a production of it, and the effect was—well.
The effect was doing things to my focus that were not appropriate for a security briefing. Things involving Sterling’s hands on the table, the way his forearm flexed when he reached for his coffee, the low rumble of his voice when he said Jackson’s name.
I’d been in enough tense situations to know the difference between someone performing calm and someone who actually was calm. Sterling was the second thing.
It was reassuring.
It was also extremely distracting, and I needed to pull myself back before someone noticed I was staring at our security coordinator’s jawline during a threat assessment, which would be unprofessional on approximately seventeen different levels.
So I asked the question. Direct. The way Sterling liked things. “What’s the play?”
Sterling looked at me. His eyes held mine for a beat—dark green, registering everything, giving back nothing—and then he said, “Eyes open. No pattern changes that signal awareness. Let whoever is watching think they haven’t been made. Two more days of observation before anything visible changes.”
Burke grinned. The wide one. The one that said he’d just heard something that pleased him enormously and he was not going to pretend otherwise. “That sounds like bait,” Burke said.
“It is bait,” Sterling said.
Burke’s grin widened. “I like it.”
Rawley wanted daily check-ins. Sterling said fine. Macon said he’d tell Carter to keep the kids closer to the house without explaining why, and said it in a tone that closed the subject so completely I half-expected the door to slam. Cruz said he’d take the northeast corner overnight.
Sterling said, “You don’t have to do that.”
Cruz said, “I’m aware.”
Sterling looked at him. One beat. Two. Then he said, “Okay.”
Cruz nodded.
That was the whole negotiation. Just a few words, delivered with the efficiency of men who had decided that talking was mostly a waste of time when both of you already knew what the other was going to say.
The crew cleared out slowly. Burke stole the last cinnamon roll on his way to the door, holding it between two fingers like it was contraband and he was smuggling it to safety.
“If anything happens to this kitchen,” he told Caleb, completely seriously, “I am personally going to be very upset about it.”
Caleb said, “Nothing is going to happen to the kitchen.”
“Yeah, okay,” Burke said, in the tone of a man who actually believed it. Then he looked at the roll in his hand, his expression doing that thing—the shift from operational to genuine, the moment where Burke Callahan stopped performing and started meaning it.
“These are genuinely the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” he said. “I say that every time. I mean it every time.”
Caleb said, “I know.”
“Okay, good,” Burke said, and left.