The Agent’s Curvy Seduction (Silver Lake #8)

Prologue

. . .

Rhys Kane

The file lands on my desk at six a.m., and I know before I open it that it's going to take a year off my life.

Michaelson Strategic Logistics. Government contractor.

Two hundred million dollars in active federal contracts—military resupply, disaster relief, emergency medical shipments.

The kind of company that gets a plaque at the Pentagon and a table at every charity gala in the city.

Adrian Michaelson himself is the kind of man senators call by his first name.

Which is exactly why my task force has spent two weeks building a case nobody wants us to build.

"Walk me through it again," I say to Dash, who's got six monitors of shipping manifests spread across the conference room like a crime scene.

"Invoices don't match manifests," he says.

"Not by a little. By a lot. Trucks logged as carrying emergency medical supplies to hurricane zones that are documented taking routes two hundred miles in the wrong direction.

Millions moving into shell companies with no employees, no offices, nothing but a mailing address and a bank account. "

"Weapons?"

"That's my read. No hard proof yet. But somebody's moving something they don't want manifested, and they're using taxpayer-funded humanitarian contracts to do it."

Finn leans back in his chair. "And Michaelson's protected. Two deputy directors have blocked subpoena requests in the last year. Every time we get close to pulling banking records, something stalls."

"Somebody's greasing wheels," I say.

"Somebody's greasing a lot of wheels."

I look at the org chart on the wall—Michaelson at the top, a web of shell companies underneath, a head of security named Nolan Voss whose background reads more like a mercenary's resume than a corporate employee's. This isn't going to be a paperwork case. Men like this don't go down quiet.

I don't know it yet, but somewhere inside that company, an accountant named Daniel Thompson has already started asking the wrong questions.

The call comes in five days later, routed through three layers of anonymity before it hits my desk.

"I think someone's stealing from my company," the voice says. Male, calm, trying hard to sound calmer than he is. "I found discrepancies in the shipping invoices. I've been documenting it for a few weeks. I don't know who else to trust."

I don't tell him what we already suspect. I let him talk.

"Who is this?" I ask.

"I'd rather not say yet."

"That's fine. Tell me what you found."

He tells me about mismatched manifests, about trucks logged for disaster routes that never went near the disasters, about small companies that seem to exist only on paper.

It's everything Dash already flagged, except this man has access we don't—internal financial records, invoice trails, vendor payment history.

"This sounds like it could be bigger than embezzlement," I say carefully.

A long pause. "I was afraid you'd say that."

"Don't do anything. Don't confront anyone. Don't change your routine. If this is what I think it is, the people involved will notice if you start acting strange."

"Okay," he says, and I hear the fear underneath the word, thin and stretched.

"What's your name?"

Another pause. "Daniel."

I write it on a legal pad and underline it twice.

One week passes. Daniel calls twice more, each time a little more careful, a little more scared. He gives me shipment numbers, vendor names, dates. Every piece slots into the picture Dash has been building. I start to believe we might actually get this bastard.

Then Daniel calls at eleven at night, and his voice is wrong. Too flat. Too controlled, like a man holding himself together with both hands.

"I saw something," he says.

"Where are you right now?"

"Home. I'm home. My family's asleep." A shaky breath. "I stayed late. I wanted to check something in the loading facility before I left. I saw Michaelson. And a man named Voss—he runs security. They were talking to Curtis, one of the shipping supervisors. He must have found what I found."

"Daniel—"

"They killed him." His voice cracks on the word.

"I watched them kill him, Agent Wolfe. I was behind the stacked pallets.

I couldn't move. I couldn't—" He stops. I hear him breathing, forcing air into lungs that don't want to cooperate.

"I have it on the security footage. I pulled the drive before I left.

I have everything. Financial records, manifests, shell company documents, and now I have him on camera. Actually on camera."

I close my eyes. This just became a murder case, and Daniel Thompson just became the only person who can connect Michaelson to it.

"Listen to me carefully," I say. "You did the right thing calling me. But this changes everything. These people will kill to protect this operation. You've just proven that yourself. You cannot go to work tomorrow like nothing happened."

"I have a wife. Two kids." His voice breaks fully now. "My daughter's twenty. My son's twelve. What do I do?"

"You do exactly what I tell you," I say. "Nothing else. Not one thing outside of what I tell you."

I hear him nod, even though nodding doesn't make a sound. Fear does, though. Fear has a sound, and I've heard it in a hundred voices over twenty-five years. His is the kind that means he's already imagining his own funeral.

"I'm going to arrange protection," I tell him. "I need a few days to set it up properly. Until then, go to work. Act normal. Come home. Lock your doors. Don't talk to anyone about this. Not friends, not family, no one."

"Okay."

"I promise you, Daniel. I will get your family out safely. All of you."

I mean it when I say it. I have no idea yet how much that promise is going to cost.

Two days later I sit across from my supervisor with a legal pad full of names and a very bad feeling I can't quite name.

"We need to move on the extraction faster than planned," I say. "He witnessed a murder. Michaelson knows someone's been in the financial files. It's a matter of time before they trace it back to Thompson."

"You said full extraction. Family of four."

"Wife, daughter, son. All at risk the second Michaelson figures out who's talking."

He taps his pen against the table. "You're sure about the route?"

"Dash mapped it. The core planning group is small, but pieces of this extraction have passed through multiple operational systems. Financial authorization, vehicle requisition, safe-house coordination.

Too many people have touched pieces of it.

If there's a leak, I won't be able to prove where it came from until after it matters. "

"So you're moving blind."

"I'm moving because Daniel Thompson is in immediate danger. We can audit access logs after his family is safe. Right now, we move tonight."

The last call with Daniel happens four hours before the extraction.

"Tell me again," he says. His voice sounds steadier than it has since he first called me, which worries me more than the fear did. Steady is what people sound like right before they either do something very brave or something very stupid.

"You'll pack light. Essentials only. We'll meet you two miles from your house, at the gas station off Route 9. Black SUV, government plates removed. You get in, we drive straight to a secure location, and from there into witness protection. Your family will be safe within twenty-four hours."

"Margaret doesn't know everything. Just that we have to leave tonight for work reasons. I didn't want to scare the kids more than they already—" He stops.

"That's fine. You'll have time to explain once you're safe."

"I made a second copy," he says. "Of everything. Just in case something happens to the first drive."

"Where?"

"Somewhere Willow will keep safe."

"Daniel, I need to know where."

"If something happens to me, she'll find it." A long pause stretches on the line, and when he speaks again his voice has gone soft, almost peaceful, like a man who's already made peace with something I don't understand yet. "Some things are worth saving."

I don't know what that means. I don't have time to ask him to explain it, and some part of me assumes he's talking about his family, about the life he's trying to protect, not about a physical location I should be memorizing.

"Nothing is going to happen to you," I say instead.

"You don't know that."

I don't answer, because he's right, and we both know it.

"Two miles," I say instead. "Route 9. We'll be there."

"Thank you," he says. "For believing me. For not thinking I was crazy."

"You're not crazy, Daniel. You're the reason this ends."

I don't know yet how true that sentence is going to turn out to be, or how much it's going to cost him.

I'm in position at the gas station forty minutes before the pickup window when Dash's voice comes through my earpiece, tight and fast.

"Wolfe. We've got a problem."

"Talk to me."

"Traffic cam three miles back on Route 9 just picked up a black sedan running parallel to the Thompsons' route. Wasn't there an hour ago. It's moving like it knows exactly where they're headed."

Ice drops straight through my chest. "Get eyes on the vehicle. Now."

"On it—"

Gunfire crackles through the earpiece, distant and then not distant enough. I'm already running for the SUV, already screaming into the radio for backup, already doing math I don't want to do—distance, time, how fast I can get there, how fast is not fast enough.

By the time I reach the stretch of Route 9 where the guardrail is torn open like paper, it's already over.

The Thompsons' sedan is twenty feet down the embankment, crumpled around a tree, smoke curling up into headlights that are still somehow on.

I go down that slope faster than I've moved in years, my weapon drawn on instinct even though every instinct in my body already knows there's nothing left here to shoot.

Daniel Thompson is dead in the driver's seat.

Margaret Thompson is dead beside him.

Their son—twelve years old, I'd learn later, though right now he's just a small, still shape in the back seat—is dead too.