Chapter 23 #2
I reached for my coffee and took a sip. Buying time.
Letting my hands do something besides betray me.
"That's interesting. My model covered the northern corridor because the data pointed there.
If someone else is working that territory independently, they may have identified the same vulnerabilities. "
"That's what I told the higher-ups. They want to know if your model can identify who's doing this."
Shit. “I see.”
“We want you to overlay your pipeline model against the disruption data and see if anything shakes loose. Source location, operational signature, anything that narrows the field."
"You want me to profile an unknown actor."
“Exactly.” He gave me a look that carried more respect than I'd seen from him in three years. "You built the most comprehensive model of Kindt's operation that anyone in the Bureau has produced. They want you to do more.”
And now I wished I’d never given it to them. I struggled to think of a relevant question that wouldn’t give anything away. “What data will I have access to?"
"I'll send you what we've compiled on the disruptions. Dates, locations, known impacts on Kindt's logistics. It's not as granular as your original analysis, but it's what we've got."
"I can work with it. I'll need a few days."
“This is a priority. But Leadership also wants us to be thorough.”
"Understood."
"One more thing." He lowered his voice even though his door was already closed. “We're treating whoever's behind the disruptions as a criminal threat.”
“But…”
“Not a hero, not a Good Samaritan, not a concerned citizen. Operating outside the law against a target we have an active interest in. That's obstruction at minimum. If they're using force, and the disruption pattern suggests they are, we're looking at a list of federal charges."
Shitshitshitshit. It took everything I had not to look over at Travis where he was sitting just outside of my line of vision.
He nodded. Picked up his glasses again. Set them down. "I'll have the data packet to you by end of day. And Bolland?"
"Yes?"
"Good work on the original model. I should have said that sooner."
The screen went dark.
I closed the laptop and looked up.
Travis stepped into view from behind the second monitor. His jaw was tight and his shoulders were set the way they got when he was running threat assessments in his head.
"You heard all of it."
"Yeah."
We walked back to the control room together without speaking. The kittens scattered ahead of us down the corridor, the white one in the lead.
I sat down at my workstation and pulled up the Kindt model on my main screen. Not the sanitized version I'd submitted to the Bureau eight months ago. The full model, with Travis's intercept data, his communication feeds, his operational logs layered in.
Then I pulled up my original model on the secondary screen.
The routes, the courier patterns, the logistics nodes.
Clean, detailed, comprehensive. The best work I'd ever done, built from a cubicle in Spokane with a green badge and an ignored inbox and the relentless, stubborn conviction that someone would eventually care about what I could see.
Someone cared now. And it was going to destroy everything.
"You see it," Travis said. He wasn't asking.
"I can manage what I give them, draw it out,” I said.
"Steer the analysis toward Kindt's operation and away from the disruption source.
Or maybe make it seem like the disruption is a group of people, rather than one.
Feed the Bureau enough real intelligence on Kindt that the Ghost becomes background noise. "
"For how long?"
The question I didn't have an answer to.
The FBI was looking now. Not for the Ghost by name, but for the shape of him. For the negative space my own work had helped create.
If Travis kept operating, the disruptions would continue, and the pattern would sharpen until someone other than me connected the dots.
"I don't know," I finally said. "I don't know how long. And the truth is, they’ll just eventually replace me if I continuously don’t make forward progress.”
It felt like everything was crumbling down around us.
I looked at him, forcing back tears. “This is my fault. I’ve led the FBI basically right to you. I—”
“Stop. I’m alive right now because of you. And you were never trying to lead the Bureau to me; you were trying to stop Kindt the only way you could.”
He reached for me and I went, settling against his right side, careful of the left. His arm came around my shoulders, and I leaned into him. This warmth was real. The partnership was real. Everything we'd built in these walls over the past weeks was solid under my feet.
But outside those walls, a clock had started ticking that neither of us could stop.
Pratt's data packet would arrive by end of day.
I would open it and begin the work of protecting Travis while appearing to hunt him, and every analysis I produced would walk a line so narrow that a single misstep could unravel everything.
The kittens slept. Travis's heartbeat was steady against my shoulder.
I had what I wanted most in the world.
But I had also never been more afraid.