13. Forty Minutes to Burn
Chapter thirteen
Forty Minutes to Burn
Claire Rossi
Iam in the kitchen when I hear Dominic's voice go very quiet in the study, and quiet from him means the situation has changed, so I set down my coffee and walk toward the door.
The hallway smells of old wood and the lemon polish Petra uses on everything.
My footsteps are silent on the runner. Six weeks of living in this house have taught me where every creak lives, which floorboards to avoid, how sound travels through these walls like water through a sieve.
The pipes talk. The doors whisper. And right now, Dominic's study door is cracked open three inches, enough for me to hear the cadence of confession before I see who is making it.
I stop in the doorway.
Petra stands with her hands clasped in front of her, her small frame somehow smaller than usual, shoulders drawn inward like she is trying to occupy less space in the room.
A second burner phone sits on Dominic's desk, different from the one she brought him yesterday.
This one is silent now, but the screen still glows with the ghost of a recent call.
She looks at me. Then at Dominic. Then back at me.
"I did not know," she says. Her voice is steady in that particular way that costs something real. "I want you both to understand that. I did not know what I was doing until this morning."
I step fully into the room and close the door behind me. The click of the latch sounds louder than it should.
Dominic's face is unreadable, but I have learned to watch his hands. They are flat on the desk, perfectly still, which means he is controlling them. When his hands are still, his mind is moving at dangerous speed.
"Tell her," he says to Petra. "All of it."
Petra turns to face me. She is maybe five foot three, efficient in a way that usually makes her seem larger, but right now she looks like a woman who has been carrying a weight she did not understand until it crushed something.
"Six weeks ago," she begins, "a man came to the house. He said he was from the compliance division of Mr. Thorne's security firm. He had credentials. Proper ones, or what looked proper. Marcus arranged the visit. I let him in."
I feel my shoulders tighten but keep my expression neutral. Six weeks ago. Before I arrived. Whatever Voss planted in this house predates me.
"He asked questions about the household routine.
Staff schedules. Who came and went." Petra's thumb moves against her opposite palm, pressing hard enough to leave marks.
"And he asked me to report Mr. Webb's schedule to a number.
Just his schedule. When he arrived, when he left, what meetings he took here. Nothing more."
"You agreed," I say. Not a question.
"He paid well. And I did not think it was wrong.
Compliance divisions do this. They verify security protocols.
I have worked for careful men before." She pauses.
"I did not recognize what I was doing until this morning, when I saw his photograph in a bulletin Dana's field team circulated to Senate-adjacent staff. "
My pulse picks up at the mention of Dana's bulletin. That circulation went out twelve hours ago. Which means Petra has been sitting with this knowledge, processing, deciding, for half a day before coming forward.
"The man in the photograph," Dominic says. "You recognized him."
"Yes." Petra's voice drops. "He is the same man who visited this house. The same man whose number I have been calling twice weekly for six weeks to report Mr. Webb's movements."
I cross to the desk and look at the burner phone she brought. It sits between us like evidence, which is exactly what it is. One contact stored: Auditor. The last outgoing call logged at forty minutes ago.
Forty minutes.
"You made a call this morning," I say.
Petra nods. "Before I knew. Before I saw the bulletin. The phone appeared in my coat pocket yesterday evening. I do not know how it got there. I found it when I was leaving for the night. I thought perhaps one of the cleaning staff left it by mistake. I called the contact to ask."
"What did you report?"
Her eyes meet mine. Apologetic. Specific. "I reported that I had seen something unusual. One of your field team photographs, circulated on the staff network. I described the man in it because I recognized him."
The room goes very quiet.
I understand, with the precision of operational assessment, exactly what has happened.
Petra's confession was not fast enough. Whatever she reported this morning, her discovery of the bulletin, is now in Voss's hands.
He knows we are closing in on his auditor.
He knows his access point has been burned.
I look at the phone's call log. Forty minutes ago means we have maybe six hours before Voss recalibrates his entire operation.
"Claire." Dominic's voice pulls me back. He has picked up his own phone, and I watch his posture shift from private to operational with that complete transformation I have been watching for three weeks and still find startling. "I need to make some calls."
I nod. There is work to do.
I step into the hallway and pull out my secure line. Dana picks up on the second ring, which tells me she has been waiting.
"I have the full picture," I say, keeping my voice below the threshold that Dominic's security cameras would capture as audio.
"Petra was the unwitting source. Voss's auditor recruited her six weeks ago under the guise of compliance work for Dominic's security firm.
She was reporting Marcus Webb's schedule.
She made contact forty minutes ago before she understood who she was working for. "
Dana is quiet for three beats. "Forty minutes is not enough time to reposition our warrant application. But it accelerates Voss's timeline."
"I know."
"The field team's analysis on the original burner phone came back.
The cipher traces to a private server registered to a shell company that shares a registered agent with a Voss family telecom subsidiary.
" Dana's voice is carefully controlled, which means the news is better than expected.
"It is not proof, but it is direction. We are forty-eight hours from a warrant application. "
"Forty-eight hours is too long."
"I am aware." A pause. "What do you need?"
I think about the fireproof case behind the bookshelf in Dominic's study. The documents I have not yet seen. The truth he has been carrying for eight years that Voss is using as a leash.
"Access to the original Geneva documents," I say. "The ones Dominic said do not exist in any official record."
"You think he will give them to you?"
"I think he already decided to. He just has not opened the case yet."
Dana is quiet again. Then: "The Bureau is forty-eight hours from a warrant application if we can get documentation of Voss's direct communication with the auditor before Friday. You said Petra has been calling a number. That number is our link."
"I understand."
"Do not do anything that compromises the case, Rossi."
I say "understood," which is not the same as a promise, and end the call.
When I return to the study, Dominic is standing by the bookshelf. His hand rests against a panel I have walked past a hundred times without noticing anything unusual. But now I see the subtle seam in the wood, the way the grain does not quite match the surrounding shelf.
"Petra left to make tea," he says. "I told her to give us the room."
"Did you believe her?"
"Her confession?" He considers. "Yes. She was genuinely horrified when she realized what she had been feeding Voss. The question is what we do with that horror."
I move closer. "She can still be useful. If Voss does not know she has turned, we can control what information she provides. Feed him what we want him to see."
"Counterintelligence." His mouth curves slightly. "You have done this before."
"I dismantled a Sicilian money-laundering network from the inside. Turning an asset is not new."
He watches me for a moment, and I feel the weight of everything we are not saying. Forty-eight hours ago, I would not have been standing in this room. Forty-eight hours ago, his badge was on the floor and my hands were in his hair and neither of us knew how to name what we were becoming.
"You said you needed to see the Geneva documents," he says.
"I need to understand what we are fighting. What Voss actually has on you."
Dominic presses something I cannot see, and the panel swings open on silent hinges. Behind it is a fireproof case, small and precise, the kind that survives building fires and government raids. He sets it on the desk and opens it.
Three documents. I count them before I touch them.
The first is the weapons export authorization. Official-looking, bureaucratic, stamped and signed with names I recognize from eight years of intelligence briefings. This is the thing that saved three NATO networks. This is also the thing that could end careers.
The second is the burial clause. I read it twice. Dominic and Harlan Voss drafted this together. Their language is careful, legal, designed to disappear into the archives without leaving fingerprints. But fingerprints remain anyway. They always do.
The third document stops me.
It is a supplemental memo, typed on government letterhead, and at the bottom there is a footnote. I read the footnote, and then I read it again, because the name there does not match anything in my files.
"Elena Thorne," I say aloud. "Civilian witness. Present by accident."
I look up at Dominic.
His hand has gone to his jacket pocket, to the inside pocket where he keeps the folded photograph I have seen him touch a hundred times but never asked about. His thumb presses against the fabric twice, slow, the same gesture I saw at the fundraiser when the string quartet played Barber's Adagio.
"Who was Elena Thorne?" I ask.
The question lands in the room like something breaking.