CHAPTER TWO
The task force had been assigned a section of the third floor of the FBI headquarters, a block of cubicles and two shared conference rooms. It had all been converted into a workspace for the joint FBI and Homeland Security operation.
On paper, it was an impressively organized response to an unprecedented threat.
In practice, it had spent the last two weeks operating like a machine with two different sets of instructions loaded into it at the same time.
Half the team was focused on Kane. The U.S.
Marshals were leading the manhunt itself, but the task force was providing intelligence support, running down financial records, analyzing communication patterns from Kane's known associates, and trying to map the network of people who might be sheltering him or moving resources on his behalf.
It was important work—Hahn understood that, but it was also the kind of work that produced reams of data and very few actionable conclusions.
Every lead that looked solid in the morning had gone soft by afternoon.
And it was the exact same day after day.
The other half of the team was still doing what it had been doing before Kane escaped from prison: screening potential unactivated disciples.
They were building profiles and running names against Kane's known academic and professional contacts.
They were cross-referencing purchases of unusual chemical compounds with individuals who had any documented connection to Kane's philosophy or writings.
Hahn had spent the better part of the past week on that side of the operation, pulling purchase records for a list of twelve compounds that the team's chemist had identified as potentially relevant based on elements that hadn't yet appeared in the case series.
It was painstaking and boring work. Most of it led nowhere.
The day before yesterday, he had spent four hours tracing a bulk purchase of potassium permanganate back to a pool supply company in Ohio that had filed the wrong vendor paperwork.
The problem, as Hahn saw it, was that no one was fully in charge of the overall direction.
Miles Sterling was the de facto intellectual center of it all, and Agent Stone was a competent field operator.
But they were also the response team, which meant they were positioned to react when something broke rather than driving the proactive work.
AD Hayes ran the meetings and kept things organized, but Hayes was a director, not an investigator.
Sadly, the daily shape of the operation reflected that.
Meetings ran long. Priorities always shifted.
People asked good questions that didn't get followed up on.
Hahn had only been a federal agent for fourteen months.
Before that he had spent a year undercover inside a mid-sized drug distribution network operating out of Baltimore and into three surrounding states.
He had gone in as a low-level transporter and worked his way up to a position where he was present for conversations that mattered.
When the takedown came, the case had been clean and thorough.
His supervisors had been pleased, and a few different jobs had been offered to him.
What they didn't know, and what Hahn had no intention of telling them, was that he had deliberately left two people out of the net.
Not because he liked them particularly, but because they were useful.
One of them was a man named Darius who had grown up two blocks from Hahn in Wilmington.
To this day, he moved through corners of the criminal world that law enforcement couldn't reach without months of preparation.
The other was a woman named Dezi Reyes who had a talent for knowing things before they were common knowledge.
Sure, it would be frowned upon if anyone ever discovered he was using them, but it was a great fallback to have.
It was Reyes who called him at 6:58, just as Hahn was shutting down his laptop.
He looked at the name on his phone screen, checked the room around him, and walked toward the stairwell before he answered. He wanted to have a quick and basic escape just in case anyone walked by.
"Hey," he said.
"You still looking for weird chemistry people?" Reyes asked. She had a flat, unhurried voice that sounded sarcastic no matter what she was saying.
"Depends on what you've got."
"There's a woman in Portland. Not Oregon, the Maine one. Her name is Jennifer Parsons. She's been buying cesium compounds for about eight months. Not huge quantities at a time, but regular. Multiple suppliers. She's spacing it out."
Hahn leaned against the wall of the stairwell landing. "How do you know? Who's the source?"
"A guy I know who works a chem supply route up through New England. He started noticing her orders a few months back. Same woman, different company names, all traces back to the same address. He looked her up because it seemed off."
"Has she bought anything else?” Hahn asked. “Anything that pairs with it?"
"I don't have a full list. Just cesium. But the pattern bothered him enough to mention it."
"Do you have a current address?”
“No, sorry,” Reyes said.
It was disappointing, but Hahn knew it was all he needed to nail down a specific address. In fact, he typed it into his phone as she spoke.
"This is good," he said.
"I know it is."
"You need anything from me?"
"Not right now, but maybe a favor later on," Reyes said and ended the call.
Hahn stood in the stairwell for a moment, looking at his phone screen.
He knew that cesium was not on the task force's primary watch list because the team's chemist had ranked it lower priority than some of the other unstable alkali metals.
Hahn thought that was probably a mistake, but he had been a federal agent for fourteen months and the chemist had a doctorate…
so he had kept that opinion to himself. Still, the element wasn't impossible to connect to Kane's framework.
Kane had built his philosophy around the periodic table's capacity for destruction and transformation, and cesium had both of those qualities in abundance.
It reacted violently with water. It was unstable at room temperature.
Anyone who had spent time studying Kane's previous cases would know that the methodology was always chosen for its symbolic resonance with the element.
He went back to his desk, sat down, and opened his laptop again.
The task force had a formal protocol for new leads.
You logged them through the intake system, they went into the queue, and a supervisor reviewed them.
From there, they were assigned out based on current capacity and relevance ranking.
The process existed for good reasons. Hahn understood that.
He just thought it was also a reliable way to make sure that anything without an obvious pedigree got buried under whatever the senior agents were already excited about.
And usually, that was Kane and only Kane.
He pulled up what he could find on the name Reyes had given him.
The woman—named Jennifer Parsons—was Oregon-born, and was currently registered at a residential address in Portland, Maine.
There was no criminal record, and she had a brief employment history that included a stint at a university research lab.
She also had several years of experience working for a small private environmental testing firm that had closed two years ago.
Since then, her employment history was thin, having stayed in the same place.
The spacing of the compound purchases over eight months suggested she was not impulsive.
Hahn knew it might be a bit speculative, but he thought it suggested she was planning something that had a timeline.
Hahn was twenty-nine years old. He had grown up competitive and stayed that way, and he had not spent a year living a false life in Baltimore to come out the other side only to sort purchase records in a cubicle for the rest of his career.
He wanted to be the agent who caught something real.
He wasn’t picky about how that happened, as long as it happened and as long as his name was attached to it when it did.
He copied the information into a personal file on his laptop rather than the shared task force system.
He would log it eventually. He just wanted to run it further first—to develop it to a point where it couldn't be dismissed or reassigned to someone else's plate.
If it turned into nothing, no one needed to know where it came from.
If it turned into something, he would have been the one who saw it first and pushed it forward when no one else was paying attention.
He looked at the name on his screen for another moment, then checked the time: 7:15.
He thought about it only for a moment before turning back to his monitor. He sighed deeply and continued working.