CHAPTER FIVE
Hahn's cubicle was the cleanest workstation on the floor, and he knew it because he had looked.
Every other desk in the task force section had the particular entropy of people working too fast on too many things at once: stacked folders, empty cups, charging cables draped across keyboards, sticky notes overlapping other sticky notes.
Hahn's desk had none of that. His monitor sat at a precise distance from the edge.
His two charging cables were routed along the back of the desk and held together with a Velcro strap.
He kept one personal item among it all—a small, framed photo of his mother taken at her retirement party two years ago.
Everything else was either in use or in a drawer.
It was not a performance. He simply found it easier to think when the physical environment didn't create noise, and right now he needed to think clearly.
He had spent the better part of two days building his file on Jennifer Parsons.
What he had was not conclusive, but it was coherent, and coherent was more than most of the task force's screening leads had managed in the past month.
The information Reyes had given him centered around Portland, Maine but the profile he had put together for Jennier Parsons told a much more complicated story.
Parsons was thirty-six years old and worked as a regional procurement coordinator for a medical supply distributor based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire before moving to Maine.
The job gave her legitimate access to chemical suppliers and a working knowledge of procurement systems, which explained how she was spacing her purchases across multiple vendors without triggering any single company's internal flagging protocols.
She knew how the ordering infrastructure worked and she was using that knowledge deliberately.
The cesium compounds she had been buying over the past eight months were the kind used in cancer treatment, specifically in certain brachytherapy applications where cesium-131 seeds were implanted near tumor sites.
This was the first thing that anyone inclined to dismiss the lead would point to, and Hahn had anticipated that objection before he had even finished his first day of research.
The problem was that Parsons's employer did not supply radiation oncology equipment.
Their catalogue ran to surgical consumables, sterilization products, and basic diagnostic tools.
There was no professional reason for her to be purchasing cesium compounds of any kind, and she was apparently doing it on a personal credit card, not through any company account.
After a bit of searching, he came across a social media comment that seemed a little important.
Eight months ago, a few weeks before the first purchase appeared on her credit card records, Parsons had posted a brief comment on a public forum dedicated to what appeared to be alternative health and spiritual wellness.
The post she had commented on was about detoxification and cellular renewal.
Her comment read: "Real purification has to go deeper than the body.
Some of us already know that radioactive decay is just transformation at its most fundamental level.
" The comment had received four likes and no replies.
The account had been largely inactive since.
Hahn had screenshotted it, saved it to his file, and cross-referenced the timing against the first purchase. The gap between the comment and the first cesium order was nineteen days.
He had also pulled what he could find on her background without triggering a formal records request that would go through the task force's shared system.
She had a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from the University of Maine.
No criminal record, as Reyes had said. And there was also no documented connection to Gabriel Kane's academic career, which was the obvious check…
even though Hahn was aware that absence of documentation was not the same as absence of connection.
Kane's influence had spread through informal networks and personal introductions that often left no paper trail, including dark web hubs.
He put the file together cleanly, organized by category with a brief summary at the top, and took it down the hall to Ortega's office.
Special Agent Sandra Ortega was Hayes's appointment to head the task force's day-to-day operations, which in practice meant she was the person who decided what got resources and what got shelved.
She was in her mid-forties and had come up through counterterrorism before moving to organized crime, and she ran the task force with the brisk impatience of someone who was accustomed to working with expert.
She and Hayes went back a long way, from what Hahn had gathered—far enough that Ortega occasionally spoke about him with the casual irreverence of an old colleague rather than a superior.
She was on her phone when Hahn appeared in her doorway. She held up one finger without looking at him.
He waited patiently and listened in. She was talking in clipped, low sentences to someone about a development in Nevada.
A possible Kane sighting, she said at one point, and then something about verification and the local Marshals office.
She mentioned a biker gang by partial name and said she needed confirmed eyes before she committed anything, and then she said she'd call back in an hour and hung up.
She looked at Hahn and he could see her mentally shifting gears. "What do you have?"
He set the file on her desk. "A woman out of Portland, Maine named Jennifer Parsons.
She has eight months of personal-account cesium compound purchases across multiple vendors.
She works for a medical supply company that has no business reason to be ordering it.
Eight months ago, she made a public social media comment about radioactive purification.
" He tapped the summary page on top. "The timing and the pattern are consistent with someone in early preparation. "
Ortega picked up the file and read the summary. She was quiet for a moment. "Where did the initial tip come from?"
Hahn had prepared for this question as well and answered as honestly as he could without putting himself at risk. "A contact."
"I need more than that."
"A confidential contact. Someone with visibility into certain supply and distribution networks. I've used them before and the information has been reliable."
Ortega set the file down and looked at him directly.
"Hahn. I need to know whether this came through proper channels or whether you've been running your own sources outside the task force's protocols.
" She stared at him in a way that let him know that she was well aware of his undercover background and the sort of connections he had garnered during that time.
"The information is solid regardless of where it originated," he said.
"That's not an answer."
He held her gaze. He was not going to give her Reyes's name or explain the arrangement, because if he did, the lead would get buried under a discussion about procedure and he would spend the next two weeks filling out disclosure forms while Jennifer Parsons continued ordering cesium compounds in Maine.
"I'm not in a position to burn the source," he said.
"But everything I've documented here—the purchase records, the employment verification, the social media post—all of it is independently verifiable.
The tip pointed me in the right direction.
The case for looking at her is built on things you can check yourself. "
Ortega studied him for a moment with an expression that was flat and unamused. She looked back down at the file, flipping to the purchase record summary and then to the screenshot of the social media comment.
"Cesium isn't on our primary watch list," she said.
"I know. And personally, I think that's a gap."
She closed the file and set it aside. Outside her office, the floor was active.
Someone's phone was ringing and a conversation was going on two cubicles down about the Nevada development.
Ortega had three other things on her plate that Hahn could identify just from what he'd overheard in the hallway over the past two days, and the Kane sighting in Nevada was clearly the one currently consuming most of her attention.
"I can't spare anyone to send with you," she said.
Hahn registered what that meant before she finished the sentence. "I'll liaise with local law enforcement on the ground."
"Three days," Ortega said without much more thought.
"That's what I can give you before I need you back here and working the Kane intelligence. You develop something solid in three days, and you bring it back and we resource it properly. If you can’t develop anything solid, you come back and we move on. "
"Three days is fine."
"And Hahn?" She picked up her phone, signaling the conversation was ending. "When this is resolved, I want to know where the tip came from. That's not optional."
Hahn picked up his file from the corner of her desk where she had set it. "Understood," he said, and left her office before she could add anything else.
He went back to his desk, sat down, and looked at the clean surface in front of him.
Three days in Portland. Local law enforcement liaison, and no task force support.
It wasn’t much, and Ortega knew it. But she had given it to him anyway, which meant she thought the lead had enough in it to be worth the allocation even if she wasn't willing to say so directly.
He was fine with that. He had worked with less and had gotten stellar results. He didn’t see why this would be any different.