CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The conference room was on the fourth floor, behind a long window of frosted glass that ran alongside the hallway.
From the outside it looked like every other conference room in the building, a door with a brushed metal handle and the almost eerie silence of a space insulated for sensitive discussions.
Miles, Vic, and Sarah sat in the row of chairs along the hallway wall just outside of the room and watched people pass without making eye contact.
"I heard Owen’s face is pretty messed up," Vic said.
"He's fine," Miles shot back
"I'm just saying…”
Vic looked at her phone and said nothing further on the subject. Sarah had her laptop bag in her lap and was looking at the frosted glass of the conference room door with an uncertain expression.
Miles had spoken with Assistant Director once by phone and once in a hallway debrief in the hours after he and Vic had returned from Texas.
She was not a warm person, but she was a precise one, which he found more useful in the aftermath of an operation than warmth would have been.
She had asked the right questions and noted the right things and had treated him with the even, collegial respect of a senior agent who had decided he was competent.
He still appreciated that because there were times where he still felt that he was playing dress-up…
that he should still be sitting in a lab rather than an active agent in the field.
“I wonder if this is about Agent Hahn,” Sarah said.
“Possibly,” Vic answered.
It was a good point. The report had been emailed out across the bureau yesterday.
The first non-active Elementalist disciple had been caught in New Hampshire by a relatively new agent by the name of Hahn.
What Miles had heard about Hahn was only what he had gleamed through the summary reports that had come through Hayes's office yesterday afternoon.
An unactivated disciple in Portsmouth, armed with cesium compounds, contamination equipment, reservoir plans, and an email exchange with an unnamed contact that confirmed she had been waiting on activation.
It was the task force's first prevention, and while it was a massive success, there were lots of questions that came with it.
Miles had read the summary twice and found himself genuinely impressed, not just by the result but by the instinct that had led there.
Hahn had taken a lead that the formal screening process had not flagged, developed it quietly and without support, and been right about all of it.
That was not nothing. That was, in fact, the move that certain agents made early in a career and did not stop making afterward.
The conference room door opened, breaking his train of thought apart. Director Ortega was there, holding it with one hand. "Come in," she said.
They filed in one by one. The room was large enough that the table in its center had twelve chairs around it and did not look crowded.
Hayes was already seated on the far side, his jacket on the back of his chair, a file folder open in front of him.
He looked up when they came in and gestured toward the three chairs across from him.
Ortega sat at the end of the table, which put her at a slight angle to both sides.
Hayes opened the folder in front of him and slid a photograph across the table. It was a wide shot of the storage unit interior, taken before anything had been moved. The shelving, the containers, the folding table with the laptop and the printed documents.
"You've seen the evidence summary," Hayes said. "But I want to walk through the interview."
He looked at Ortega, who took it from there.
"Parsons was cooperative up to a point," Ortega said.
"She confirmed the cesium purchases, and she confirmed the storage unit, the reservoir plans, the contamination timeline.
She didn't make us work for any of that.
" She paused briefly. "What she wouldn't give us was Kane. "
"She claims she doesn't know where he is?" Vic said.
"She claims she's never had direct contact with him.
That the activation instructions came through an intermediary and that she was waiting on a signal she said she would recognize when it came, without being able to describe what form it would take.
" Ortega's expression was flat and unamused.
"Which is either the truth or a very well-rehearsed version of it. "
"Any of the other disciples say anything similar?" Sarah asked.
"Every surviving one," Miles said.
Ortega looked at him. "Correct. The pattern holds. She admitted to being a disciple without hesitation. Beyond that, she went quiet. Same wall we've hit before."
The room was still for a moment. Miles looked at the photograph of the storage unit, at the careful rows of containers and the folded Tyvek suits and the aerial photograph of the reservoir sitting on top of the stack of documents.
"She's absolutely one of his," he said. It wasn't a question.
"No doubt," Hayes said.
Ortega went on. Parsons had admitted to being a disciple.
The admission had come without legal pressure, offered in the flat and cooperative tone of a person who had already decided what they were willing to say and what they were not.
She offered no information about Gabriel Kane's current location.
She offered no information about other disciples.
She said she did not know the identities of the others, which may or may not have been true.
She said the activation signal would have been recognizable to her when it came, though she declined to describe its form.
Beyond that, she had gone quiet in exactly the same way the other surviving disciples had gone quiet, a cooperative surface over a total absence of useful intelligence.
"She's not going to give us Kane," Hayes said. "But she's given us the confirmation that the proactive approach works. One identified, one stopped before activation. That matters for where we go next."
Miles nodded. He had no disagreement with that read and actually found it encouraging.
"The neon case," Hayes continued, "is closed, pending the formal processing of Gallagher.
Three murders and the attempted mass casualty event at the Paramount are going to be a significant piece of work to put together, but the evidence is strong and the DA's office in Austin is already engaged.
" He looked between Miles and Vic. "You did excellent work.
Both of you." He looked at Sarah. "And you, Agent Kim.
The Rachel Gallagher connection was the piece we needed, and you found it. Damned fine work."
Sarah accepted this without excessive modesty. "Thank you, sir," she said.
Hayes gathered the papers in front of him into a loose stack and closed the folder.
"That's where we are. The task force continues.
The Parsons arrest gives us some political room to breathe, which we're going to need.
Hahn's approach is going to require a very candid conversation about sources and methodology before it gets codified into anything formal, but the result speaks for itself.
" He looked at Ortega briefly, and something passed between them that Miles couldn't fully read but recognized as the shorthand of people who had been working alongside each other long enough to conduct whole conversations in a single look. "Questions?"
“None here,” Vic said. Miles and Sarah shook their heads in agreement.
“Then you’re dismissed,” Hayes said.
They left the conference room in silence and made their way to the elevator bank at the end of the hall. Vic punched the Down arrow and then sighed, stepping away. “Damn. My laptop’s upstairs. You guys take this one. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Bright and early,” Miles said.
"Bright and early," she confirmed.
The elevator arrived and the doors slid open. When Miles and Sarah stepped on, Vic looked in at them for one single second. She met Miles’ eyes, gave him a small grin and then walked toward the stairwell to head upstairs.
The elevator doors closed and there was silence—not awkward or tense, but it was there.
And just as he thought he had found something to say to break the silence apart, Sarah stepped toward him and kissed him.
There was no preamble and no clear warning sign, just a decision executed without hesitation.
For just a second or two, Miles returned it and the world contracted to a very small and very specific point. Then he pulled back.
He looked at her, not sure how to respond. She was watching him with an expression that was readable and direct, and there was no embarrassment in it.
"Sorry," she said, though she didn’t sound sorry at all. "Sometimes a girl just wants to shoot her shot, you know?"
"Don't apologize," he said. "I'm glad you did it."
"So glad that you pulled away?"
"I know." He looked at the elevator doors, facing the harsh fact that he was thinking of Elena. He’d been thinking of her ever since the moment he'd pulled back.
He figured he could explain this, but explaining it would take more than a forty-second elevator ride, and he wasn't sure he had the full explanation yet anyway.
"I'm just too much of a mess right now. That's the honest version. "
"That's fair," she said.
"I hope you'll try again sometime, though?"
She looked at him for a moment. "Sorry, buster,” she said with a smile. “I made my move and got shot down. The next one is your duty.”
He leaned forward and kissed her, briefer this time and gentler. It was a kiss that made a point without pressing it. He was aware of what he was doing and he did it anyway. And a large part of him rejoiced.
She was quiet for a second, and then she smiled, and it reached everything. "Okay," she said. “I’m back on the clock. The next one is mine.”
"Come over for dinner," he said. "Tonight."
"Absolutely. On one condition."
"What's that?"
"Kiss goodnight when it's over."
He felt something loosen in his chest, something that had been pulled tight for longer than he could easily account for. "That sounds fair," he said.
The elevator reached the lobby and the doors opened. They stepped out together into the main corridor, headed into a night of countless possibilities.