Chapter one
Griffin - San Francisco - May 4
The threat assessment email had mentioned obsessive fans and invasive messages. It hadn't mentioned the music.
It hit me the moment I entered through the loading bay. Electronic and organic mingled, underscored by a pounding bass line. It bled through concrete and insulation, even though the backstage corridors of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium (the Civic, in venue shorthand) were built to contain sound.
It was nothing like the Ramones records my father used to play in the garage on Sunday mornings, all jagged edges and deliberate friction.
This was engineered intimacy, precision-crafted to make millions of people feel seen. It was working on a global scale.
I kept moving through the loading entrance. Outside, San Francisco's late afternoon light made the city look softer than it was. Tourist crowds moved through the plaza beyond the security perimeter, oblivious to the machinery happening inside.
I'd worked in San Francisco before. Different firm, different principal, back when my career was something other than acautionary tale. The city had always felt like Seattle’s ambitious younger sibling, historically older, but louder, hungrier, and more convinced of its own importance.
A place that demanded you hustle or get out of the way. Seattle let you hide. San Francisco made you visible.
The venue coordinator's badge said Maren, but she introduced herself as the tour liaison, which meant she'd been warned I was coming and didn't like it.
"You're late," she said, not looking up from her tablet. "Everyone else arrived two hours ago."
"Flight delay." I didn't apologize. An apology would suggest I'd had control over the situation.
She glanced up, taking in my age and my face, calculating whether to trust me. Her expression didn't shift. "ID and clearance code."
I handed over both.
"You're the specialist on the threats against Rune."
"I am."
Her mouth tightened. "Chief Kang runs point security. You report to him. The members don't know you yet, so stay back unless he brings you in." She paused, fingers hovering over her tablet. "We had a credential issue this morning. Someone used an expired vendor pass to access the loading bay. Might be nothing, but Kang's already on edge."
My attention sharpened. "Expired how long?"
"Three months. It scanned initially, but the system flagged it on the second verification." She handed back my credentials, a lanyard printed withSECURITYin block letters on a red background. "Rehearsal's active. Stage left entrance. Don't interrupt."
I nodded and took the badge. She was already moving toward the next crisis while I was still threading the lanyard onto my belt.
The corridor ahead swallowed sound, except for the music. It was clearer now, closer. Layered harmonies, synthesizers that felt analog but probably weren't, and a vocal line that dropped into a raw segment before the arrangement caught it and smoothed it back into precision.
My father would've hated it. It was too clean and controlled.
The stage left entrance opened into chaos as the music shifted from atmospheric to immediate.
I counted personnel. Fourteen visible: seven crew in blacks, four in street clothes with staff lanyards, and three in the same red security badges I wore. Korean and English overlapped in rapid bursts.
The music came from the stage, with live vocals. Running through the choreography at half-speed, the band members demonstrated something more intricate than it appeared. The song was darker than I'd expected. Minor key. The lyrics I could catch in English were about cages and wanting air.
The bass line vibrated through the floor, resonating up through my boots. It was a low frequency you felt in your body before you heard it, physical and demanding.
A man in his forties stood near the monitor station, phone pressed to his ear, speaking Korean too fast for me to catch more than occasional words. His posture said management. His expression said problems he was solving in real time. He didn’t look at the stage when the music faltered. He looked at his phone.
Two men in security black stood at opposite sightlines. The older one, fifty, maybe, compact and watchful, had his arms crossed, scanning the space with systematic attention. That would be Chief Kang.
I stayed back and observed.
The stage itself was half-lit, work lights harsh against the Civic's ornate proscenium arch. It created an odd frame forfour men in contemporary streetwear, running choreography. The contrast was deliberate, I realized. Historic venue. Modern performance. The collision of old-money aesthetics and new global culture.
