Page 58 of Keller

"I'll stay on it."

A sharp ping cuts through the steady hum of the servers.

Wells goes still.

Not startled or dramatic, but it could be qualified as both for Wells. He's usually unflappable. His fingers hover over thekeyboard, then move again, faster this time. The right monitor flashes red across the top, a banner I have never seen in his system before.

“What is it?” I ask.

He doesn't answer right away. Instead, he pulls up a secondary window and scrolls, scanning lines of code I don't pretend to understand.

“Backend access alert,” he says finally, voice lower now. Focused. “Someone just hit Stone Intermodal’s routing database. That's never good news.”

That is Ridge’s world, not mine. I don't sit in on port logistics or compliance meetings. I handle private tables and players who are ranked by liquidity. But Wells does not get tight over nothing.

“Like a hack?” I ask.

He enlarges the credential string. A new window opens with the originating agency tag.

He swears quietly.

“Federal.”

The word lands flat in the room.

“What are they pulling?”

He scrolls again, jaw tightening as he reads.

“Formal request. Looks like they are focused on the Q4 post-clearance override logs.”

Q4. That would fall into the time-frame of when Dad was murdered.

He keeps reading, and I try not to pepper him with a thousand questions.

“Routing amendments from October tenth through the thirteenth, to be precise.” He doesn't look at me when he says it.

October sits there between us without either of us needing to say why it matters. That was the week everything detonated. Theweek Duvall pushed, our father died. The week Ridge shut down anything that even smelled wrong.

I step closer to the desk, not because I understand the system but because I understand tone.

“Is that a problem?”

Wells exhales through his nose and leans back in his chair, eyes still on the screen.

“Any time the Feds are poking around in our business, it's a problem. It could be nothing, but I don't like it.”

He clicks into a subfolder and pulls up a list of entries.

“Manual routing amendments during that week.” His mouth flattens. “Which means human intervention, at least on paper, in the middle of operational chaos.”

“I don't think we have anything to worry about. We flagged a fucking fentanyl shipment. That's playing by the rules. Maybe that's all it is. Follow up on that. Our hands weren't on it, so we should be good, right?”

He shakes his head once.

“Formal federal pulls are not random.”

The red banner remains at the top of the monitor, bright against the blue glow of the dashboard. Lines of data begin copying over into a secure transfer window.