I follow his count. One breath, two, three, four. In, two, three, four. The panic recedes, leaving me shaky and drained.
"Wait… I remembered something," I say when I can speak again.
"Tell me."
"The woman. Andros. I saw her. Not just in photographs. In person." I swallow hard. "It was for an interview on geneticmedical advances. There were children's pictures on the wall behind her. Dozens of them."
Jagger's grip tightens on my shoulders. "What kind of questions did you ask?"
"I don't know. I can’t remember.” I shake my head. "But I remember feeling terrified. Not for myself. For whoever those kids were."
He releases me and steps back, running a hand through his hair. The gesture is so human, so unlike the controlled man he pretends to be, that I almost laugh.
"Andros disappeared three years ago," he says. "Same time you were taken. She's connected to all of it."
"So we find her."
"She's dead. Officially."
"And unofficially?"
He meets my eyes. "Unofficially, a lot of people connected to Project Omega seem to die right before they become liabilities. But bodies don't always stay buried."
I ponder on that. About the web of shell companies and dead ends, about Kreiss in Geneva counting money for men who don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves, about children's faces pinned to a wall.
"I want to help," I say. "Really help. Not just sit here and wait for my brain to cough up fragments."
"You are helping."
"I want to do more." I step closer to him, close enough to see the flecks of blue in his gray irises. "I was an investigativejournalist. A good one. Before you people erased me, I spent five years digging into things that powerful people wanted buried. Let me use those skills."
"It's dangerous."
"More dangerous than what I'm already in? You've got me hidden in your apartment, off the books, remembering things that could get us both killed. The danger ship has sailed, Harrison. It's waving at us from the horizon."
His mouth twitches.
"What did you have in mind?"
"The files you pulled from Moore's archive. They're copies. You said that yourself. Copies can be altered, trails can be false." I tap the tablet screen. "But somewhere, there are originals. Physical documents. Hard drives. Evidence that can't be erased with a keystroke."
"Kreiss would have those."
"Then we figure out where he keeps his records. Not the digital ones. The real ones. The paper trail that exists because men like him are too paranoid to trust anything they can't touch."
Jagger considers this. His brow furrows and his eye twitches. It's the same look he gets when he's about to do something he knows is stupid but can't talk himself out of.
"There's a vault," he says slowly. "In Geneva. Kreiss maintains a private safety deposit facility for high-value clients. It's not on the official record, but I've heard rumors."
"How do we access it?"
"We don't. Not without credentials that would take months to forge, and contacts I don't have."
"What about your brothers?"
He shakes his head. "Jace is in lala land. Jinx is unpredictable. I won't risk them until I know exactly what we're dealing with."
"So we're stuck."
