"She's good for you," she says without looking up from her screen. "For what it's worth."
"How would you know? You've talked to her once."
"Twice. Once in the kitchen when she took a banana and didn't make small talk, and once tonight when I passed her in the corridor on my way to Alexandra's office and she was standing against the wall with her hand in her pocket.” Charlotte pauses. "A woman who keeps a promise she doesn't want to keep is a woman worth trusting."
I don't have a response to that and Charlotte doesn't need one. She closes her laptop, picks up her mug, and stands. Her phone beeps and she takes it out and sighs.
"Claudio's now in the war room with Leone. They want you."
"Now?"
"The Castillo attack isn't the only thing that happened tonight. Alexandra found something in the financial transfers, and Kreiss isn't just moving money, he's moving it toward something specific." She walks past me toward the door. "Whatever she found, it spooked Leone.”
She leaves. I sit in the kitchen for a moment before checking the time and heading to the war room.
Leone is at the head of the table. Alexandra beside him, laptop open, her face lit by the screen. Claudio against the wall, which is where Claudio always is during war councils because standing behind everyone else gives him the angle he wants on every face in the room. Carmelo sits in the corner wiping blood off a knife with a rag.
"Sit," Leone says.
I sit for the debrief.
"The Castillo breach is handled. Four shooters, all dead, none carrying identification. Keycards traced to a set that was decommissioned six months ago but never physically destroyed, which means someone in our logistics chain kept copies. I've assigned Claudio to find who."
Claudio nods from the wall. He'll find whoever it is, that's not even a question. The only question is how long they'll keep breathing after he does.
"But that's not why you're here," Leone continues. "Alexandra."
Alexandra turns the laptop so I can see the screen. Financial data, accounts and transfers and routing numbers that look like gibberish to me but clearly mean something to her. Her eyes are bright and her fingers are twitching, her face has that expression she gets when a trail she's been following suddenly turns a corner and shows her something she wasn't expecting.
"Kreiss is consolidating," she says. "Every account connected to the Meridian Star operation, every shell company, every intermediary, they're all funneling into a single account. One destination. He's pulling his entire financial infrastructure into one place."
"Which means what?" I ask.
"Two possibilities. He's preparing to run, closing down the operation, converting everything to cash or crypto and disappearing. Or he's preparing to deploy, concentrating resources for a single large-scale action."
"Which one is it?" I ask.
"I don't know yet. But the volume is significant. We're talking tens of millions moving in the last seventy-two hours. Whatever he's doing, it's happening fast and it's happening now."
Leone leans back in his chair. His face is the mask it always is during operational briefings, neutral, giving nothing away to the room, but I've known this man since I was fifteen and I can read what sits behind. He's worried. Not scared, Leone doesn't scare, but worried in the way that commanders get worried when the enemy starts doing things that don't fit the patterns they've been tracking.
"The marina surveillance deploys tomorrow night," Leone says. "Tuesday. If Kreiss is still running the handoff schedule Savannah described, there should be activity. I want eyes on the Meridian Star, and I want confirmation that Vidal is still operating."
"I'll lead the team," I say.
"Take four men. Two-night deployment, Tuesday and Thursday, to catch both handoff windows. If Vidal shows, we photograph and we track. We do not engage."
"And if Kreiss shows?"
Leone's eyes find mine. "He won't. Kreiss doesn't get his hands dirty. He's a handler, not a soldier. But if somehow he does showup at that marina, you call me before you do anything. Nobody touches Kreiss without my authorization."
"Understood."
"One more thing." Leone stands and walks to the window. The courtyard below is lit by floodlights, soldiers moving in the aftermath of the attack, vehicles being repositioned, the organized chaos of a compound that just took a hit and is already rebuilding its defenses. "Aurelio had a bad night."
The room goes still.
"The doctors called me at midnight, before the attack. His oxygen dropped. They stabilized him, but the trajectory is..." Leone stops. His jaw moves once. "The trajectory is what it is. I told him about the Kreiss operation. He said to finish it."
