My gut knows before I finish reading it. The pattern has been there all along — the quiet man, always present, always helpful, always exactly where he was needed. The one person whose competence I relied on so thoroughly I stopped noticing him as a person.
Jimmy Polson.
"You're sure," I say.
"The gem trail confirms it. The access pattern confirms it. Cross-reference the Tuesday window against building entry logs—" She pulls a fourth page from underneath the others. "He was always in the building. Every time."
"Thank you," I tell her. "This is exactly what I needed."
She looks at me for a moment, then takes her ledger and goes back to her corner. She understands what comes next isn't hers to watch.
I sit with the pages for a while.
Jimmy was invisible. That's the word that keeps arriving: invisible, competent, reliable. He brought coffee. He filed reports. He relayed information I needed before I asked for it.
There was a Tuesday three months ago — I remember it now with sudden clarity. Vendor dispute, a supplier trying to renegotiate mid-contract. Jimmy had the relevant files on my desk before I'd finished the first call. I looked at the files. I saidgoodwithout looking up. He left. I filed the response and moved on, and I never once looked at the man standing on the other side of my desk. Only the function he performed.
For three years I saidgoodandhandledandthanksand looked through him at whatever he was carrying toward me, never at him. Furniture. Well-maintained, useful furniture.
I know that feeling. The silent fixer, the man who holds everything together while everyone looks through him at the problem he just solved. I've spent thirty years being that man for other people, and I understand, with an intimacy I would rather not have, how it feels.
What would it have taken to break me? What combination of years and invisibility and resentment would have done it? If Jorge had taken me for granted the way I took Jimmy for granted —
I seal it before it finishes. Press it flat. It has no useful answer.
What matters is Andrei Cebotari. Andrei followed this thread for weeks. Got close enough that someone inside knew it. Jimmy knew it. Jimmy made a call, and now Andrei is dead and his family doesn't know why.
Whatever broke in Jimmy, whatever the calculation was — Andrei paid for it. That doesn't change.
I'm on my feet before I decide to stand.
I find Gunner in the security room. I say Jimmy's name, and my expression says the rest.
He's already moving.
We find Jimmy at the staff desk near the main floor, working through the afternoon vendor schedule with his tablet — same as every other day, same quiet efficiency, the mask fully intact. He looks up when I appear in the doorway. The professional smile starts.
I say his name differently. Just that. One syllable with the wrong weight behind it.
The mask cracks. Not dramatically — it just stops working. Something behind his eyes recalibrates instantly. He knows I know. The helpful employee goes away, and what's left is a man sitting in a chair who made choices and is now measuring what they cost him.
"Sir—"
"Don't," I say.
He doesn't.
Gunner covers the distance in four steps. One moment Jimmy is behind the desk, the next he isn't, and Gunner is moving him toward the service corridor with a grip at the back of his neck that communicates without words what the next several hours will look like. Jimmy cooperates because he's smart enough to know what Gunner will do if he doesn’t.
I follow them to the holding room off the kitchen corridor. Gunner deposits Jimmy in a chair and posts himself by the door. Arms loose. Watching.
"You got Andrei killed," I say.
Jimmy doesn't respond. His hands are flat on his knees. He doesn't look at me.
You almost got Wren killed.I don’t say that out loud because I don’t trust my voice to stay even.
I leave it. There are specifics to extract, and Gunner will extract them. There's something more urgent now.
