Chapter Nine
Isaac closed the office door and sat down at the desk that came with the rental. Pressboard, wobbly, a scratch across the top that someone had tried to cover with a strip of packing tape. The whole space had the feel of a place that existed between tenants—functional, temporary, belonging to nobody in particular.
He pulled up the video call. Peter Valbracht’s face filled the screen a few seconds later, the familiar glow of multiple monitors reflected in his glasses. Behind him, the clean lines of Zodiac’s headquarters. Peter’s domain. The place where data went in messy and came out organized.
“I need a favor,” Isaac said. “Off the books, like last time.”
Peter’s typing slowed. “Last time being the Boston woman.”
“Yeah. And actually, this time, too.”
A beat. Peter leaned back in his chair. After Fallon had vanished from that hotel room in Boston, Isaac had gone to Peter. Framed it clean—that he needed more info on a woman he’d noticed at two events who’d caught his attention.
Professional curiosity, nothing more. Didn’t mention the hotel room, the night together, any of it. Just asked Peter to see what he could find.
Peter had found nothing. No last name, no digital trail, no social media footprint. A woman named Fallon who existed at two events and nowhere else. Isaac had thanked him, dropped it, and never brought it up again.
Until now.
“She’s in Austin,” Isaac said. “Showed up at the event we were working.”
Peter’s eyebrows rose. “Same woman, different city. That’s interesting.”
“I need you to pull footage from last night. The charity auction at the Lockwood estate.”
Peter was already typing. Isaac waited. The office was quiet—his team wouldn’t arrive for another hour, and the rental space didn’t have the ambient hum of Zodiac’s headquarters. Just the faint rattle of an air conditioning unit that sounded like it was running on spite.
“Got it,” Peter said. “Feeds are up. What am I looking for?”
“Red dress. Dark hair, curling against her neck. She would have come in through the main entrance somewhere around eight, eight-fifteen.”
Peter scrubbed through the footage. Isaac watched him work. Three screens, fingers moving between keyboard and mouse with the efficiency of someone who’d been doing this since before most people knew what cybersecurity meant.
“There.” Peter froze the frame. “Eight-twelve. This her?”
Isaac leaned toward the screen. The angle was from above, the image grainy but clear enough. Fallon, mid-stride, her head angled down and to the left as she passed the entry camera. “That’s her.”
“Okay, let me track her through the other feeds.” More typing. “Nothing. Just like Boston. She’s looking the other way at exactly the moment she crosses the sight line of the secondary camera near the coat check.”
Isaac sat with that. At the Boston events, Peter had pulled what footage they could get. The coverage hadn’t been great, and Fallon hadn’t appeared clearly in any of it. Isaac had chalked it up to angles and bad luck.
It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder whether the bad luck was engineered on her part. But three events across two cities, where none of the normal security cameras caught her face? Not a coincidence.
“Do you think she’s deliberately hiding her face for some reason?” Peter asked. “Do you suspect her of something?”
Suspect? No.
Actively aware of minor criminal activity? Hell, yes.
“At this point, I’m just trying to figure out what she’s all about. Can you check whether anything unusual was reported at either of the Boston events? Incidents, complaints, anything flagged by venue security or the hosts.”
More typing. “Nothing. Both events came back clean. No reports, no complaints. As far as the record shows, nothing happened at those events at all.”
So either she hadn’t stolen anything at them, or she was good enough that nobody knew.
Peter waited. Isaac could feel the pause—the space where the next logical step was for him to tell Peter what he actually knew. What he’d seen with his own eyes last night, standing thirty feet away.
I watched her lift a money clip out of a man’s pocket.
