Chapter 3
Sera Bolland
Earlier That Day
My contractor badge was green. The ones that mattered were blue.
I shouldn't have cared. It was a rectangle of plastic on a lanyard, not a personality test. But the blue badges moved through the Spokane field office like they owned the hallways, which they did, and the green badges moved like guests who'd overstayed, which we had.
Almost three years I'd been swiping through these doors, and the security guard at the front desk still checked my ID every single morning like he'd never seen me before.
Maybe he hadn't. Green badges were easy to forget.
I'd been at my cubicle since seven, which was early even for me. The assigned work—a financial pattern analysis for a mortgage fraud case that three agents were fighting over credit for—sat minimized in the corner of my screen. I'd finish it by end of day. It would take me two hours. I could do it in my sleep, and sometimes I thought I did.
The rest of my screen belonged to Lucian Kindt.
Two years of data, organized into a predictive model that nobody in this building had asked me to build and nobody in this building wanted to look at. Courier movements along the I-15 corridor, cross-referenced with fuel purchases, motel registrations, and vehicle rental patterns.
Timing intervals between movements that had started random and revealed themselves, over hundreds of data points, to be anything but random. Geographic clustering in towns small enough to be invisible and spaced just far enough apart to avoid pattern detection.
Unless you were looking. Unless looking was all you did.
Even then, the model had gaps I couldn't close. Kindt's pipeline had been disrupted at least seven times in the past year by something I couldn't identify—not law enforcement, not a rival operation, nothing that left a signature I recognized. I'd labeled it as an unresolved external variable and kept working.
I'd found a vehicle registration that had appeared in three separate towns along the corridor in a sixteen-day window. The kind of thing that looked like nothing until you saw it three times.
I was adjusting a new data point when the shadow fell across my desk. "Bolland."
I minimized the Kindt screen on reflex. Not fast enough.
"Is that the Kindt file?" Pratt leaned against the partition of my cubicle the way he always did, arms crossed, the posture of a man who'd stopped by to chat and not to listen. He was my direct supervisor, mid-forties, decent enough. He'd never been unkind to me.
He'd also never once acted on anything I'd brought him.
"I'm almost done with the fraud analysis. I'll have it to you by four."
"That's not what I asked."
I turned my chair to face him. "It was the communication node I flagged last week. I pulled coordination data from it. Real-time courier scheduling, Pratt. Not projections. Not estimates. The Kindt organization's actual route timing for the western corridor."
"Okay."
"It's not okay. It's a breakthrough. The corridor shift I flagged in January wasn't a one-off. They moved their entire western route sixty miles east, and I can show you the exact date they did it. I can tell you which towns they're going to hit next week."
"Sera—"
"Next week. Not next month, not in some hypothetical future when someone with a blue badge decides to look at this. Next week. Real children in real towns on a route I have mapped."
He let me finish. That was the worst part. He always let me finish.
"That's impressive work," he said.
"It's actionable work." I forced myself to say it calmly despite wanting to scream.
"It's work that came from a communication node you accessed on your own initiative, on your own time, using Bureau resources, in an active operational area that?—"
"That nobody's operating in. That's my point. Whoever's supposedly handling this at whatever level above my clearance doesn't have this data. They can't, because I just pulled it two days ago."
