I kept my face still. Interested but not invested. A woman hearing something new, not a woman who had stitched the answer's shoulder wound and fallen asleep in his bed. "How significant are the disruptions?"
"Significant enough that Kindt's people are scrambling. We're picking up chatter through our own channels. Route changes, courier reassignments, increased security on transfers. The pattern of disruptions is too precise to be a competitor.Too targeted. Whoever's doing this understands the pipeline's architecture."
"And nobody's taking credit."
"Nobody. No interagency reports, no classified operations we've been read into. I've checked with every contact I have, and the answer keeps coming back the same. It's not us." He paused. "The disruptions cluster geographically. Montana. Northern corridor. The same territory your model mapped."
I reached for my coffee and took a sip. Buying time. Letting my hands do something besides betray me. "That's interesting. My model covered the northern corridor because the data pointed there. If someone else is working that territory independently, they may have identified the same vulnerabilities."
"That's what I told the higher-ups. They want to know if your model can identify who's doing this."
Shit. “I see.”
“We want you to overlay your pipeline model against the disruption data and see if anything shakes loose. Source location, operational signature, anything that narrows the field."
"You want me to profile an unknown actor."
“Exactly.” He gave me a look that carried more respect than I'd seen from him in three years. "You built the most comprehensive model of Kindt's operation that anyone in the Bureau has produced. They want you to do more.”
And now I wished I’d never given it to them. I struggled to think of a relevant question that wouldn’t give anything away. “What data will I have access to?"
"I'll send you what we've compiled on the disruptions. Dates, locations, known impacts on Kindt's logistics. It's not as granular as your original analysis, but it's what we've got."
"I can work with it. I'll need a few days."
“This is a priority. But Leadership also wants us to be thorough.”
"Understood."
"One more thing." He lowered his voice even though his door was already closed. “We're treating whoever's behind the disruptions as a criminal threat.”
“But…”
“Not a hero, not a Good Samaritan, not a concerned citizen. Operating outside the law against a target we have an active interest in. That's obstruction at minimum. If they're using force, and the disruption pattern suggests they are, we're looking at a list of federal charges."
Shitshitshitshit. It took everything I had not to look over at Travis where he was sitting just outside of my line of vision.
He nodded. Picked up his glasses again. Set them down. "I'll have the data packet to you by end of day. And Bolland?"
"Yes?"
"Good work on the original model. I should have said that sooner."
The screen went dark.
I closed the laptop and looked up.
Travis stepped into view from behind the second monitor. His jaw was tight and his shoulders were set the way they got when he was running threat assessments in his head.
"You heard all of it."
"Yeah."
We walked back to the control room together without speaking. The kittens scattered ahead of us down the corridor, the white one in the lead.
I sat down at my workstation and pulled up the Kindt model on my main screen. Not the sanitized version I'd submitted to the Bureau eight months ago. The full model, with Travis'sintercept data, his communication feeds, his operational logs layered in.
Then I pulled up my original model on the secondary screen. The routes, the courier patterns, the logistics nodes. Clean, detailed, comprehensive. The best work I'd ever done, built from a cubicle in Spokane with a green badge and an ignored inbox and the relentless, stubborn conviction that someone would eventually care about what I could see.
