Page 50 of Deliverance

Liam folded his arms and pouted. “He has more than three laptops,” he said pointedly to Evelyn.

She rolled her eyes. “He lives here. You want to carry them around in your backpack. You’ll have a bad back by the time you’re thirty. You definitely have more than three at your apartment.”

Sebastian handed out laptops to each of us. Maya snagged Liam’s second laptop on the table, and Izzy rooted in his backpack for his third one while Liam complained about boundaries. Evelyn tuned them out, and I had a feeling that this bickering among the three of them was common.

“All right,” Sebastian said, dropping back into his chair and cracking his knuckles. “Ground rules. Nothing goes on our regular networks. Everything stays on these machines and routes through the VPN layers we’ve got set up. No direct searches on Drake by name unless absolutely necessary, and even then, we should go indirect. Shell companies, property records, public filings. Nothing that pings his name in a way that looks like someone is digging.”

“He’ll have alerts set up,” Adrian pointed out. “Anyone who is that careful would.”

“Which is why we don’t go at him directly,” Evelyn said. She had pulled her laptop close, her earlier pallor replaced with sharp focus. “We focus on everything around him. His properties, his companies, his connections. We can build the picture from the outside in.”

The room settled as everyone got to work. Sebastian had set up these secure laptops a couple of years ago, and it was coming in handy now. They had a closed, secure messaging system, and Sebastian dropped a list of shell companies in there. I got to work. I wasn’t the best with a computer, but I could read a large amount of information and analyze it fairly well. Came with being a lawyer. Around me, the occasional murmur of conversation, the click of keys, and the soft dings of the laptops filled the room.

“His philanthropy work is a front,” Maya said after a while, not looking up from their screen. “At least partially. Half of the organizations he funds don’t have functioning boards. They exist on paper, and they have a pretty website, but that’s about it.”

Dominic, in the seat closest to the whiteboard, stood up. “List the names of the suspicious organizations for me?”

Maya listed them, and he scrawled them on the board.

“His property portfolio is extensive,” Sebastian said. “More than what’s publicly attributed to him. Some of it is buried three or four shell companies deep.”

“I wonder if that’s where he would keep the physical records,” Evelyn mused.

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“We thought he might keep a physical record. A black book, so to speak,” Evelyn said. “What if one of these hidden properties is his safe house?”

“He has properties all over the Midwest, though,” Adrian pointed out.

“Yes, but I bet he keeps one in each city,” Alexander said. “One, maybe even two, places he can fall back to if it all goes to hell. If we find those, we can find his records.”

“You don’t think he would keep it on his person?” Izzy asked.

Dominic shook his head. “No. If he were to be arrested, anything on his person would become evidence.”

Alexander leaned forward. “How do we find the property then?”

“It’ll be tied to a property he controls that no one knows he controls,” Evelyn said. “It’ll be buried in shell companies.”

“How long will it take to map the shell companies back to him?” Alexander asked Liam and Sebastian.

“A couple of days, if we’re being careful,” Liam said. “Less if we’re not, but?—”

“We’re being careful,” Alexander said. It wasn’t a question but a statement. “Everyone stays on this until we have something solid. Whatever you need, we’ll get it,” he said to Liam and Sebastian, who nodded.

Nobody argued. The laptops stayed open, and the room stayed quiet as we all continued typing. For the first time since this all had started, I felt a kindling of hope. Nathaniel Drake had no idea we were coming. And if we could keep it that way, he wouldn’t know what hit him.

CHAPTER 21

EVELYN

Patience was not my strong suit. It’s why I hated stakeouts and surveillance jobs and typically left those to Danny and Grace and their teams. So waiting while Liam and Sebastian peeled back layers upon layers of shell companies was killing me slowly. There were a million other things I could be doing to pass the time, but instead I found myself in the filing room on the executive floor of SDS, aggressively reorganizing the files.

“Evelyn? What are you doing?” Alexander stood in the open doorway, his blue eyes scanning the mess of files around me.

“I’m reorganizing the files,” I said primly.And going crazy.

He arched an eyebrow as he looked me over, taking in my disheveled appearance. “You know we have other assistants for that?”