PART 9:

Grief, betrayal, tactical calculation, and she thought about what she’d said in the kitchen. Those are different problems, and they have different solutions. He needs to go to Wyoming, she said. Both men looked at her. Not the FBI, she said. Not officially, not yet. If Pier sees federal vehicles, he destroys the archive and lawyers up and you spend 2 years building it back.

She looked at Tanner. But if someone gets to the compound before your people do without a federal signature, I cannot authorize. Mom, I’m not asking you to authorize it. She looked at him steadily. I’m asking you how long it takes your intercept team to reach that compound. Tanner was quiet for a moment. 6 hours, maybe seven. She looked at Luchiano.

How long for you? He met her eyes. 4 and a half. And Enzo, she said. Luchiano’s expression shifted. He’s downstairs, she said. He’s been running information all night. if he knows we found the Wyoming address. Luchiano’s hand went to his phone. He was already moving toward the door.

The evidence on that drive, Rowan said to Tanner quickly. “Marco’s folder? What’s in it?” Tanner looked at her. “Tell me what’s in it,” she said. “He’s going to walk out that door and go after Pierce, and he deserves to know what he’s walking toward.” Tanner set his glass down. He reached into his jacket and produced a folded sheet.

not the drive, a print out, something he’d prepared, and held it out without walking it to her. She crossed the room and took it. She read it in 15 seconds. Then she walked to the door where Luchiano had stopped with his hand on the frame, and she held it out to him. He took it. He read it. Marco’s file. Four years old.

The last operational note his brother had ever filed with his FBI handler, written 71 hours before he died. A note that named the person inside Luchiano’s network who had been making the operation’s financial decisions in ways that never quite made sense. A name that appeared in PICE’s ledger twice in connection with wire transfers that moved money through structures outside Luciano’s authorized network.

The name on the page was Enzo Vitali. Not an accident, not a cascade of incomplete information that had accidentally gotten Marco killed. a deliberate containment. Enzo had known Marco was a leak. He had fed the information knowing what it would trigger. He had stood at Marco’s funeral and he had ridden in this car tonight and he had been on the phone constantly the whole time.

Luciano folded the paper once. He put it in his jacket pocket. He looked at Rowan. 4 and 1/2 hours to Wyoming. She said if we leave now. This is not Tanner started. You have 6 hours before your people arrive,” Rowan said without turning around. “If we get there first and Pierce is in custody by the time your team lands, you have your arrest, you have the archive, and you have everything you need for proceedings.

” She paused. “Or you can stop us right now and spend 6 hours hoping Pierce doesn’t burn it all before you get there.” The room held that. Tanner said nothing. Rowan looked at Lutaniano. We have to deal with Enzo first, she said. I know, he said. Can you? She stopped. She didn’t finish the sentence because she didn’t know how to finish it without asking something she wasn’t sure she had the right to ask.

He looked at her and understood what she hadn’t said. “He’ll be handled,” Luchiano said. “That’s all you need to know.” She nodded. They walked out of the apartment that had been her prison 12 hours ago down the maintenance corridor toward the service elevator. And she was aware that somewhere in the descent toward the parking level, Luchiano was going to walk out of this elevator and look at the man who had been beside him for 4 years, the man who had gotten his brother killed.

And she was going to be there when that happened. And she had no idea what it was going to look like. The elevator opened. Enzo was standing exactly where they’d left him. He looked at them both, his phone in his hand, and something in his face when he saw Luchiano’s expression did a very fast and very small rearrangement. An adjustment that was too quick to be casual and too controlled to be innocent.

And in that fraction of a second, Rowan understood that he already knew. He’d known they’d found it. He’d been standing here for 20 minutes calculating his next move. And now Luciano was Enzo moved first. That was the thing nobody planned for. Not Luciano, who had calculated everything else correctly, and not Rowan, who had been watching Enzo’s face and reading the rearrangement happening inside it.

Enzo had 45 years of survival instinct, and he read the situation in the half second it took Luciano to clear the elevator door, and he moved before Luciano finished his first step, not toward the exit, toward Rowan. She had time to register the decision before the arm came around her. His left across her collarbone, yanking her back against him with a force that compressed her ribs and drove the breath out of her in a single hard expulsion.

His right hand came up with a gun she hadn’t seen and hadn’t thought about, and she understood distantly that this was her mistake. She had been thinking like a lawyer all night. Lawyers accounted for information and leverage and procedural mechanisms. They did not, by training, account for the specific weight of a man’s forearm across their sternum and the temperature of a gun barrel pressed below their jaw. Luciano stopped.

The parking structure held the moment. Three vehicles, fluorescent tubes, the smell of exhaust and concrete. Rowan’s back against Enzo’s chest and Enzo’s breathing audible and fast, working hard to control it and not quite getting there, which was the only piece of information she could find that felt useful. He was scared.

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