Page 24 of Travis
“You’re investigating Lucian Kindt?”
“Well, not officially. Nobody at the Bureau would authorize that from a contractor. I’m building an analytical model on Kindt’s operation.” I watched his face. His jaw was locked tight. “I’m sorry. I know that name is?—”
“Keep going.”
“I’ve been building my model on my own time, using my own analysis, outside my assigned work. Nobody asked me to.Nobody wanted me to. I did it because the operation that killed my sister is still running, and nobody is doing anything about it.”
“Tell me what you’ve found.”
I gave him the structure. Not the full methodology I would have given an analyst, not the slow build I’d tried with Pratt. Travis didn’t need the primer.
I told him about the courier movements along the I-15 corridor, the pattern I’d found buried inside what looked like randomness, the predictive framework that could project forward with eighty-six percent confidence over the last four months of backtesting.
He asked about the confidence intervals. About the geographic clustering. About the variable weighting between temporal and spatial indicators.
Each question landed precisely, surgically, in the place where my model was either strong or vulnerable, and each one told me he’d already absorbed the architecture of what I’d built and was stress-testing it in real time.
I’d presented this data before. To Pratt. To a senior analyst who’d listened for twelve minutes and then asked me if I’d finished the mortgage fraud case. They’d barely listened. Definitely hadn’t cared enough to ask questions.
This was different. Travis caught every word. He held each one. He turned them over and handed them back sharpened. I could feel my own thinking getting clearer as I talked, as if the act of being understood was making the work better.
“Ten days ago, I found a communication node,” I said. “Active coordination hub inside Kindt’s network. Real-time courier scheduling, route assignments, timing. Not projections. The actual operational data.”
His hands went still around his mug. “From an FBI terminal.”
“Yes.”
“Using your contractor credentials.”
“Yes.”
He closed his eyes for one second. When he opened them, his expression was something I couldn’t fully read. “How long were you inside the system?”
“Long enough to pull the scheduling data. Maybe forty minutes.”
“Did you route through a proxy?”
“No. I went in clean. From my workstation.”
He set his mug down very carefully. “Using your contractor credentials. From a federal terminal. With no cover.”
I knew what he was suggesting. That Kindt’s organization might be able to pinpoint it was me who’d accessed the data. They already had. But I didn’t want to guilt Travis into helping me.
“I didn’t have the tools to do it any other way. That’s why I’m here. I need someone who can access that node without leaving federal fingerprints. Someone who can validate my model against real intelligence, not just the public data I’ve been building from on my own.”
“You want me to be your technical partner to help gather enough info to take down Kindt.”
“Well, get enough intel that the Agency has to listen to me and act on it.”
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that the toast went cold on my plate and the coffee in my mug stopped steaming. He sat across from me with his hands around his own mug, and I could see thoughts moving behind his face without being able to read any of them.
Then he looked up.
“You need to drop this.”
The words didn’t register at first. It was like hearing a sentence in a language I’d forgotten, where the sounds were familiar, but the meaning took an extra second to arrive.
“What? I thought you understood what I was saying.”
