Page 27 of Travis
She’d been right about the corridor shift. Right about the timing intervals. Right about the communication node.
If only she hadn’t left her damned fingerprints all over it. I was surprised Kindt’s men hadn’t tried anything shady with her already. But once she got it into the FBI’s hands, she’d be safer. There would be no point in coming after her for info dozens of people had access to.
Hopefully she’d drive straight in to work and make them listen.
I opened my intercept logs and started running her access point against Kindt’s internal communications to see what they knew about her.
The first layer was expected. Breach detection on the node she’d accessed, flagged within hours. Any halfway competent operation would catch an unauthorized access from a federal terminal. The node would be burned, relocated, rebuilt. Standard countermeasure.
But they hadn’t just burned the node. Shit.
I pulled the thread deeper. Communication fragments were scattered across multiple relay points, broken up and time-delayed in a pattern designed to make reconstruction difficult. Kindt’s tech people weren’t stupid.
Neither was I. But it took time to figure out exactly what they knew about what information had been accessed from an FBI server. Cross-referencing timestamps. Matching fragments to relay nodes. Reassembling the sequence.
Forty minutes and the picture assembled, and I read it three times because the first two times I couldn’t accept it.
They’d traced the access. Not just to the terminal. To the user credentials. Kindt’s organization had a fucking name.
Sera Bolland. FBI contractor. Spokane field office.
My hands stopped on the keyboard.
I kept reading. The chatter was clinical. Operational language stripped of anything that sounded like emotion, because Kindt’s people didn’t have emotions about problems. They had procedures.
And the procedure for a federal contractor who’d accessed an active communication node was straightforward.
They’d sent a team to her apartment. The phrasing in the intercepts suggested this had happened days ago. Before she’ddriven to Montana. Before she’d stood at my gate and typed a word that still sat behind my sternum like a piece of shrapnel.
They’d already been inside her apartment.
I pushed back from the desk. The chair rolled back to the table and stopped.
Sera at my kitchen table that morning. Giving me her model, her methodology, her confidence intervals. The professional case. Asking for my help with her jaw set and her hands steady and her voice under control.
She hadn’t mentioned anyone being in her apartment. Did she even know? She was a pattern analyst. Noticing things that didn’t belong was what she did for a living. If someone had been inside her space, Sera Bolland would have felt it. Which meant she either didn’t know, or she knew and hadn’t told me.
And if she had known, why the fuck hadn’t she told me?
Maybe she’d wanted to. Maybe she’d been sitting at my kitchen table working up to it, and I’d shut her down before she got there. Told her to report through channels. Go back to the people she’d just spent twenty minutes telling me weren’t listening.
She’d laid out two years of work, and I’d handed her a pat on the head and pointed her at the door. Just like the others. Why would she give me the scary part after that? Fuck.
“Maude. Pull everything from the last seventy-two hours on Kindt’s western corridor communications. Every fragment. Full decrypt.”
“Running.”
The data came in layers. I sorted through it with the operational part of my brain, the processor that could read intercepts and match patterns while the rest of me was falling apart. Most of it was routine. Courier scheduling, route confirmations, the clockwork of a pipeline that moved humanbeings from point A to point B with the efficiency of a logistics company.
Then I found it.
A sequence that started roughly eighteen hours ago. The apartment had been entered and assessed. The target’s research materials had been catalogued.
A follow-up directive had come down within hours: the target was not just a data breach. She was an active liability. Instructions were to return to the residence and complete the objective upon the target’s return.
Complete the objective.
The first visit had been reconnaissance. The next one wouldn’t be.
