Page 92 of Travis
"Half an hour."
"What's your read?"
"Something changed on their end. He wouldn't break pattern without a reason, and he wouldn't leave the subject blank unless he didn't want a paper trail of the topic before we spoke."
Or, he could’ve also have forgotten. That had happened before. But my gut was saying otherwise.
“Could it be about Kindt?” Travis asked.
“Definitely possible.”
“Okay. We need to get you set up somewhere that is so nondescript he won’t even think about it.” He led me down the corridor to a small storage room with a plain white wall on one side. Unremarkable. Could be any apartment in any city.
Travis disappeared and came back with a desk lamp. He set it on a shelf to my left, angled it toward the wall, and turned off the overhead. The lamp threw a soft, neutral glow that made the background look like a bedroom wall or a home office. Anonymous.
I held up my laptop camera and checked the frame. "Perfect."
He moved a chair into position and adjusted the height. Then he stepped behind the laptop and looked at the screen from my side.
"Your shirt."
I looked down. I was wearing one of his T-shirts. Oversized, dark gray, with a faded logo from a brand I didn't recognize.
"I'll change."
I put on a blouse Maude had ordered for me when I first got here, buttoned it to the collar, smoothed my hair. When I came back, Travis had set up a second screen behind the laptop's sightline where he could monitor the call without being visible.
"I'll be right here," he said, and stepped out of frame.
I sat down, opened the link, and waited.
Pratt's face filled the screen twelve seconds after the scheduled time. He looked the same as always: thinning hair, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, the fluorescent wash of the Bureau's open-plan office behind him.
Except he'd closed his office door. I could see it in the background, shut, which he never did for our calls because our calls had never warranted privacy.
"Bolland.” Pratt nodded at me. “Thanks for making time."
Two years. Two years I'd been feeding this man analysis that he skimmed on his way to lunch, and now he was thanking me for making time. Something had put the fear of God into Martin Pratt, and I needed to figure out what before I said a single word wrong.
"Of course. What can I help you with?"
He took his glasses off his forehead and set them on the desk. Picked them up again. Put them back.
"I'm going to cut straight to it. The brass is asking questions I don't have answers to, and your name keeps coming up."
"My name in what context?"
"Your Kindt model. The pipeline analysis you submitted eight months ago."
"What about it?"
"When you submitted that analysis, it mapped Kindt's courier network across the northern corridor. Potential routes, possible timing patterns, logistics nodes. Detailed work. I'll be honest, I didn't give it the attention it deserved at the time."
This was the closest Martin Pratt had ever come to admitting he'd dropped something I'd handed him. Eight months ago, I would have savored that sentence. Probably would’ve gotten it tattooed on my forehead.
Now it landed in my stomach like a stone, because whatever had made Pratt wake up and pay attention was about to become my problem.
"In the last several months, Kindt's operation has been hit. Repeatedly. Not by us. Not by DEA. Not by any agency that's claiming the activity." He leaned forward. "Someone is disrupting his pipeline from the outside, and nobody can figure out who."
