Page 63 of Heat Unscripted

“They hired him to watch her.”

“Yes.”

I shut the laptop and set it on the tile. Pressed both palms flat to the cold floor and breathed in through my nose, all of it, and under all of it the honey that wouldn’t leave the walls now.

Somebody had sat in our production meetings. Handed her scripts with a smile. Watched her manage the booth heat, watched her dose suppressants in the green room between segments, watched Cillian put himself between her and everydoor that could open on the wrong person, and written all of it down, all of it, for the people now using it to take her career apart.

Eight months embedded in the crew. Six weeks with the access to turn observation into evidence.

“The biometric data,” I said. My voice came out level. The work voice, not a mask, just the tool the next part of the job needed. “Did he get into your monitoring logs?”

“He couldn’t.” His jaw tightened. First crack in him all night. “The feed runs through my private server. Encrypted. Air-gapped off the production network. He could read the spec for what I track. Not the readings.” A beat. “So he knew I was watching her vitals. He just couldn’t prove why.”

“But the spec on its own was enough for the filing.”

“More than enough.” The sandalwood off him went sharp at the edges. “The filing says the production knew a biological event was possible and didn’t put safeguards in place. So my monitoring system becomes proof we knew, not proof we protected her. Six years I spent building that to keep her safe, and they’re using it to argue we put her in danger.”

Through the ceiling I could hear her moving. Fabric being arranged, set down, moved again. The nesting drive Sloane had described, running full out. Tuck was up there too. Not helping, just there. Close enough that his cedar was available for whatever she was building, close enough to hold the door without anyone asking.

I thought about Jamie Okafor. Twenty-three. Eight months on a crew. A clause that turned watching into his contract and his contract into this. There’s a particular cruelty in writing the surveillance into the work itself, so clean the kid doing it might not understand the whole shape of what he was handing over until the day they used it.

And I thought about her finding out. That somebody she’d shared a sealed booth with for eight months, who’d handed her scripts and fixed her microphone, had been documenting her body for the people who wanted everything she’d built.

Getting outed to millions of strangers was a broadcast. One catastrophic minute you could put on a timeline, bracket, contain. The world heard the whine, the world drew its line, and the world moved on to the next person’s three seconds of private truth.

This was different. Being watched, for months, by someone whose presence she’d let into the most exposed space there is and never once questioned. You can’t put that on a timeline, because it didn’t happen at a point. It happened the whole time. Every nice exchange retroactively poisoned. Every moment she’d felt safe, actually being filed.

I knew what that would do to her.

Years I’d watched her do the constant, grinding work of hiding without even realizing the extent of it. The suppressant schedule. The scent spray. Every interaction adjusted to head off exactly this. It cost her, and the cost showed, in the circles she buried under oversized glasses and the vocal fatigue she blamed on long sessions and the way she walked into every room already reading it for the person who might see through her.

She’d spent eleven years watching everyone. Finding out that someone had been watching her, on purpose, under contract, would get into whatever trust she was just starting to rebuild and shake the footings.

I couldn’t stop that. Couldn’t manage the impact or build some frame around her that would soak up the hit before it reached her.

What I could do was make sure that when it landed, the evidence was finished, the legal strategy held, and the pack around her had already done every piece of work there was to do.So the only thing left for her to carry was the feeling. Everything else, the documentation, the counter-filing, the response, would already be standing.

I opened the laptop again.

“Walk me through the whole access timeline,” I said. “Every file. Every timestamp. Every place his drive activity lines up with our production schedule.”

Cillian turned the screen back to himself and started.

We worked deep into the night.

The timeline came together like it had been sitting there waiting. Okafor had hit the shared drive inside twenty-four hours of every major milestone. After the technical rehearsal. After the press conference. After each script revision. He pulled an updated technical rider every time Cillian changed the booth spec. He pulled the production schedule six times, cross-referencing it, presumably, against whatever reporting setup the network had him on.

The midnight sessions were the worst of it. In three of them he’d opened files that had nothing to do with a PA’s job. Cillian’s engineering specs. My narrative structure documents. Isobel’s vocal warm-up protocols. He sat with them long enough that it was reading, not browsing. Somebody had told him what to look for. Somebody had handed him a list.

“The liaison gave him the credentials,” Cillian said. He’d moved up to the counter, laptop by the kettle, his fourth cup of tea going cold beside it. “Same device, same IP range, same off-hours pattern. But the liaison’s own machine quits logging in after week three. He handed it off.”

“Plausible deniability.” I made a note in the margin of the legal pad. “Liaison never touches the sensitive files himself after the handoff. Anybody audits him, his log reads like normal oversight. Okafor’s log has everything else on it, but under the liaison’s login.”

“Except Okafor used his own machine.” Cillian’s mouth went sideways. Not a smile. “So we get the second hardware signature. Two devices, one credential. That’s a security violation that voids the liaison’s access agreement with the production company.”

“And his personal device means we can identify him without going through the liaison’s account at all.”

“Done.” He turned the tablet toward me. One line. Device ID, manufacturer, model. “Personal laptop, registered to Jamie Okafor through his university email. He didn’t even mask the hostname.”