Page 40 of Wrong Way

At the end of this, there was one disciple, identified and stopped. One contamination event that had not happened and would not happen because of eight months of patient, careful, covert purchasing by a woman who was now in a holding cell and would not be returning to this storage unit.

Hahn looked at the email printout still in his hand. The sender's address, the unnamed contact above Parsons, in whatever structure Kane had built around his people, the one who had written Patience, is required. The one who had not sent the activation signal in four months and whose identity remained completely unknown…though he was all but certain it was Kane himself.

One disciple. One prevention. And beyond that, an architecture of others the task force was still only beginning to map, built by a man who was still at large and still building.

There was a long road ahead. Hahn was aware of this with the same matter-of-fact clarity with which he was aware of the ache in his jaw and the cold coming in off the water. He took a few steps back to photograph the front of the unit, then stepped aside and waited as patiently as he could for the forensics team to arrive.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Nobody had told them what the meeting was about, which was the part Miles kept coming back to. Hayes's assistant had sent the calendar invite at 7:30 that morning with a subject line that read only DEBRIEF, a location, and a time, and nothing else. Miles had replied with a confirmation and then sat with his coffee in the kitchen of his apartment for ten minutes, running through the inventory of things he might have done wrong in Austin and finding more candidates than he was comfortable with. He'd fractured Owen Gallagher's cheekbone and orbital socket but, on the other hand, he and Vic had literally saved a theater-full of people.

The conference room was on the fourth floor, behind a long window of frosted glass that ran alongside the hallway. From the outside it looked like every other conference room in the building, a door with a brushed metal handle and the almost eerie silence of a space insulated for sensitive discussions. Miles, Vic, and Sarah sat in the row of chairs along the hallway wall just outside of the room and watched people pass without making eye contact.

"I heard Owen’s face is pretty messed up," Vic said.

"He's fine," Miles shot back

"I'm just saying…”

Vic looked at her phone and said nothing further on the subject. Sarah had her laptop bag in her lap and was looking at the frosted glass of the conference room door with an uncertain expression.

Miles had spoken with Assistant Director once by phone and once in a hallway debrief in the hours after he and Vic had returned from Texas. She was not a warm person, but she was a precise one, which he found more useful in the aftermath of an operation than warmth would have been. She had asked the right questions and noted the right things and had treated him with the even, collegial respect of a senior agent who had decided he was competent. He still appreciated that because there were times where he still felt that he was playing dress-up…that he should still be sitting in a lab rather than an active agent in the field.

“I wonder if this is about Agent Hahn,” Sarah said.

“Possibly,” Vic answered.

It was a good point. The report had been emailed out across the bureau yesterday. The first non-active Elementalist disciple had been caught in New Hampshire by a relatively new agent by the name of Hahn. What Miles had heard about Hahn was only what he had gleamed through the summary reports that had come through Hayes's office yesterday afternoon. An unactivated disciple in Portsmouth, armed with cesium compounds, contamination equipment, reservoir plans, and an email exchange with an unnamed contact that confirmed she had been waiting on activation. It was the task force's first prevention, and while it was a massive success, there were lots of questions that came with it. Miles had read the summary twice and found himself genuinely impressed, not just by the result but by the instinct that had led there. Hahn had taken a lead that the formal screening process had not flagged, developed it quietly and without support, and been right about all of it. That was not nothing. That was, in fact, the move that certain agents made early in a career and did not stop making afterward.

The conference room door opened, breaking his train of thought apart. Director Ortega was there, holding it with one hand. "Come in," she said.

They filed in one by one. The room was large enough that the table in its center had twelve chairs around it and did not look crowded. Hayes was already seated on the far side, his jacket on the back of his chair, a file folder open in front of him. He looked up when they came in and gestured toward the three chairs across from him. Ortega sat at the end of the table, which put her at a slight angle to both sides.

Hayes opened the folder in front of him and slid a photograph across the table. It was a wide shot of the storage unit interior, taken before anything had been moved. The shelving, the containers, the folding table with the laptop and the printed documents.

"You've seen the evidence summary," Hayes said. "But I want to walk through the interview."

He looked at Ortega, who took it from there. "Parsons was cooperative up to a point," Ortega said. "She confirmed the cesium purchases, and she confirmed the storage unit, the reservoir plans, the contamination timeline. She didn't make us work for any of that." She paused briefly. "What she wouldn't give us was Kane."

"She claims she doesn't know where he is?" Vic said.

"She claims she's never had direct contact with him. That the activation instructions came through an intermediary and that she was waiting on a signal she said she would recognize when it came, without being able to describe what form it would take." Ortega's expression was flat and unamused. "Which is either the truth or a very well-rehearsed version of it."

"Any of the other disciples say anything similar?" Sarah asked.

"Every surviving one," Miles said.

Ortega looked at him. "Correct. The pattern holds. She admitted to being a disciple without hesitation. Beyond that, she went quiet. Same wall we've hit before."

The room was still for a moment. Miles looked at the photograph of the storage unit, at the careful rows of containers and the folded Tyvek suits and the aerial photograph of the reservoir sitting on top of the stack of documents.

"She's absolutely one of his," he said. It wasn't a question.

"No doubt," Hayes said.

Ortega went on. Parsons had admitted to being a disciple. The admission had come without legal pressure, offered in the flat and cooperative tone of a person who had already decided what they were willing to say and what they were not. She offered no information about Gabriel Kane's current location. She offered no information about other disciples. She said she did not know the identities of the others, which may or may not have been true. She said the activation signal would have been recognizable to her when it came, though she declined to describe its form. Beyond that, she had gone quiet in exactly the same way the other surviving disciples had gone quiet, a cooperative surface over a total absence of useful intelligence.

"She's not going to give us Kane," Hayes said. "But she's given us the confirmation that the proactive approach works. One identified, one stopped before activation. That matters for where we go next."