Page 54 of Crowe
The ninth floor had the lived-in warmth of people who spent their off-hours together, but the eighth floor was something different. It was all business from the offices to what they call the operations center to the conference center where we were meeting. It had a long table, eight chairs, a mounted screen at one end, and a whiteboard with nothing on it yet. The kind of room that you could tell was meant for strategy and logistics.
Wolfe was sitting at the head of the table with Hawk and Gator on each side of him. Diego was sitting next to Hawk with astack of folders in front of him. Jackson and I walked in, and he directed me to a chair across from Diego. I took my seat and looked at the people filing in around the table. These were the people who were keeping me safe. Not abstractly. Actually. My safety was literally in their hands.
I knew that, of course, but it landed differently in this room than it did upstairs.
Then the door opened again, and a man I recognized from months ago walked in. He was tall, with dark hair, and the bearing of someone who’d spent years in rooms like this one.
“Chance Kelly,” Jackson said quietly beside me.
I nodded. “I remember him. He asked me a ton of questions last fall, but he was kind about it. He’s kept in touch over the last six months.”
Chance set a leather portfolio on the table and looked around the room, clocking each person, landing on me last. He didn’t make anything of it. Just nodded. “Noah.”
“Agent Kelly,” I said.
“Chance,” he said. “We’ve been through enough together for you to call me Chance.” He said it matter-of-factly, then he sat down. “Let’s get started.”
Wolfe looked at Jackson. “First off, Caden updated the schedule board, and I see that Knox and Maddox are both on out-of-town assignments, so they are out of rotation. Does anyone else have anything coming up that Caden doesn’t know about?”
Hawk chuckled. “No way, none of us wants to get on Caden’s bad side.”
“That’s the truth. How about you, Jackson? I didn’t see any groups on your schedule at the camp for the next couple of weeks.”
“The group from East Texas left on Friday, and I don’t have anyone on the schedule until mid-June, so I’m clear.”
“Good, let’s keep it that way. Diego, how about you? What do you have for us?”
Diego nodded and passed around the folders he had in front of him before opening the one he’d kept, setting it flat on the table. “Gregor Valen,” he said. “I’ve been running his US contacts for the past two weeks. Here’s what I have.”
He walked through it without rushing. Valen moved money through three shell companies registered in Delaware. They were hard to trace but not impossible. He had a contact in Miami who handled logistics for him. Transportation, documentation, and supplies. The kind of infrastructure you needed when you were moving people rather than goods. There was a lawyer in New York who’d represented three different companies that were connected to Corvane’s network over the last few years.And finally, he’d found a property management company in Fort Worth that had leased warehouse space twice in the past eighteen months, both times for short periods, both times paid in cash through intermediaries.
“So not just in Vesper but in Fort Worth, as well,” Gator said.
“Yeah, and I’m sure that isn’t all. That’s just what I found in a week.” Diego shook his head and let out a frustrated sigh.
“Did you find anything in the Fort Worth warehouses?” Hawk asked, and Diego looked at Chance.
“Wolfe turned those over to us. Unfortunately, both were cleared out before we could get eyes on them,” Chance answered. “But the timing lines up with two separate FBI cases pertaining to missing people.”
“That’s all I have,” Diego said. “Like Chance said, from there, we turned it over to them.”
Chance picked it up without missing a beat. “We’ve been building a parallel picture from our end. We’ve known about the Miami logistics contact. He’s been on our radar for four years. Nothing actionable yet because he’s careful, but the pattern is there. We know he’s connected somehow.” He tapped the table once. “The New York lawyer is interesting. We weren’t aware of him in connection with this case, but he represented a shell company that came up in an unrelated wire fraud case eighteen months ago. The wire fraud case went nowhere, but y’all’s work connects him to Valen in a way we hadn’t seen before.”
“So you have the shape of it,” Gator said.
“We have the shape of it,” Chance agreed. “What we don’t have is anything that survives a courtroom. Corvane is untouchable in Selvaris, and he knows it. Everything he touches in the US is layered enough that you get to Valen, and you stop. Valen’s loyal because he’s afraid, and scared men don’t flip easily.”
The room was quiet for a moment.
I looked at the folder I’d gotten from Diego. At the names and the shell companies and the warehouse addresses, all of it laid out in neat columns. The infrastructure of the thing that had happened to me. I’d known it existed. You can’t go through what I went through and not understand that it was organized. That someone had built a machine, and I, and the others, were nothing more than a product that had been moved through it. But seeing it mapped out like this was something different. Something colder. It reaffirmed just how lucky I’d been to be rescued.
As if Jackson somehow sensed my distress, his hand found my knee under the table. Brief. Just there. A reminder that I was safe.
I breathed through it.
“Okay, now let’s talk about the Gala,” Wolfe said, and the room shifted.
Hawk leaned forward. “Freedom Forward. It’ll be held in Houston, and it’s a little over one week out. We had Noah’s name added to the program as a speaker.” He looked at me. “We’re hoping this will draw Corvane out, so we want to treat this as a full operation.”
