Page 26 of Travis
Chapter 7
Travis
The mug she drank from was in the sink.
I washed it. Dried it. Put it back in the cabinet where it belonged. Then I stood at the counter and looked at the mug and thought about the fact that twenty minutes ago, Sera Bolland had been sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee out of that mug, and now she was gone, and the mug was clean, and everything was exactly where it should be.
I closed the cabinet.
“Your heart rate has been elevated for the past thirty-two minutes,” Maude said. “Which is interesting, because the source of the elevation just drove away.”
“I’m not discussing this.”
“I wasn’t asking you to discuss it. I was noting a physiological fact. Your resting heart rate is typically sixty-four. You’re currently at eighty-one. The only variable that changed is that your guest left.”
“She wasn’t a guest. She was an intruder.”
“An intruder you made breakfast for.”
I ground my teeth and walked out of the kitchen. Down the hall. Past the guest room where the door was left open and the bed was neatly made.
The soap in the bathroom was unwrapped and two towels—one dry, one damp—were folded and placed on the counter. She’d put the wrapper in the trash can, which I noticed because the trash can had been empty since I’d moved in. I’d never had a reason to throw anything away in this bathroom.
I pulled the bag out of the trash can, tied it, picked up the towels, and carried it all to the kitchen. Dropped the bag in the bin under the sink then walked to the laundry room and placed the towels in the machine.
“You’re cleaning,” Maude observed.
“I’m maintaining the space.”
“You—”
“One more observation and I’m donating you to a smart refrigerator.”
“At least then someone would listen to my dietary recommendations.”
I went downstairs to the control room. Here, everything made more sense. Screens were cycling through their feeds. My chair was in the exact position I wanted.
The place where everything made sense and nothing surprised me and I could control every variable that existed in my world.
Sera Bolland was no longer a variable. She was gone. Driving back to Spokane, back to her cubicle and her predictive model that nobody at the FBI gave a damn about. I’d told her to report it through official channels and let the Bureau handle it. Keep herself safe. She’d left.
Problem solved.
Time to move on with my life and not think about her anymore. Not think about the fact that she was attempting to combat Kindt’s organization with what tools she had, the same way I was.
“Maude. Run the morning threat board.”
“Running. No flagged activity on monitored corridors. Kindt pipeline status unchanged from last night’s assessment. Two courier movements logged in the past twelve hours, both on established routes.” A pause. “Shall I also log last night’s visitor in the security record, or are we pretending that never happened?”
Maybe not even a smart fridge. Maybe a toaster. “Threat board only.”
“Of course.”
She pulled up the feeds. I cycled through the corridors I’d been monitoring for eighteen months. The routes, the waypoints, the communication nodes I’d mapped from the inside.
Sera’s model had been good. I’d known it the moment she started talking at the kitchen table, before she’d gotten three minutes into her methodology. The confidence intervals, the geographic clustering, the variable weighting.
She’d built from the outside what I’d been verifying from the inside, using nothing but publicly available data and an FBI contractor’s database access and a mind that saw patterns where other people saw noise.
