Page 95 of Travis
Chapter 24
Travis
Sera’s FBI laptop had been open for three days, and I’d stopped pretending it didn’t bother me.
It sat on her workstation in the control room, its screen angled just far enough that I couldn’t read it from my chair. She hadn’t angled it on purpose. The desk was narrow and the two setups competed for space, and it was just where the laptop fit.
But every time I glanced over and saw the Bureau interface beside my intercept feeds, the same thought crossed my mind: the woman keeping me out of prison was also the woman whose employer wanted to put me there.
She was handling it. She’d spent three days building a narrative that characterized the Ghost disruptions as a fragmented group, feeding Pratt genuine intelligence on Kindt’s pipeline to keep the Bureau focused on the real target. I’d watched her construct the analysis, and it was airtight.
But everything she was doing had a shelf life, and neither of us knew how long.
“Your wound site temperature has decreased to normal range,” Maude said. “Inflammation markers are trending down. I’d estimate full tissue repair in another eight to ten days.”
“Good.”
“I’m also noting that your sleep efficiency has improved by fourteen percent this week. I attribute this to consistent co-sleeping with a person who forces you to remain horizontal for more than three consecutive hours.”
I closed my eyes. Sera was right there. Three feet away, fully capable of hearing every word my traitorous computer was broadcasting about our sleeping arrangements.
“Thank you, Maude. Truly. For sharing that. Out loud. In this room.”
“You’re welcome. It’s the kind of data-driven observation that would make an excellent peer-reviewed study, if you had peers.”
I made a mental note to look into whether there was a personality dial somewhere in her code that I could turn down by about forty percent. I’d been making that same mental note for three years. I had yet to act on it, which probably said more about me than I wanted to examine.
Sera’s mouth twitched. She didn’t look up.
I went back to the overnight intercepts from Kindt’s communication channels. Routine chatter, mostly. Scheduling noise, courier assignments, the operational hum of a network that moved children through the dark while the rest of the world slept.
Then Maude interrupted again, and this time her voice was different.
“I’ve decrypted a file from the internal communication channel between Kindt’s senior operatives. Video format. I’ve been working on their encryption architecture for the pasteleven days.” A pause. “I want to flag the content before you open it.”
“Why?”
“The content is… disturbing.”
That pause. I didn’t know if it was for effect or what, but I knew it wasn’t good. “What is it?”
“An internal message from Kindt to his organization. Recorded and distributed to his senior people within the last forty-eight hours.”
Sera turned from her workstation.
“Put it on the main screen,” I said.
The video opened on a room. Concrete walls, a single overhead light, a metal chair bolted to the floor. Nothing staged. The room looked like what it probably was: a utility space in a building nobody would ever look at twice.
A man was in the chair. Thirties, heavyset, wrists zip-tied to the armrests. His face was swollen on the left side and one eye had closed to a slit. He wasn’t struggling. He’d already learned what struggling cost.
Kindt stood beside the chair, close enough to rest his hand on the armrest. I’d seen photographs of him in intelligence files but never video. He was unremarkable. Wire-frame glasses, a polo shirt tucked into khakis. Thin hair combed flat. He could have walked through any grocery store in America without a single person remembering his face.
“You had a route, a schedule, and a vehicle.” Kindt’s voice was level. Conversational. “Just three things. I need you to explain to me which of those three things was too complicated for you to manage.”
The man in the chair tried to answer. Kindt listened for about four seconds, then stood up and broke two of the man’s fingers. Left hand, index and middle, bent backward with a quick efficient motion that looked practiced.
The sound was worse than the image. A wet snap followed by a scream that the man tried to swallow and couldn’t.
