Page 15 of Hunt Me, Daddy

I stared at what I’d written.

The professional read was clean enough. Whoever this was had moved from monitoring the network to monitoring the person inside it. That was containment logic. This was someone deciding I was worth understanding before deciding what to do with me.

But surely, he had a next move. A warning, a recruitment, maybe even a threat, but he had done none of those things. He had been in the same digital space as my surveillance for days without announcing himself, without acting, without closing whatever gap existed between observation and intention.

That kind of patience was a personality trait that I couldn’t fully account for through the screen.

I didn’t like that I’d noticed it.

Then I added some more questions. Why not expose me? Why not strike? Why return? What does he want? The professional answer was information. The watcher wanted to know who else was inside Orlov infrastructure, what I had found, whether Iwas a threat, a tool, a liability, or competition. The professional answer did not explain the patience. Or the restraint. Or the unsettling sense that he was watching me more closely than the Orlov money trail.

I hated that my skin prickled at the thought.

I made the mistake of examining the prickle directly.

Fear had a specific address. It pointed at the door and saidrun. I knew what fear felt like; I had catalogued it and metabolized it often enough that it had stopped functioning as an emotion and started functioning as data.

This wasn’t that.

This was warmer. Located somewhere in the chest rather than the spine, which was not a place I trusted for reliable information, and absolutely not where I was sourcing any tactical decisions tonight.

I stood up from the desk faster than the situation required.

I crossed to the board and looked at Mikhail Orlov’s name pinned near the center. For weeks, he had been the monster in the middle of the map, the shadow behind the shells, the man whose network might, if I dug deep enough, thread back through time toward Daniel’s disappearance and subsequent murder. I had no evidence to confirm it, but I had a feeling he was the man that ordered it himself.

With a sigh, I returned to my desk and pulled the keyboard closer. Every stubborn, reckless part of me wanted to keep chasing the blank space where the Watcher should have been, but I didn’t.

I closed the file and went back to tracing the Orlov money trail, but my thoughts always seemed to go back to the ghost in the data.

That was the problem with ghosts. Once you knew they were there, you started looking for them in every shadow, every silence, every little shift at the edge of your vision. I could feel him now, not on my machines and not in my apartment, but somewhere in the dark of my investigation, patient and careful and far too interested in what I was doing.

He had seen enough to know I was dangerous.

I had seen enough to know he was worse.

CHAPTER 4

Ivan

In-person assessment was the logical next step.

That was the phrase I used because it sounded clean, professional, and only slightly dishonest.

What I did not know was how she moved through the world and for some reason, that mattered to me.

Digital behavior told me what a person chose when there was time to think. Physical behavior told me what they did before thought had a chance to interfere. Did she check reflections? Did she choose exits? Did she notice repetition? Did she carry anything pointy and sharp, anything illegal, anything useful? Did she hold herself like prey trying not to be prey, or like a woman who had decided long ago that fear was merely a nuisance with poor manners?

These were valid operational questions, but the most important one was whether she was reckless enough to get herself killedbefore Mikhail’s people even had the courtesy to find her properly.

Perfectly reasonable.

I wrote all of that down in the assessment file on early Tuesday morning because written justification tended to look more respectable than the thing it was covering.

Then I stared at her address on the screen. The room around me was quiet, lit only by the glow of several computers and the cold blue line of the server cabinet behind glass. I had been awake too long, but that wasn’t unusual. Sleep was useful, not sacred. I respected it only when it served a purpose, and lately my purposes had been crowded out by a woman in a fourth-floor apartment with too many tripwires and not enough survival instinct.

I could have sent my own men.

That would have been the normal procedure. Distance was useful. Delegation preserved objectivity. A good tail could follow a woman from her building to a café and give me a written report by lunchtime. A great tail could do it without her noticing.