One evening after Zuri had gone to bed, Renee sat in the living room with Patricia and said quietly and without drama, "How long does something like this usually take?"
Patricia, who had seen enough of these situations to know that honest answers were kinder than comfortable ones, said, "It depends on what they find, and how quickly they can act on it."
Renee looked at the locked door. "My niece saved a man's life," she said. "And now we're the ones locked in."
Patricia didn't have an answer for that. Some truths didn't need one.
On day six, Hartwell's team found the memo.
It was an internal document: three pages, marked confidential, distributed via the company's encrypted internal system eight days before the assassination attempt. The subject line was a routine notation about Adrian's quarterly travel schedule: departure times, vehicle arrangements, security protocols for each leg—standard operational planning.
The distribution list was short: five names, five executives at Cole Dynamics who had received that specific document in that specific form. Thomas pulled the list, cross-referenced it against access logs, and confirmed that no copies had been forwarded outside the original five recipients.
Whoever had provided the fake guards with Adrian's precise schedule, down to the vehicle and departure time, was one of those five people.
Thomas brought the list to Adrian that evening. Adrian read the five names slowly, the way you read something you don't want to misread. He knew all of them, of course he did: three had been with the company for more than seven years; one had hired the other two; they'd sat across from him in board meetings, and across from him at dinner tables, and across from him in every difficult moment the company had faced.
He handed the list back to Thomas without speaking.
"We don't move on any of them yet," Thomas said. "Hartwell wants forty-eight more hours to establish which of the five had contact with the shell company accounts."
"Forty-eight hours," Adrian confirmed.
He spent that night in a rented office space, working, because the apartment felt too small for what was inside his head. He thought about trust. Specifically, he thought about the ways it failed: not dramatically, not suddenly, but slowly and from the inside, the way something rots from the core outward while the surface looks fine. He'd been betrayed before—not at this scale, not with this kind of consequence, but the texture of it was familiar. He recognized the particular weight of finding out that someone who knew your schedule, your habits, your exits, and your entrances had been quietly building something against you.
What he couldn't settle was why. Greed was the obvious answer, and it was usually right. But the financial amounts he'd seen in the shell company trail were not the kind of money that moved a senior executive: they were operational payments—logistics, coordination. The real money was elsewhere, and it was pointing at something larger than any one of those five people.
He made a note for Hartwell: Follow the money past the five. There's a principal behind this.
He didn't know yet how right he was.