The shell company accounts had one degree of separation from a consultancy firm in Richmond, Virginia—a small operation that, on paper, provided corporate risk analysis services. It had three clients. It had been in business for four years. Its registered agent was a woman named Deborah who had no background in corporate risk, and whose name had been used, it appeared, without her full understanding of what she was signing.
The firm's founder and its only active principal was a man named Carl Whitmore. Carl Whitmore was Marcus Hale's brother-in-law.
The payments from the shell companies to Whitmore's consultancy had been made at three intervals over the past eight months: the first payment preceded the building maintenance contract by eleven days; the second preceded the IT services contract by eight days; the third—the largest—was dated six days before the assassination attempt.
Thomas laid the report on the desk in front of Adrian without a word. Adrian read it twice. He set it down. He stood up and walked to the window again, because standing at windows had become the thing he did when he needed his body to do something while his mind processed something enormous.
Twelve years.
He turned back to Thomas. "Where is he?"
"In the building. Meeting with his team."
"Don't move on him yet. Not here. Not today." He picked up the report again. "I want to be in the room when it happens. And I want everything in order before we walk in."
Thomas nodded. "And the convoy incident—the men who were stopped? Any link to Marcus directly?"
"We're still establishing that. But the network they're tied to has appeared twice in other documents that reference the same Estonian corridor operations. Hartwell believes it's all one structure."
Estonia. The word sat there quietly, meaning nothing to Adrian yet. In a few days, it would mean a great deal.
That same evening, Zuri was looking through the surveillance footage on the tablet Patricia had left unlocked—accidentally, though Zuri had her quiet suspicions about that. And she was not looking for anything specific, just looking the way she always looked at things.
She was watching the plaza footage from the morning of the assassination attempt. She'd asked to see it twice before and had been gently redirected; this time, there was no one to redirect her.
She watched the convoy arrive. She watched herself on the screen: small and quick, coming off the stone wall. She watched Adrian stop walking. She rewound to before that: she watched the approach from the building entrance, the way the security formation moved, the way the path from the revolving doors to the lead car was shaped.
She watched Marcus Hale, visible in the background, speaking to a colleague near the building entrance. She watched him glance just once, brief and casual, at the lead car, then at his watch, then toward the revolving doors.
Then, two minutes before Adrian appeared, she watched Marcus Hale take a single step to his left and say something to one of the official security team standing near the route: a small gesture, easy to miss. The security guard nodded and adjusted his position. And in doing so, the open corridor from the revolving doors to the lead car became three feet wider and more direct.