She looked up at him. Her eyes were wet, but her face was level. "Thank you for telling me yourself," she said.
"I told you I would."
She nodded. She looked back at the table. After a moment, she said very quietly, "I'm glad I stopped you."
"So am I," he said. "More than you know."
Hartwell's Estonia lead had been developing for several days in the background, fed by the combination of Thomas's tracking of Marcus's disappearance and intercepted communications from the same Baltic corridor network Zuri's accent observation had identified.
Marcus Hale had not simply fled; he had gone somewhere specific. The tracking trail, partial but directional, pointed toward Tallinn, Estonia's capital: not to a safe house or a temporary location, but to a specific set of meetings. Hartwell's contact in European intelligence confirmed that a private consortium had been gathering there over the past week: investors, intermediaries, and at least two individuals with documented connections to corporate intelligence operations in Northern Europe.
"Marcus isn't hiding," Hartwell said during the briefing. "He's meeting."
Adrian stared at the map on the screen. "Who with?"
"The consortium. The people who pressured him. We believe he may be attempting to renegotiate, to use the information he has as leverage."
Thomas, who had been listening from the doorway, said, "Or he went there to trade what he knows about our investigation for protection."
"Possibly both," Hartwell said. "He's not a stupid man. He knows we're close. He knows we have enough to act. If he's at this meeting, he either believes he can make a deal, or he has no other move."
Adrian looked at Thomas. "We can't let that consortium know what we have," Adrian said. "If they think we're closer than we are, they accelerate. If they think we're further than we are, we have time."
Hartwell nodded. "Which is why I want to propose something."
The plan that Hartwell laid out over the next two hours was precise in its simplicity: Adrian would issue a public statement, carefully worded, leaked through a channel that would appear credibly unintentional, suggesting that the security investigation had reached a dead end, that no internal wrongdoing had been substantiated, and that Adrian himself was considering stepping back from day-to-day operations temporarily to allow the acquisition process to complete without distraction. Not a resignation—a strategic retreat, publicly performed.
The message it would send to the consortium: their pressure was working, the campaign was succeeding; back off and wait for the acquisition to collapse on its own.
The message it would actually mean: the investigation was three moves ahead of where they thought, and the window they believed they were exploiting was closing from the other side.