By the time Adrian came downstairs to the apartment's main room that morning, Thomas had two things waiting for him: a cup of black coffee and a secure tablet with a file on it that he suggested Adrian read before they spoke to anyone else.
Adrian read it standing up. He didn't sit down until he was finished. And when he sat, he was still for a long moment.
"You're certain it's him?" Adrian asked.
"The facial match is 87%. Camera angle and window glare limit the ceiling on that number. But I've worked alongside this person for years, and I'm certain." Thomas said it flatly; he didn't editorialize.
Adrian set the tablet down. "Who else has seen this?"
"No one."
"Keep it that way until we have more."
Thomas nodded. That had already been his plan.
Within forty-eight hours, Adrian had quietly engaged an outside firm, a private intelligence outfit called Meridian Group, run by a former NSA analyst named David Hartwell, who operated with a small team and a reputation for finding things that didn't want to be found. Adrian had used Meridian once before, three years ago, during a corporate espionage dispute that had never become public. Hartwell didn't ask unnecessary questions, and he didn't speak to anyone who wasn't in the room.
Hartwell and his team got to work alongside the official police investigation, which was moving at the pace of official investigations: carefully, procedurally, with appropriate documentation at every step. Adrian respected that process; he also knew it wasn't going to be fast enough. The two tracks ran parallel, separated by a careful wall, each feeding the other only what Adrian decided to pass through.
On the third day, Hartwell's team surfaced the financial thread.
It started, as these things often do, with something small and slightly wrong: a series of wire transfers, modest in size, moving between accounts in a pattern that was designed to look like vendor payments—a consulting invoice here, a software licensing renewal there. Each one individually unremarkable; together, when you laid them end to end and looked at the timing, they told a different story.
The transfers were routed through a chain of shell companies, three of them dissolved within sixty days of receiving funds. The trail passed through Delaware, then Cyprus, then a numbered account in Latvia. Hartwell's analyst had seen this architecture before: it was a cleaning mechanism, the financial equivalent of wiping fingerprints, but it had been built in a hurry. Hurried work left gaps.
The source of the funds, traced backward through the chain, linked to a holding entity that appeared twice in the Cole Dynamics vendor registry: once for a building maintenance contract, once for an IT services agreement. Both contracts had been signed internally, approved by someone with mid-level authorization, buried in the operational budget where no one was looking closely.
"Someone inside approved those contracts," Hartwell told Adrian during a briefing in a rented office space three blocks from the plaza, chosen specifically because it had no connection to Cole Dynamics. "That person either created the shell companies or was the intended recipient of the payments. We're working on establishing which."
Adrian turned that over carefully. "When were the contracts signed?"