"I know," Vance said.
"He left a rifle cartridge, Stuart. 5.56. That's military caliber."
"I know what caliber it is," Vance said. He was leaning against the passenger door with his arms crossed, his eyes moving around the dark parking lot with the residual professional habit of a man who checks his perimeter even when he knows nothing is there—except that something was there, and he did not know it. "The Cayman account is gone. $387,000 routed through 11 intermediaries in 14 seconds. I've had forensic accountants who couldn't do that in an afternoon."
He paused. "And the DoD block logged, which means the moment I ran his name, someone was notified. That was last night."
"So, we go back," Puit said. "Tonight, we go to the shop, we plant product, we arrest him. If it goes wrong, we stop."
"Puit," Vance said, "I'm just saying he walked through your alarm system, Conrad. He moved almost $400,000 in 14 seconds. He knew my name when he called me. Knew it specifically, not the other detective—my name, which I never gave him."
Vance turned to look at Puit directly, which he rarely did. "He is watching us right now. I would bet everything I have left on that."
In the SUV 2 miles away, Marcus said nothing.
He was watching the GPS dot on the tablet that corresponded to the tracker he had placed on Puit's Charger while Puit was inside the evidence building 3 hours ago.
And through the audio relay in his earpiece, he could hear both men with sufficient clarity to follow the conversation word for word.
And what he was hearing was exactly what he had expected to hear. Two men who have been operating with impunity for long enough to build a false confidence, now processing the experience of encountering something their false confidence had not prepared them for, and arriving inevitably at the decision that corrupt men always arrive at when they feel the ground shifting.
They would move to protect their largest asset.
"The storage unit," Vance said in the car on Candler Road. "We need to move the inventory. If he can find offshore accounts, he can find a storage facility."
"Call Dobs," Puit said. "We need him there."
"Calling Dobs already," Vance said.
In the SUV, Marcus keyed his earpiece quietly. "Ray, they're moving to Route 85. Get Torres on the line. Green light on phase 2."
Cole's voice came back immediate and steady. "Copy that, commander. Moving now."
Marcus put the SUV in drive.
The two detectives in the parking lot on Candler Road believed they were taking action. Believed they were exercising the last available control in a situation that had slipped.
And Marcus understood that belief because he had spent 20 years studying the decision-making of people under pressure. And the consistent finding was this: when you apply the right kind of pressure to the right kind of people at the right moment, they don't fight back. They run to their treasure, and their treasure leads you to everything else.
He turned out of the office complex and headed for Route 85.
He was born in Macon, Georgia in the summer of 1971, the second child of Dorothy Webb, who worked the morning shift at a textile plant, and the evening shift at a dry cleaners, and the occasional weekend shift at a diner on Mulberry Street, and who never once, in Marcus's memory of his childhood, complained about the weight of what she was carrying, which was a large and heavy weight by any reasonable accounting.
Two children, no husband after Marcus turned nine, a two-bedroom house that required more repairs than the budget allowed, and the specific daily labor of loving people in conditions that made love difficult to sustain.
His father left without a scene, which Marcus had come to understand as an adult was its own kind of damage—not the dramatic damage of a loud departure, but the slow, low-grade damage of an absence that never quite explained itself, that left a shape in the house that couldn't be named or addressed or recovered from in any direct way.
Dorothy Webb's answer to this, and to most of the other problems her life presented, was work and directness and the expectation that her children would find their own way through the world, and that finding it would require them to be honest about what it actually was.
Marcus enlisted at 19 in 1990 at the recruiter's office on Cherry Street in Macon because the alternatives available to him in that time and place were limited in ways that people who grew up elsewhere in different circumstances sometimes find difficult to understand.
And because his mother had made it clear without drama that whatever he did with his life, she expected it to be something. And the army was a path to something: a structure, a discipline, a direction that he could see and commit to. Even if he couldn't entirely predict where it would lead, it led further than he could have predicted.
The 75th Ranger Regiment came first, where he learned what discipline actually cost a body and what a unit of men who trusted each other completely was capable of, which was considerably more than he had understood before.
And then the Special Forces assessment and selection process, where the evaluators identified in him something that the infantry had used but not fully recognized—which was not physical ability, but analytical patience. The ability to hold a situation in his mind at multiple levels simultaneously, and to wait for the right point of intervention rather than forcing the first one available.
Delta came in 1997.