Calhoun crouched. He pulled the trim back farther with his bare hand, snapping the retaining clip. He followed the wire with one finger, his jaw set. "She said this was a federal device."
Sharp said nothing.
Calhoun stood. He looked at Nadia. He walked toward her until he was close enough that she would have had to step back to maintain standard conversational distance. She did not step back.
"Last chance," he said. "Tell me what's on the drive. Tell me who sent you. Tell me who runs this vehicle."
"The vehicle is registered in my name," Nadia said, "which your officer confirmed twenty-six minutes ago."
He grabbed the front of her blazer. Not a strike—a grip, both hands, fabric bunched at the lapels, the kind of contact that stops just short of the legal threshold he'd spent nineteen years calibrating. He held it for one second. Two.
Renata said from eight feet away, her voice absolutely level, "Release her. You are being recorded."
Calhoun released the blazer. He stepped back. He smoothed his polo shirt.
Priya Holden had gone very still.
Nadia looked down at her lapels. A small button had come loose. It lay on the asphalt at her feet. She looked at it. She looked at Calhoun. "I'd like to note that for the record as well," she said.
He turned away. He walked back to Sharp. He said something that Priya was close enough to partially hear—three words, maybe four, the last of which was "the report."
She looked at the road. She thought about six months ago. She thought about the memo that was retracted. She pressed her hand against the secondary device under her vest one more time: green, still transmitting.
The older woman in the church hat had been joined on the opposite shoulder by six other people. Two of them had been driving past and stopped when they saw others stopped. One was a teenager on a bicycle who had come from the direction of the neighborhood three blocks north. The contractor in the vest had called someone on his phone; whoever he called had told two more people, because there were now two more vehicles behind his truck. None of them knew who the women in the Rolls-Royce were. None of them needed to.