Chapter 11
Nora was already reaching for her coat when I said we needed to split up.
“No,” she said.
“I’m not asking you to stay behind forever. Just until we know the street’s clear.”
“You don’t know the street’s clear. That’s why you want me hidden.” She looked at my bandaged leg, then met my eyes. “I’m going to the office.”
Jake shifted beside the door. The Meridian guards still watched us through the glass, their faces calm enough to be practiced. One of them had stopped pretending to study his phone.
“Then we go together,” I said. “Nobody gets left alone.”
Charles’s phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen, and the color drained from his face.
“My board chair,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for him to call back.”
“Put it on speaker,” Nora said.
Charles looked at her, then tapped the screen. “I’m here.”
A clipped voice answered. “Where are you?”
“Not in a position to discuss that. Is Cross in contact with the board?”
Silence stretched for a beat.
“Charles, don’t do this over the phone.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I can give you.”
Charles gripped the phone so hard his knuckles whitened. “He’s threatened to destroy the acquisition records unless you cooperate, hasn’t he?”
The pause told us enough.
“He said those files could expose every party connected to the deal,” the board chair finally replied. “He said we had until tonight to show we were aligned.”
“Aligned with what? Destroying evidence?”
“Preserving the company.”
Charles let out a short, joyless laugh. “That’s what we’re calling it now?”
The call ended without a goodbye. For a moment he stared at the dark screen, his reflection broken across it.
“They want the acquisition to go through clean,” he said. “And they’re willing to let Cross bury anything that makes it dirty.”
Nora pulled on her coat. “Then don’t let them.”
“I won’t,” Charles said. This time there was no executive polish in his voice. “I just wish I’d figured out what I was buying before people got hurt.”
A muted knock sounded somewhere beyond the office door. Jake raised one hand, and we went quiet. Through the glass, one guard had moved out of sight. The other stood near the conference room, his face angled toward us.
“Service stairwell,” Jake whispered. “Now.”
We slipped through a rear door into a narrow corridor that smelled of floor cleaner and damp concrete. My left leg complained with every step. I kept my weight off it as much as I could, but pain had a way of announcing itself whether invited or not.
At the bottom of the stairs, Ryan waited beside a gray sedan, its engine running. His gaze flicked over us, then past us to the street.
“White van,” he said. “Two men inside, parked across the service entrance. It’s been there since before you came down.”
“A surveillance car?” Jake asked.
“Maybe. Or maybe the car they want us to notice.” Ryan pointed toward the next block. “There’s a service road behind the loading docks. We take it, stay off the main street, and come in from the north.”
Nora looked toward the van. “Could they have Gabriel in there?”
“Could be,” Ryan said. “Could be a decoy meant to pull us away from the office.”
She didn’t look reassured. She looked as if she were measuring the choices for herself.
“Office first,” she said. “If they’re watching the front, we don’t give them the route they expect.”
Ryan gave one brief nod. “Then follow me.”
The service road ran between the backs of shuttered businesses and a chain-link fence topped with coils of wire. The evening air carried the sour smell of wet pavement and old cooking grease. We walked close to the wall, pausing whenever tires hissed across the street beyond the loading bays.
At the corner, Ryan held up a fist. Through a gap between buildings, I saw a dark SUV parked near the office entrance. Another man stood beneath the awning, looking down the block. Not the same vehicle from the diner, but the same patient stillness.
Nora moved closer to the gap.
“Don’t,” I whispered.
She looked at me. “I’m not going to run up to him. I’m trying to see whether he’s watching the door or the road.”
“He’s watching both,” Ryan murmured.
“Then he expects us to come from the street.” Nora pulled back. “We take the loading entrance.”
It was her call. We followed.
The old Meridian office had once been a glass-and-brick showpiece. Now most of its windows were dark, and the sign above the front doors had been removed, leaving a cleaner rectangle on the brick where the letters used to be. A narrow loading entrance stood half-hidden behind a rusted metal enclosure.
The door wasn’t locked.
Jake tested it, then eased it open. The smell inside hit first: dust, cold tobacco, and something damp trapped in the walls. We stepped into a service hall where plastic sheeting hung from one ceiling pipe, stirring in the draft.
Nora found the coat on a chair in the first open room.
She stopped so abruptly I nearly ran into her. It was a dark wool coat, one sleeve turned inside out. She touched the cuff but didn’t lift it.
“That’s his,” she said.
“How can you tell?” Charles asked softly.
“The tear near the button. He caught it on a nail years ago and kept wearing it.” She swallowed. “He said the coat had earned the right to be ugly.”
Jake checked the corridor beyond the room. “No one here.”
Nora’s fingers closed around the sleeve. She looked at the empty chair, then at the open doorway behind it. “He was here.”
The words came out too certain for what we knew. I let them stand anyway.
A speaker crackled from somewhere deeper in the office.
“Mercer.”
The voice was low and rough, close enough to sound like it came from the next room.
I stepped toward it. “Cross?”
A burst of static answered. Then a man’s voice—Gabriel’s, or a voice built carefully from it.
“I changed the route. Mercer never knew. I gave Cross what he needed, and the team paid for it.”
Nora went rigid.
The voice continued. “Daniel Mercer can tell them the truth. He won’t. He was the one who—”
A sharp pop cut through the sentence. The next words came slightly louder, the rhythm wrong.
“—approved the route. He knew what would happen.”
Nobody spoke.
The accusation hung in the room, made more convincing by the name it used and less convincing by the seam where the sound broke.
Nora stared at the speaker grille. “That isn’t how Dad talks.”
“Is the voice his?” I asked.
“Yes.” Her jaw tightened. “But he doesn’t say my name like a stranger’s name. And he wouldn’t call you Daniel Mercer unless he was trying to make sure someone understood who he meant.”
“That could be what they want us to hear,” Charles said.
Nora reached for the speaker cabinet, but Jake caught her wrist gently.
“Don’t touch it,” he said. “We don’t know what else is in there.”
She pulled free, anger flashing through her fear. “I’m not going to mistake a machine for my father.”
The speaker hissed. A faint click came from somewhere behind us.
May you like
Then Gabriel’s voice filled the room again—closer this time, stripped of the hard, false certainty.
“Nora-girl,” he whispered, using the childhood nickname she had never heard from anyone else. “Don’t come in. Please. Whatever you hear, don’t come in.”
