Chapter 27 Twenty seven

Chapter 27 Twenty seven
Dax was already moving before I finished the sentence.

I heard her call Reaper on a second phone while still on with me, her voice splitting into two simultaneous conversations with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned to manage multiple crises without putting either down.

"Reaper Murphy's Garage on State Street. Now. Don't call ahead." Then back to me: "How certain are you."

"Certain enough to call you," I said. "The timing fits. Four months ago, one month before Cole showed up at the Steel Riders. Viper raced the airstrip circuit three times in the two months before Ghost Rider's first appearance. Finished mid-pack every time. He would have had access to the bikes in the staging area between heats."

"That's when the clasp was scored."

"Staging area, forty minutes between heats, everyone focused on their own machines." I was already moving toward the garage door. "He had the access and the time and he knew my equipment because he'd been watching Ghost Rider specifically not randomly. Someone told him to watch."

"Kane," Dax said.

"Or Dutch through Kane. Either way Cole didn't come to the Steel Riders by accident and he didn't get placed in this compound by accident." I pushed through the garage door into the yard. "Stone vouched for him. Which means either Stone was deceived or "

"Stone wasn't deceived," Dax said immediately, with a certainty that stopped me mid-stride. "I know Stone. She doesn't get deceived."

"Then Stone knows something about Cole that she hasn't told us."

A pause. "I'll call her. Keep moving toward the gate."

I was at the compound gate when Reaper's bike cleared the exit at a speed that suggested he hadn't needed much convincing about urgency. I watched his taillight disappear around the first corner and stood at the gate with my phone and the specific tight feeling in my chest that came when a situation was moving faster than the information available to manage it.

My phone buzzed. Rivera.

"I just got off with Dax," Rivera said. "Cole full name Cole Merritt was flagged in our initial background check as having racing circuit connections in this region going back eighteen months. It was assessed as consistent with his Steel Riders cover story and dismissed." Her voice had the quality of someone who had just found an error they'd made and was processing it without the luxury of time to be properly frustrated by it. "It wasn't consistent with the cover story. It predated the cover story by six months."

"He was already in Kane's network before Stone placed him," I said.

"Stone placed a Kane asset thinking she was placing her own," Rivera said. "Which means someone fed Stone a fabricated background on Cole that was good enough to pass her vetting." A pause. "That's a sophisticated operation. That's not something Kane put together in response to Dax's investigation. That was built in advance."

"How far in advance."

"Based on the timeline at least a year before the airstrip race." Her voice was flat and precise. "Zed, this means Cole has been inside the compound for three weeks with full access. Everything we thought was secure "

"The air-gapped laptop," I said.

"Was in a locked office with a combination lock that Cole would have had opportunity to observe at least twice based on the movement logs." Rivera paused. "We need to know what he's copied and what he's communicated."

My phone buzzed with Reaper's number. I switched over.

"Murphy's Garage," Reaper said. "Murphy is here. He's fine. Cole's gone Murphy says he left twenty minutes ago, said he had an errand and would be back." A pause. "Murphy didn't know anything was wrong. Cole was helping him with a carburetor rebuild all morning, apparently very competent, very pleasant."

"Of course he was," I said.

"Gravel is on his way back. I'm staying with Murphy until this is resolved." Another pause, shorter. "Reaper. There's something else."

The quality of his voice had changed not alarmed, but carefully controlled in the way Reaper got careful when the information he was holding was significant.

"Murphy found something this morning," Reaper said. "Before Cole left. He didn't think anything of it at the time but when I described what we were looking for he went quiet." A pause. "There's a tracking device under Murphy's desk. Small, magnetic-backed. Murphy says Cole spent ten minutes under there yesterday fixing a cable run."

I stood at the compound gate in the afternoon light and thought about Cole in Murphy's Garage for three weeks, pleasant and competent and completely invisible, and about Murphy sitting at his desk with a tracker under it reporting his location and movements to someone who had good reasons to want that information.

"Pull it and bring it to Rivera," I said. "Don't destroy it."

I switched back to Rivera and told her. She was already typing before I finished.

"We're running Cole's known associates through the database now," she said. "I want him found in the next two hours. He knows his cover is blown he left Murphy's Garage voluntarily which means he's been monitoring communications and he knows we've made him."

"He's been monitoring communications," I said slowly.

"Almost certainly."

"Then he knows about Stone's circuit. He knows about my preparation for the final. He knows about the outside apex option." I looked at the circuit map I still had folded in my pocket. "Everything I've been building for five weeks."

Rivera was quiet for two seconds. "Does that change your approach for the final?"

I thought about Colt's lap data. About the outside apex. About an asset who had been inside the compound for three weeks feeding information to a man currently making his way to a property twenty kilometers from the final circuit.

"No," I said. "It doesn't change my approach."

"Why not."

"Because knowing something is possible and knowing how to execute it at race speed are different things," I said. "Colt can know about the outside apex option. That doesn't mean he can run it."

A pause. "You're certain."

I thought about eleven days of footage. About the way Colt rode perfectly, efficiently, with the precision of someone who had trained one method until it was automatic. About what happened to automatic responses under race pressure when the circuit demanded something different.

"He's been running the middle apex for eleven days," I said. "Muscle memory runs deeper than intelligence at a hundred and thirty kilometers per hour."

Rivera processed that. "Find Cole first," she said. "Everything else after."

She ended the call and I went back through the compound gate and found Dax in the yard with her phone and her controlled urgency and the expression of a woman managing six things simultaneously and not dropping any of them.

She looked at me. "Stone's circuit tonight is cancelled."

"I know."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." I looked at the garage. "I've run it enough. I know what I need to know." I paused. "Did you reach Stone?"

Dax's jaw tightened fractionally the tell she had that she didn't know she had, the one that appeared when information was worse than she'd prepared for.

"Stone is the one who told me to cancel tonight," she said. "She found something on her circuit's camera system from Cole's last access." She held out her phone.

The footage was from Stone's fixed camera on the longest straight the same angle the Colt footage had come from. But this clip was different. This was Cole, alone on the circuit three nights ago, on a bike I recognized as one of the Steel Riders' standard machines.

He wasn't testing setups. He wasn't learning the circuit.

He was filming it. Holding a small camera at handlebar height, running the entire circuit at race speed, creating a complete visual record of every corner, every surface change, every marshal position and camera blind spot.

For Colt.

Who had changed his motel the same morning Kane escaped federal custody.

Who was somewhere in Coldwater right now with a complete visual guide to a circuit he'd never physically ridden.

I handed the phone back to Dax.

"How long until the final," I said.

"Four weeks and three days."

I looked at the garage. At the Ducati inside it. At the circuit map in my pocket and the five weeks of preparation behind me and the thing that had just shifted underneath all of it.

"Then we have four weeks and three days to find Cole," I said, "locate Kane, and figure out what Colt does when his inside information turns out to be four weeks old."

Dax looked at me with the look she reserved for things that were simultaneously problems and solutions.

"Or," she said, "we give Cole something new to film."