POV: Aria
Matteo was already on a call when I came back into the room with the monitors.
I had gone to find a bathroom, five minutes, and in those five minutes something had changed. He was standing with his back to the door and his voice was low and clipped and the man on the other end was doing most of the talking, which for Matteo meant the information was serious enough to listen to fully before responding. I could read that much without hearing a word.
I sat down and waited.
He finished the call. Stood still for a moment with the phone at his side. Then he turned and put it on the table and sat down across from me and his face was settled in a way that took work to maintain.
"Carver doesn't work alone," he said.
"You said that already."
"I said he runs logistics. I didn't tell you who he runs them for." He paused. "His name is Victor Moretti. No relation to the family. He took the name as a statement."
I looked at Matteo. "A statement to who."
"To everyone who already had a name in this city. Victor built from nothing, which he finds important, and he's been running operations in the northeast for eleven years without a single prosecution. The cases that reached him dissolved. The witnesses stopped cooperating. The investigators changed departments." He said all of that without inflection. Like a weather report.
"He knows about the shipment," I said. It wasn't a question.
"He knows it was taken from the warehouse," Matteo said. "My contact says he received the report an hour ago."
"What was his reaction."
Matteo picked up his phone and turned it to face me. It was a still from a camera feed, grainy, a man seated at a table with other people around him. The moment the photo was taken he was looking at something off frame and his mouth was slightly curved.
Not upset. Not alarmed. Interested.
That was a worse reaction than angry would have been. Angry meant you were surprised. That look meant you were expecting something to happen and something did.
"He smiled," I said.
"Coldly is how my contact described it," Matteo said. "Which means either the stolen shipment is not actually a problem for his operation, or it's useful to him in a way we don't understand yet."
I thought about the timeline being moved up. Four days. Victor receiving the report of the stolen shipment and smiling. Those two things in the same twelve-hour window were not a coincidence and I was tired of things that weren't coincidences.
"He moved the timeline because of the theft," I said. "Not despite it. The theft gave him a reason to accelerate."
Matteo looked at me.
"If someone stole from his supply chain, he has a legitimate operational reason to push the delivery forward before anything else is disrupted," I said. "Which means the job in four days isn't just a delivery. It's a demonstration. He's showing his buyer that the disruption was contained and the product is still moving."
"And he needs a driver," Matteo said.
"A driver his own people can't connect back to him. Someone who looks like they're running from a previous employer. Someone who became available at exactly the right time." I looked at the photo on his phone. "He's not going to find that suspicious."
"He's already looking," Matteo said.
He took the phone back and pulled up something else, a text exchange, and slid it across the table. The exchange was in Italian, but the name at the top of the thread was in Roman characters. Carver. And the message near the bottom, timestamped forty minutes ago, had one phrase in English sitting in the middle of the Italian.
The girl from the bridge.
I read it twice.
"He has someone who was at the bridge tonight," I said.
"He had someone at the bridge tonight," Matteo said. "We don't know how many people, we don't know if they were there to watch the delivery or to watch for exactly this, a driver getting separated from the DeLuca operation under difficult circumstances."
"Or someone told him to watch for me specifically."
"That is possible," Matteo said.
I put both hands on the table. Flat. Still.
The unknown number. Don't run. Don't fight. Just drive. Someone who needed me to stay close to Matteo. Someone who knew the route and the check-in protocol and that the bridge would be a problem. Someone who wanted me in a specific position at a specific time so that Victor Moretti's people would see exactly what they needed to see.
I had been moved around that board for two weeks and I still didn't know whose hand was on me.
"The message I received," I said. "The unknown number. You said you didn't know who sent it."
"I don't," he said.
"But you have a guess."
He was quiet for a beat too long.
"Matteo."
"There is someone I've been trying to identify inside Victor's operation for eight months," he said. "Someone who has passed me information twice before. Both times anonymously. Both times accurate."
"You think your contact inside Victor's operation sent me that message," I said.
"I think someone with access to Victor's communications and the DeLuca check-in protocol sent you a message that kept you in play and in position," he said. "Those two things together narrow it considerably."
I sat with that. Then: "Why didn't you tell me this before."
"Because I wasn't sure," he said. "And because telling you means you know there's a third party in this who I can't identify and can't control."
I looked at the photo of Victor on his phone. The cold half-smile. The look of someone watching a plan proceed.
"He's going to reach out to me," I said. "Through Carver. In the next forty-eight hours."
"Probably less," Matteo said.
My phone was on the table. It had been quiet since the bridge. I looked at it.
It lit up.
Unknown number. Not a message that time. A call.
I looked at Matteo.
He looked at the phone.
Neither of us reached for it.
It rang a second time, then a third, and on the fourth ring I picked it up and held it and the voice that came through was not the voice from the bridge and not Rael and not anyone I had heard before.
Low. Measured. A man who spoke like someone used to rooms going quiet when he entered them.
"I hear you need work," he said.