POV: Aria
The answer sat in the room for a long time before either of us did anything about it.
I looked at him across the table and thought about eight months of security footage and a recruitment dressed up as a job offer and a parking structure full of guns that were apparently for show. I thought about the girl in the crate, who was somewhere safe then, or supposed to be, in a placement Matteo had arranged and that I had no way to verify myself. I thought about the message from the unknown number that still hadn't sent another word since the bridge.
Someone out there knew more about that situation than I did. Possibly more than Matteo did. And I had three weeks before a job that had been designed around me started whether I agreed to it or not.
"If I do this," I said, "my crew doesn't know."
"They'll need to believe you've separated from me."
"That's not what I said. My crew doesn't know I'm working for you while I'm pretending to run from you. That's not a performance I can maintain with people who know me."
He considered that. "That puts them at risk."
"They're already at risk," I said. "At least this way they're not carrying information that gets them killed if someone decides to ask for it."
He was quiet. Then: "Agreed."
I pulled out the chair across from him and sat, which was the first time I'd sat since we came up there, and I watched him register it without making anything of it. We were at the same level then. That wasn't an accident and he knew it and I knew it and neither of us said anything about it.
"Tell me about the person higher than Rael," I said.
"His name is Carver," he said. "American. Runs logistics for four separate operations across the eastern seaboard, none of which know about the others. He uses existing infrastructure, other people's networks, other people's contacts, so that if any one piece gets pulled the rest stays clean."
"He used yours," I said.
"For two years before I finally identified him," he said. "He's been moving product through routes my people set up and taking a cut I didn't know existed."
"What kind of product."
He looked at me. Not a pause, a decision about how much to give.
"The girl in the crate was one type," he said.
I looked at the table. I had a rule about that specific type of cargo and the rule was absolute and it had never been tested because I had never been in a room where someone admitted to it without flinching, and Matteo was not flinching, and the thing I was trying to decide was whether that meant he was comfortable with it or whether it meant he had been living with the weight of knowing about it for long enough that it had stopped showing on his face.
"You've known he was moving people," I said.
"I've known for six months," he said. "Building the case took time. Moving on him without enough evidence means he walks and rebuilds somewhere else."
"Six months," I said.
"Yes."
I sat with that. I let it be exactly as heavy as it was. Six months of knowing and building a case and not stopping it, which was the kind of decision that looked like strategy from one angle and looked like something else entirely from another. I didn't say that out loud. I filed it where I filed the things that mattered and hadn't resolved yet.
"What does he think I'm carrying for him in three weeks," I said.
That was where Matteo leaned back slightly. Just one adjustment, his shoulders dropping a degree, a man preparing to say something true.
"He'll tell you it's documents," he said. "Financial records. The kind that could compromise multiple people if they surfaced in the wrong hands. High value, low physical risk, easy to move."
"But."
"But what he's actually moving is components," he said. "Parts. Packaged to look like industrial equipment, spread across three vehicles. Individually useless. Together they assemble into something that his buyer in the northeast has been waiting eighteen months for."
I looked at him. "What kind of something."
He held my gaze.
"The kind that ends conversations," he said. "Permanently. And at scale."
The table between us had not changed. The room had not changed. But something in the air of it had shifted and I felt it the way you felt a temperature drop before you understood why.
"Weapons," I said.
"Modified weapons," he said. "The kind that aren't legal anywhere and that his buyer intends to use within sixty days of delivery."
I put both hands flat on the table. Not a dramatic gesture, just something to do with them while my brain ran the full numbers on what I had just been asked to put my hands on and drive through a city full of people.
"You want me to transport weapons to a buyer," I said. "As a way of getting close enough to identify Carver and his network."
"I want you to transport what Carver believes is his regular cargo," he said. "The actual cases will be substituted before they reach you. What you'll be moving is tracking equipment and documentation. But everyone watching, including Carver's people, will believe it's the real shipment."
"And if something goes wrong."
"Then the cover holds and we pull you out."
"You pull me out," I said. "You. Personally."
Something in him settled. "Yes," he said. "Personally."
I didn't know what to do with that word in his mouth. I recognised that I should have been focusing on the logistics of what he was describing and instead I was noticing how he said it, the weight he put on it, like a thing he meant precisely and not generally.
I didn't look at that. I looked at the monitors.
"There's something you're not telling me," I said.
He stood up, which was not a yes or a no, just a movement, and he walked to the monitors and pulled up a new feed and pointed.
I stood and looked at the screen.
It was a warehouse camera, current timestamp, and in the frame there were crates being loaded, a dozen of them, and on the side of each one I could see the chain symbol from the first warehouse pressed clearly into the wood.
"Carver already started moving," Matteo said quietly. "He moved the timeline up. The job isn't in three weeks."
He turned and looked at me.
"It's in four days."