His Bite Stole My Tomorrow

The Aldergate Name

Marsh picked a diner three subway stops from the office, small and half empty, laminated menus and a bell over the door that hadn't worked in years. Marlowe texted Micah the address before she went in, a habit she hadn't had before last night and now couldn't quite talk herself out of.

Meeting Marsh here. Should take twenty minutes.

I'll know if it takes longer than that. His reply came back almost instantly. Not because I'm watching you. Because I'll be counting, and I won't be able to stop myself from counting.

She read it twice before pocketing the phone, unsettled by how much steadier it made her feel walking into a diner to meet a man who'd sounded terrified on the phone the night before.

Marlowe spotted Marsh in the back booth before he saw her, hunched over black coffee he wasn't drinking, glancing at the door every few seconds like a man counting down to something.

"You look terrible," she said, sliding into the seat across from him.

"I feel worse than I look, which should tell you something." He kept his voice low, pitched under the clatter of the kitchen behind them. "I sealed those files because I was told to. Not asked. Told. Someone above me, someone I've never met in person in eleven years at this firm, sent the order through a channel that doesn't officially exist."

"Whose order."

"I don't have a name. I have a phrase. 'The Aldergate directive.' It's come through twice before in my career, both times attached to claims that didn't add up, both times followed by the file disappearing entirely from the system within a week. I ignored it those two times because the amounts were small and nobody was digging. You started digging."

Marlowe kept her hands still on the table, though her pulse had picked up in a way she recognized now, the same feeling she'd had in the elevator right before the lights dimmed. "Digging into what, exactly. Say it plainly, DeWitt. I've had enough half answers for one week."

"Into things that shouldn't exist and apparently do." He pulled a folded slip of paper from his jacket pocket and slid it across the table rather than saying the rest out loud. "That's a name. Aldergate isn't a person, it's a private trust, decades old, and it funds exactly one kind of research. The kind that goes looking for people like the one you visited last night. I don't know how they found out you were there so fast. I don't know how they knew to call me within the hour. But they did, and I've spent eleven years assuming that phrase was somebody's idea of corporate cover for embezzlement. I don't think that anymore."

She unfolded the paper. A single name, handwritten, no explanation beneath it. Marsh's handwriting had a slight tremor to it she hadn't seen on any memo he'd ever sent her, small and rushed, the writing of someone who'd copied something down quickly and didn't want it lingering on his desk long enough to be found.

Elva Rourke, Aldergate, founding trustee.

The coffee in front of her went cold without her touching it, another small thing moving faster than she could keep pace with. "You're telling me the woman funding whatever this trust is has a personal history with the man I audited last night."

"I'm telling you I found her name buried three layers deep in a filing nobody was supposed to be able to trace back to her, and I found it an hour after sealing your files on direct order from someone using a phrase connected to her trust. Draw your own conclusion. I already drew mine, and that's why I told you not to come into the office."

"Why give me this at all? You could have stayed quiet and kept your job."

"Because the last time I looked the other way on an Aldergate directive, a woman on my own team asked too many questions about a different closed file and resigned two months later, healthy as anything, and died in a car accident before she ever started her new job." Marsh's hand shook slightly around his mug. "I've told myself for years that was a coincidence. I don't get to tell myself that anymore, not after last night, and I'd rather live with having warned you than live with pretending I hadn't noticed the pattern."

Marlowe folded the paper carefully and slid it into her coat pocket, next to her phone, which had stayed silent all morning in a way that felt less like relief and more like a held breath. "What do you need from me?"

"Nothing. I need you to disappear from this for a while, actually, if you're smart. Take leave. Let someone else close the file, or don't close it at all. I've done what I can to slow this down on my end, but I'm not equipped for whatever's actually happening here, and neither are you." He rubbed at his jaw, a nervous habit she'd noticed in board meetings years ago and never once seen this bad. "I have a wife and a kid in second grade. I'm not built for whatever this is, Marlowe. You might be. I'm not."

"I'm not walking away from six weeks of work because a corporate ghost sent you a scary phrase."

"Then at least stop trusting the man you audited last night to be the only threat in this story." Marsh glanced toward the door again, faster this time, longer. "Whatever he is, he's not the one who's been closing files and burying attorneys for eleven years. That's Aldergate. That's her. And if she already knows your name, she's not going to wait for you to finish deciding whether he's dangerous before she decides what to do about you."

The bell over the door gave its broken half chime as it opened, and Marsh's whole body went rigid, coffee forgotten, eyes fixed past Marlowe's shoulder toward the entrance.

"Don't turn around," he said, quiet and fast. "Walk out the back, past the kitchen, now."

"DeWitt, what is going on," she started, but he was already talking over her.

"Now, Marlowe."

She was on her feet and moving before she'd fully processed the order, some old instinct from years of reading risk assessments telling her that a man who never used her first name was suddenly using it now, and that alone meant something had already gone wrong. She pushed through the kitchen door without looking back, past a cook who barely glanced up, out into an alley smelling of old grease and morning rain.

She waited there four minutes, then six, expecting Marsh to follow.

He never did.

When she finally circled back around to the diner's front window, his booth sat empty, his coffee mug still full, his coat still draped over the seat where he'd left it. Two men in dark coats stood near the register speaking quietly to the waitress, and Marlowe stepped back from the glass before either of them could turn and find her watching.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. The unknown number again.

You should have listened when he told you to disappear.