Blood and Boardrooms

Chapter 2

Chapter Two: The Deal

I didn’t sleep.

Not because I was scared. Because my brain wouldn’t stop running, and thinking and sleeping have never worked well together for me. I lay on top of my covers in the Bureau’s rented apartment, staring at the ceiling, turning that note over and over in my head like a coin I couldn’t figure out.

I know why you’re really here.

I came up with four possibilities. One: he’d already seen through my cover before the interview, in which case Monday would end in handcuffs, not a desk job. Two: he suspected I was law enforcement but didn’t have proof yet, in which case Monday would be a test. Three: it was a mind game, something he said to every new hire just to see how they’d react.

Four: something else completely, something I didn’t have enough information to figure out yet.

I hated option four. Option four meant things I couldn’t control.

At 6 a.m. I got up, made coffee, and called my handler.

“Clean hire,” I told him. “I start Monday.”

“Good.” Davis sounded pleased in that flat, relieved way of his, relieved but too proud to say it. “Anything unusual?”

“Standard interview. He moves fast.”

I didn’t mention the note. I told myself I was waiting for more context first. That was mostly true.

Monday came. I arrived at 8:47, thirteen minutes early and was shown to my new office on the thirty-fifth floor. It wasn’t in the open accounting workspace with everyone else. It was a private room with glass walls and a clear direct view of the elevators.

Someone wanted me visible. I just couldn’t tell yet whether that was meant to protect me or put me on display.

I found my first red flag by 10 a.m.

Not in the files they’d given me, those were spotless, almost suspiciously organized, the kind of tidy that meant someone had cleaned up before I arrived. The red flag was in what wasn’t there.

A company called Veles Logistics appeared in three separate vendor contracts but had no matching internal records anywhere. No payroll. No overhead costs. No bank entries. It existed on paper as a supplier and nowhere else as an actual company.

I wrote it down and kept working.

At 11:15, my desk phone rang. Internal line.

“My office,” Nikolai said. “Now.”

No hello. No name. He just knew I’d pick up.

The thirty-eighth floor felt different the second time. Now I knew where the cameras were.

I also knew his assistant, Mara, a sharp-eyed woman in her forties who noticed everything. She had clocked my arrival time, my outfit, and probably my heart rate before I even made it through the door.

Nikolai was behind his desk when I walked in. This time he wasn’t facing the window. He was watching the door, which meant he’d been waiting for me.

“Close it,” he said.

I closed the door. I didn’t sit until he told me to, because the last thing I needed was to look eager.

“How was your morning?” he asked.

“Productive.”

“Find anything interesting?”

There it was. He wasn’t even trying to be subtle. I kept my face calm and looked him straight in the eye. “Your filing system is very thorough.”

Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile. “I’m going to be direct with you, Ms. Vasquez.”

“You said you preferred that.”

“I do.” He leaned back in his chair and studied me the same way he had during the interview, calm, focused, unreadable. Like he’d already made up his mind and was just double-checking he was right. “You’re not here to audit my books.”

The room went very quiet.

“I’m a forensic accountant,” I said. “Auditing books is exactly what I’m here to do.”

“You’re federal.” He said it the way someone might say you’re early, a plain fact, not an accusation. “I don’t know which agency. I don’t need to. What I need is for you to understand that I’m not your target.”

I said nothing. Silence isn’t a confession.

“Someone inside this organization has been moving money,” he said. “Not my money, skimming from operations I don’t personally run, rerouting contracts to fake companies, building a whole hidden structure inside mine that I can’t see clearly enough to take apart.” He paused. “Veles Logistics.”

I kept my face completely still.

“You found it in two hours,” he said. “My internal team has been sitting on those same files for four months.”

Silence stretched between us. Forty stories below, the city kept moving.

“What are you offering?” I asked.

“A trade.” He folded his hands on the desk. “You get full access to everything, six years of financials, communication records, vendor contracts, company structures across four countries.

You find me the person running the hidden operation inside my organization.”

He held my gaze. “In exchange, I give you documentation on a network that will be far more valuable to your agency than anything you’d ever build a case on me with. Names, accounts, transaction records. People your agency has been trying to find for years.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then you keep running your investigation, I keep not getting in your way, and in about three weeks your backup agent’s cover gets blown, by someone who isn’t me.” He tilted his head slightly. “I’d rather we be useful to each other.”

He knew about Davis’s backup. He’d known before I even walked in this morning.

I sat with that for a moment. The professional math was simple enough, if what he was offering was real, it was a bigger win than the Bureau had ever planned for. If it wasn’t, I was no worse off than before. I still had access. I still had time.

The other calculation, the one I wasn’t supposed to be making was messier. He was calm in a way that didn’t feel like an act.

He’d handed me a significant piece of information about his own exposure without even blinking. That meant either he was a very good liar, or he simply wasn’t afraid of me.

Neither one made this easier.

“I need forty-eight hours,” I said.

“You have them.” He picked up his phone, signaling we were done. “The Veles file will be on your desk when you get back downstairs. Call it a show of good faith.”

I stood and walked to the door.

“Ms. Vasquez.”

I stopped. I didn’t turn around this time.

“Whoever is running the secondary operation knows you’re here,” he said. “They were watching when you were hired. That means they already see you as a problem.”

I left without answering.

The Veles file was on my desk exactly where he said it would be. Thick. Tabbed. Someone had been putting it together for months.

I sat down, picked up my personal cell, not the Bureau phone, and typed a single message to a number I didn’t have saved in my contacts.

He already knows about you. How compromised are we?

Three minutes passed.

Then: Don’t trust anything he gives you.

I stared at the message.

The number belonged to Davis.

But Davis hadn’t sent it.