Blood and Boardrooms

Chapter 3

Chapter Three: First Access

Someone had Davis’s number.

I sat with that for exactly four minutes, long enough to think it through, not long enough to fall apart.

Either Davis’s phone had been hacked, which meant there was a leak somewhere above my level inside the Bureau.

Or Davis himself had sent it from a second phone, testing me to see if I’d report it. Or there was a third player I hadn’t considered yet; someone with enough reach to intercept internal messages and enough nerve to actually use them.

All three options were bad. The third one was the worst.

I deleted the message, closed the Veles file, and spent the rest of the afternoon doing exactly what my cover required, reviewing vendor contracts, flagging missing documents, building the kind of paper trail that would make me look like a very good accountant and nothing more.

At 5:30 I left the building, walked four blocks north, and called Davis from a payphone that only still existed because that block hadn’t been renovated since 2019.

“Someone used your number,” I said when he picked up.

A pause. “Say that again.”

“Forty-eight minutes ago. My personal cell. Told me not to trust anything Morozov gives me.” I kept my voice flat. “Did you send it?”

“No.” Fast and hard. “Lena, I haven’t contacted that number in six weeks. Protocol.”

“Then we have a problem.”

Another pause, longer this time. “Come in tonight. Full debrief.”

“I can’t.” He had given me forty-eight hours and I needed to use every one of them. I watched a cab cut across three lanes without signaling. “Run a trace on the number. Find out how deep the leak goes before I go back in there.”

I hung up before he could tell me not to.

By 7 a.m. I was back at my desk.

The floor was quiet at that hour, just the overnight security staff doing their rounds and the low hum of a building that never fully shut down. I badged in, rode the elevator to thirty-five, and opened the Veles file properly this time. No interruptions. No performance. Just the work.

What I found in the first hour was a setup so clean it was almost elegant.

Veles Logistics appeared as a vendor across eleven separate Morozov subsidiaries.

Each contract had a different contact name, all untraceable, all registered to addresses that stopped existing about eighteen months after the companies were set up.

The billing amounts were steady enough to avoid triggering any pattern alerts, but varied enough to slip past automated systems. Someone who knew exactly how Morozov’s compliance systems worked had built this to live right in the blind spots.

This wasn’t casual theft. This was architecture.

I pulled the payment dates and matched them against Morozov’s internal calendar, executive travel, board meetings, audits. Every single Veles invoice had been processed during a window when senior oversight was at its lowest. Whoever built this had access to Morozov’s scheduling.

I was writing up my early findings when the door opened.

I didn’t look up. “This floor is restricted.”

“To everyone except me.”

Nikolai walked in without knocking, which, in his own building, wasn’t technically against anything. He stopped on the other side of my desk and looked at what was spread across it: the Veles file broken into sections, my handwritten timeline running along the top of a legal pad, three subsidiary contracts laid out side by side.

He was quiet for a moment.

“You’ve been here since seven,” he said.

“You have cameras.”

“I have cameras.” He didn’t apologize for it. He pulled the chair from across the desk and sat down without asking, which should have felt arrogant and somehow didn’t. He looked at my legal pad. “What’s the timeline?”

“The invoices line up with low-oversight windows. Board travel, audit periods, executive offsite schedules.” I kept my voice steady. “Whoever built this has access to your internal calendar at a senior level. That narrows your suspect list to thirty people inside this organization. At most.”

He went very still. “How long did that take you?”

“About fifty minutes.”

Something shifted in his face. Not quite surprise, more like a confirmation of something he’d already suspected but hadn’t wanted to say out loud.

“My compliance team has been working on this for four months,” he said.

“Your compliance team was looking for accounting errors. This isn’t an error.” I turned the legal pad so he could see my notes. “It’s a system.

Someone built it on purpose and kept it running for at least three years. You don’t find that by looking for mistakes. You find it by understanding the thinking behind the structure.”

He studied the page. I studied him.

Up close, without a desk between us as a buffer, Nikolai Morozov was harder to read. In the interview he’d been controlled to the point of being completely closed off.

Now there was something sharper in his focus, the same look I recognized from my own team when a case cracked open and the pieces started falling into place. He wasn’t just listening. He was building something in his head.

“Thirty people,” he said.

“Give or take. Once I cross-reference calendar access permissions with the payment windows, I can probably get it down to eight or ten by end of day.”

He looked up from the pad. “You’re not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Someone slower.” He held my gaze a beat longer than necessary, like he was still making up his mind about something.

“I haven’t decided to trust you yet either,” I said. “I’m just good at working inside uncertainty.”

The corner of his mouth shifted slightly. Not quite a smile, more like an acknowledgment. He stood, moved the chair back to its exact spot, and picked up one of the subsidiary contracts from my desk. Read it for about thirty seconds. Set it back down.

“The calendar access,” he said. “It’s not one shared system. It’s tiered, different people see different levels of information.

For someone to know every low-oversight window across all subsidiaries, they’d need to pull from multiple access levels.”

I hadn’t gotten there yet. But he was right. “Which means either one person with unusually broad system access, or two people working together.”

“Yes.”

We looked at each other across the desk.

“That changes the pool,” I said.

“It does.”

I pulled my legal pad closer and made a note.

When I looked up he was still standing there, watching me write. His expression was the same unreadable thing it had been from the start, like he was following a thread I couldn’t see.

“You should know,” he said, “I’ve already identified one of them.”

I set my pen down. “Then why do you need me?”

“Because the one I’ve identified isn’t the one running it.” He moved toward the door. “And the one running it knows I’m getting close.”

He stopped with his hand on the door frame.

“Someone fired a shot through my window last Tuesday,” he said. “The glass is reinforced, it didn’t break through. But the angle was wrong for an outside shooter.”

I went still.

“It came from inside the building,” he said. “Thirty-fifth floor.”

He left.

I looked at my desk. At the chair I was sitting in.

At the window directly behind me.