Blood and Boardrooms

Chapter 4

Chapter Four: Locked In

I moved my chair.

Not dramatically, just slid it three feet to the left, out of the direct line of the window, and kept working.

If someone in this building had already taken a shot at Nikolai from this floor, sitting in an exposed spot was a rookie mistake I couldn’t afford.

The move also told me something about myself that I quietly filed away: my first instinct hadn’t been to leave. It had been to reposition.

That was worth thinking about later.

I spent the next four hours pulling calendar access logs.

Nikolai had been right about the tiered system. It was set up in three levels, and getting full visibility across all subsidiaries required either administrator credentials or manually piecing together information from at least two separate access points.

I matched every Veles payment window against the login records for both.

By 1 p.m. I had seven names.

By 2 p.m, after cutting three who had solid alibis, travel records, keycard data, and one who had been on medical leave during two of the key windows, I was down to four.

I was staring at those four names when my office door opened without a knock.

It wasn’t Nikolai this time.

The man who walked in didn’t look like someone who spent his days behind a desk. He was in his mid-forties, short hair, with a scar running along his jaw that looked like it had healed on its own without any medical help. His jacket didn’t do much to hide the shoulder holster underneath.

Head of security. Gregor Malin. I’d read his file.

“Ms. Vasquez.” He didn’t step further into the room, just filled the doorway and looked at me with the flat, calculating stare of someone deciding how much trouble I was going to be.

“Mr. Morozov has asked that you move to the private floors for the rest of your time here.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Asked.”

“Move,” he said, without changing the word.

“I have an office.”

“Your office on the thirty-fifth floor has a window visible from the eastern stairwell.” He glanced at the window, then back at me. “The private floors are more secure.”

“Or less convenient for whoever wants access to my work.”

Something shifted in his expression, calculation, maybe, or a quick reassessment. “Mr. Morozov thought you might say something like that. He told me to tell you this isn’t optional.”

I stood up, stacked my files, and picked up my legal pad. Not because I agreed. Because arguing with Gregor Malin in a doorway wasn’t the battle I was picking today.

“Lead the way,” I said.

The private floors started at thirty-nine, one above Nikolai’s office, reached by a separate elevator that needed a keycard I hadn’t been given until Gregor handed me one in the hallway without a word.

The space up here was different. Less corporate, more functional, built for actual work rather than appearances. A long table, multiple screens, a server rack behind a glass partition. A smaller room off to the side with its own door.

“The room is yours while you’re on site,” Gregor said.

“I’m not staying here overnight.”

“That’s your choice.” His tone made it clear he thought it was the wrong one. “You’ll need your access card to use the elevator between these floors and the lobby. It logs every entry and exit.” He paused. “Mr. Morozov will know when you leave.”

“Mr. Morozov will know regardless,” I said. “He has cameras.”

Gregor looked at me for a moment. Then he left.

I set my files on the work table and stood in the middle of the room, taking an honest look at my situation.

I was on a secured floor where every movement was logged, inside a building owned by the man I was investigating. Somewhere in this organization was a shooter who already knew I was here.

The Bureau would call this compromised. I called it exactly where I needed to be.

I worked through the afternoon.

By four o’clock I had the four names down to two, a deputy CFO named Reiss who had administrator credentials and a pattern of after-hours system logins, and a woman in vendor relations named Sokolova whose login activity showed she had been pulling information from all three calendar tiers.

Either of them could be the person who built the internal structure. But neither one fit the profile of someone running a three-year shadow operation entirely alone.

I was building a comparison chart when the elevator opened and Nikolai walked in.

He looked at my files spread across the table, then at me. “You moved the chair in your old office.”

“You really do watch everything.”

“Habit.” He came to the table and stood across from it, not looking at my work this time. Looking at me. “Gregor said you didn’t argue.”

“I argued. I just lost quickly.” I kept my eyes on my screen. “You could have asked me yourself.”

“You would have said no.”

“I said no to Gregor.”

“And then you came anyway.” He pulled out the chair across from mine and sat down with the ease of someone who owned the space, which he did. “Because you understood why it made sense.”

I looked up. “Because I’m four hours away from identifying your two most likely suspects and I’d rather not get shot before I finish.”

He held my gaze. “Two.”

“Reiss and Sokolova. I need one more day to figure out which one is running things and which one is just support.” I turned my screen toward him so he could see the chart.

“Your security team should pull the physical access logs for the eastern stairwell on the day of the shot.”

He looked at the screen. His jaw tightened slightly, the first physical reaction I’d seen from him. “Reiss has been with this organization for eleven years.”

“I know.”

“I promoted him personally.”

“I know that too.” I held his gaze. “That’s probably why he thought he could get away with it.”

The room went quiet. Outside, the city was fading into early evening gray, the last light bouncing off the windows.

Then the elevator opened.

Gregor stepped out and the look on his face unsettled me more than anything had since Monday morning. Gregor Malin was not a man who unsettled easily. I could tell that just from watching him cross the room in eleven seconds.

He spoke directly to Nikolai. Low and clippedk. “The eastern stairwell camera. The day of the shot.” He paused. “It was wiped. But the IT team found a ghost frame in the buffer. Thirty seconds of footage before the wipe.”

Nikolai stood. “And?”

Gregor’s eyes moved to me for just a second. Then back.

“It’s not Reiss,” he said. “It’s not Sokolova.” Another pause. “It’s a woman.”

The silence that followed was total.

“Show me,” Nikolai said.

Gregor took out his phone and placed it face up on the table.

The ghost frame was grainy,thirty seconds of damaged footage, partially put back together. But the figure in the stairwell was clear enough.

It was a woman.

She was holding my personnel file.