The safehouse was our cathedral of engineered lies. Dominic and I worked through cables and bank statements with Gage and Tyler hunched over a ratty laptop, light frosting everyone’s faces like the glow of an altar. The ledger chunks we possessed connected to Julian’s philanthropic shell by a single thread: a vendor account that funneled payments into a Cayman-visible node. Julian’s money always had a fingerprint—careful, clean—but there were mistakes. A reused vendor login, a sloppy cert, a cached IP that Tyler found like a bruise under skin.
“His partners are sloppy on nights they drink too much,” Tyler said, a little too proud. “They left a breadcrumb. We follow it and we find the server in the Caribbean.”
Dominic’s eyes were small, pleased and hungry. “Good. We burn the mirror.”
We
