I showed Adrian the message without speaking.
He read it. Read it again. Set my phone down with the care of someone managing a significant recalibration.
"Someone above him," he said.
"Yes."
"Someone who gave the original order." He stood. The stillness he used when thinking was replaced immediately by movement, a tell I'd catalogued over forty days that meant the issue required motion to process. "Hale had been operating for a decade. The network we've dismantled Mercer, Choi, Lena, the shell companies, that's all infrastructure. Infrastructure serves something."
"He built it for someone," I said.
"Or with someone. Someone with resources significant enough that Hale, who has nine years of network construction behind him, was still the operational lawyer rather than the principal."
