Page 37 of Grayson

“Confirmed.” AJ followed.

“His remaining aliases are flagged, his accounts are frozen, and every known resource is cut off. He has only what he carries.”

Grayson surveyed the team—Moose, Striker, Gunner, Hunter, Conor, U-Jin, Brunson, Romeo, Iggy, Jethro, Kai, Rowe, and Sonny—then looked back at Lacroix’s blinking marker.

“We’re done chasing him,” he said. “From now on, every road he takes closes behind him, every lie exposes another lie, and every call reminds him that someone he trusted chose us instead.”

The marker shifted toward the dark coastline, hesitated, and turned inland. Nobody in the room moved.

“He changed direction again,” said Hiro.

“Third time in eleven minutes,” said AJ. Grayson’s expression hardened.

“Good. Let him keep running scared.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Kyle Lacroix watched the rain glaze the train windows as the night express slipped out of Brussels. He felt a sting at the back of his neck and slapped at whatever insect was biting him.

He had changed coats twice, abandoned one phone beneath a café table, and bought his ticket with cash from a machine three districts away. Yet every reflection seemed to hold the same accusation: they were closer than he wanted to admit.

Moreau no longer mattered to him. His arrest had turned inevitable the moment the ship was discovered and the survivors telling their story. In his home, evidence was found in nearly every corner. He’d been careless and networks were crumbling around him, denying having known him.

Kyle assumed Moreau would trade names for leniency, then disappear into a courtroom and a sentence that would consume the rest of his useful life.

Jennifer was different.

She had seen Kyle without the practiced charm, without the priest’s clothing. She could identify him, connect his polished business persona to the animal he truly had become. She had the ability to unravel every relationship he planned to preserve.

He told himself he only needed to frighten her into silence. A warning delivered through the right channel, a rumor placed before the right executive, a manufactured doubt about her memory—any of it might make her testimony seem uncertain.

If she became unbelievable, she would be as good as absent. His contacts would trust him, believe in him and she would become hunted by men who had more resources than she could possibly imagine. But it seemed nothing rattled this woman and that pissed him off more than anything.

In a compartment three cars behind him, a plainclothes officer studied a blurred station photograph. Kyle’s face was half-turned, but the angle of his shoulders and the mark beside his ear matched the alert. The image was transmitted quietly to teams waiting along the route.

Kyle left the train before dawn in Luxembourg, stepping onto the platform just as the doors began to close. He moved through the station with a porter’s cap pulled low, then crossed into a parking garage where an aging sedan waited under a false registration. His escape had been designed weeks earlier, but every plan now felt like a corridor narrowing around him.

He drove south without using the main roads, pausing only at places where cameras were sparse. At a roadside inn, he opened a laptop stripped of identifying software and searched for Jennifer through fragments: an old university contact, a charity mailing list, a photograph taken at a conference. Each clue ended in caution tape or silence.

“This isn’t possible,” he whispered.

Her history, where she’d come from seemed lost to the world. In an age where everything was digital it seemed she had not existed until she entered university. Until she’d wandered into that fucking club.

Jennifer had learned to disappear carefully. She stayed away from friends, avoided familiar routines, and communicated with members of the advocacy group through arrangements Kyle could not easily trace.

Still, she knew his habits well enough to understand that he would search for patterns before he searched for places.

Kyle called a former associate in Lyon from a public phone. He did not ask where Jennifer was. Instead, he suggested she had stolen money, altered records, and invented accusations to protect herself. The associate listened without agreeing, and Kyle heard fear in every careful pause.

By noon, the story had begun circulating among people who once rushed to return his calls. It did not spread as he intended. Rather than discredit Jennifer, the rumor confirmed that Kyle was desperate enough to attack the one witness who could place him at the center of the enterprise.

Accounts began to freeze that afternoon. A logistics firm in Rotterdam suspended contracts connected to his intermediaries. A bank in Zurich flagged transfers that had once passed without question, and a warehouse manager in Marseille surrendered access logs to local authorities.

Kyle stared at the notifications until the screen blurred. He had imagined inheriting what remained after Moreau’s fall, consolidating routes and ruling his partners through fear. Instead, the network was behaving like a damaged ship, each section sealing itself off before the water reached it.

He crossed into France again, using back roads and slept in the sedan beside an abandoned quarry. Near dawn, headlights appeared on the ridge and remained motionless for several minutes. Kyle waited with his hand on the ignition, but the vehicle eventually turned away, leaving him uncertain whether it had been chance or surveillance.

Jennifer and whatever network she was working with, were no longer chasing a single fugitive through scattered jurisdictions. Shared evidence had joined the pieces: financial records, border images, witness statements, and the communications seized from Moreau. Every attempt Kyle made to protect himself gave the joint team another point of reference.