Page 53 of Velvet Vaughn

She tipped her head. “Fair point.” She wrote Vic Shaw at the top left and circled it. “Fine. It’s a little bit a murder board.”

Remi had set up a second laptop at the end of the desk and was running diagnostics on the comms gear, occasionally muttering something to himself about signal strength, and didn’t look up when his phone buzzed against the table. He checked it, then held it up without comment.

“Tyler’s ready when you are.”

Anja scooted a chair up to the desk. Leo dropped into the one beside her, close enough that she could feel the heat off him, which she decided not to think about right now. Bad timing, hormones. Remi tapped a few keys, and Tyler’s face filled the screen.

“Morning, one and all,” Tyler greeted. “You’re at the safe house?”

“Got in about an hour ago,” Anja responded.

Tyler opened a window and angled his screen so they could see rows of file names and timestamps scrolling past. “Okay. I’ve been through the metadata on every photo in the dossier, all eight athletes, and gathered full EXIF data where it survived and reconstructed timestamps where it didn’t. I want to walk you through what I found, because it’s not what I expected.”

“Worse or better?” Leo asked.

“Depends on your definition.” Tyler displayed a timeline graphic with dots scattered across an eighteen-month span. “These are capture dates for every surveillance photo in the library. Eighteen months, give or take. That part’s not surprising. You build a blackmail file over time. What’s surprising is the camera signatures.”

“Camera signatures?” Leo repeated.

“Every digital camera leaves a fingerprint in the files it produces. Sensor noise, lens distortion patterns, compression artifacts, even if someone strips the obvious metadata. I ran every photo in the library through a comparison.” Tyler brought up a second graphic, this one color-coded dots grouping into three distinct clusters. “At least three different cameras shot these eight dossiers. That’s three people working the athletes over different time windows, some of which overlap.”

Anja worked through the implications aloud. “It’s not one person with a telephoto lens and a grudge.”

“It’s not one person at all. This is a program. Someone built a pipeline. They’ve got multiple people in various cities collecting on numerous athletes over time, and somebody’s been assembling all of it into these files.” Tyler gestured at the screen behind him, at the rows of folders Anja knew represented eight separate lives and eight separate sets of leverage. “That’s not a stalker. That’s a coordinated operation.”

Leo set his coffee down. “Okay, so who’s running it?”

“That’s the part I can’t get you from metadata,” Tyler explained.

“Send me everything,” Anja instructed him. “Names, dates, the camera clusters, the agency breakdown. I want to map this out properly.”

“Already uploading to the secure drive. Here’s where it gets interesting, though. The eight athletes on this drive aren’t randomly scattered across the league. Every one of them is represented, for contracts and endorsements, by one of three agencies, and Pinnacle is one of them.”

Tyler presented a breakdown of names sorted into columns. “Three of the eight are Pinnacle clients. The other five are divided between two other agencies. But here’s the part that matters: every single one of them has crossed paths with athletes from the other two firms in the last couple of years. Shared training facilities and charity circuits, many of the same agents’ holiday parties. The whole industry overlaps.”

“So any of the three companies could be the source.” Leo considered it. “Or none of them. It could be somebody sitting in the middle of all three.”

“That’s the conundrum.” Tyler nodded. “I can’t tell you which agency the program lives inside, or whether it’s inside one at all. Could be a firm or a vendor all three of them share, like a medical group, a PR shop, or a financial outfit. It might be one person with access to the right rooms. The data shows me three cameras funneling into one library and three agencies feeding the same pool of athletes. It doesn’t give me a name.”

Anja turned back to the butcher paper, marker in hand, her mind several steps ahead of where her hand was. Three cameras. Three agencies. Eight athletes. A web with no center she could see yet, and Leo caught inside it.

“Then we don’t assume.” She wrote Pinnacle on the board, then the other two firms Tyler named. “We treat all three the same until the evidence tells us otherwise. No favorites, no shortcuts.”

“That’s the smart play,” Tyler agreed. “Don’t fall in love with a theory before the data earns it. I’ve watched talented investigators tunnel on the obvious suspect and miss the one standing off to the side.” He glanced at something off-screen, then back. “Leo, I know two of these eight are your clients, and that’s a gut punch. But it cuts both ways. It could mean Pinnacle’s dirty. It could just as easily mean somebody’s using Pinnacle athletes as a way in, and you’re as much a target as anybody. We don’t know yet. So don’t carry a verdict into that office tomorrow.”

Leo didn’t answer right away. He was looking at the butcher paper, at Vic Shaw circled in the corner and the three agency boxes Anja had drawn beneath it. Realization crossed his face as the ground under six years of his life became far less solid.

“Three agencies. I know people at all of them.”

“I figured you might,” Anja replied. “Which makes you useful. You know these rooms. You know who’s where they should be and who isn’t.” She tapped the board. “We’re going to need that.”

Leo nodded slowly, and she watched him put it away, fold it up, and tuck it somewhere he could function around, the same thing she’d witnessed a hundred operators do before a mission. It wasn’t healthy long-term. Short-term, it was the only thing that worked.

“Thanks, Tyler. I need to go for a walk.”

Leo was gone before either of them could say anything, his footsteps heavy on the wood floor, followed by the sound of the side door opening and closing.

Remi looked at her. “Want me to go with him?”

“No.” Anja capped the marker. “He’s not running. He needs time alone where nobody’s reading his face.” She returned to the board. “Give me the file, Tyler. Let’s get this board built before he comes back.”