Page 170 of Only the Hunter

SAFE PASSAGE PROJECT — REACTIVATED

After a moment, Quinn’s face replaces the slide—the feed slightly pixelated, resolving and blurring with each small movement, eyes slightly shadowed like she hasn’t slept much recently. Her update is clean and technical, numbers and nodes and payment-chain mapping delivered without flourish. She never says Hudson’s name, but when Hanford references KOAN as the external support liaison and Hudson Stone as point of contact, Quinn’s gaze goes flat for half a second before she looks away from the camera.

It’s quick.

If you aren’t trained to notice micro-shifts in a witness, you’d miss it.

I don’t miss it.

Hanford’s voice is measured. The kind of delivery designed for rooms where accurate information is critical.

“Harridan has agreed to cooperate,” she says. “He is providing communications, payment records, and names.”

There’s a shift at the far end of the table—one of the Public Integrity attorneys making a note, the DHS liaison’s jaw tightening slightly, the quiet sound of someone swallowing an emotion they wish to conceal. He’s worked here a long time. Bonds form. I understand.

Hanford continues. “His cooperation has implicated unauthorized DHS authorization signatures connected to Morozova’s transport. Whether that eventually leads to charges tied directly to her death is unknown. That’s partly a question for Swiss authorities, given jurisdiction, and partly a question of what the ongoing investigation uncovers.”

I keep my face neutral.

“Additionally,” Hanford says, “the PAC chair’s operation is under active federal investigation. That investigation is ongoing. No arrests have been made at this time.”

At this time.

The phrase carries the honest limit of what we’ve achieved.

Power moves slowly when it has money.

The DHS liaison mentions that there has been movement in certain financial networks since Harridan’s cooperation became known. Protective movement. The kind that happens when powerful people start identifying as a defense mechanism.

“Some of the individuals Harridan named have retained counsel,” Hanford adds. “We expect motions. Delay. Attempts to relocate assets. This will not be fast.”

No one in the room argues. No one pretends otherwise. It’s almost a relief, the way reality is spoken plainly now.

One name on the slide catches my attention—not a trafficker, a client, and one I recognize instantly, the kind of name that shows up in business press and charity galas, never anywhere near a courtroom. It won’t be the last time wealth and impunity travel together on this case.

I know the profile regardless of the name attached to it. Two distinct groups sit at the center of what we’re dismantling. The traffickers are, in most profiles, transactional. They approach it as logistics—a means to an end, primarily motivated by greed. The clients, the ones who pay for the labor or the body or the organ, have a more varied profile. Some frame it the same way—resource management, cold calculation. But the harder group to identify and prosecute are the entitled ones: sexually motivated, convinced they operate above accountability, often unable to see the person they’ve paid for as a person at all. They don’t stop to think about the victim. They may not register a victim exists. That’s the group the leads from Harridan point toward. If the prosecutions land, maybe the next one thinks twice. One case. One precedent. That’s how it starts.

One person may not be able to change the world, but one person starts with the case before them. We make a difference, one case at a time.

Hanford’s gaze shifts to me, briefly.

“Safe Passage is reopened,” she says. “Thompson is assigned as lead counsel.”

And then she turns the conversation to logistics—task force resources, document preservation orders, parallel tracks with the trafficking conspiracy case, the careful division of labor between agencies that have spent years protecting their turf.

I take notes.

Ask one question when it matters.

Answer one when I’m asked.

And through it all, I feel the weight of being here.

Not because this is where I should have been all along.

Because this is where they told me I wasn’t allowed to be.

When the meeting breaks, Delgado catches me in the hallway.