November 12, 2035

  Enzo swivels a quarter-turn to the left. Then back. The chair squeaks both times, a tiny, defeated sound of a long abused government issued chair. He holds the tablet containing Sarah's report at reading distance, then slightly further, as though the extra centimeters might help the words rearrange themselves into something less interesting.

  They don't.

  Sarah stands on the other side of the desk with her arms crossed, which is either a posture of patience or a posture of mild contempt. With Sarah, the difference is academic.

  "Walk me through it again," Enzo says. He sets the tablet down. "You’re making an interesting theory, but I need to hear it from you personally."

  Sarah unfolds slightly, not her arms, just an internal mechanism, and begins.

  Her friend Javier Montejo's condo was robbed last weekend. Enzo clocks that she said the friend’s name with intentional neutrality.

  The burglary’s method of entry, the method of exit, the things taken and the things left behind, all generally matched a string of burglaries that had been quietly eating through the city's wealthier neighborhoods for the better part of the year. Whoever they are they knew what they were doing, and the elites were being quite about it for privacy reasons.

  Before being targeted by Severino, Tatiana Tiamzon and the De Veras were also victims of the same MO.

  But wealthy people make easy targets. Half the city's money lived in just a half a dozen communities, and all of them had been touched by the serial burglars. The burglaries had spread wider than Severino'ss crusade, other families, other people who had committed no explicit crime beyond the acquisition of comfort. So the overlap could be a coincidence. Even to Sarah, it normally would be a coincidence. Normally.

  Except… Javier’s upstairs neighbor has a chief of security, Sabina Reyes-Hartwell, former ISAFP intelligence. This woman had materialized at the scene and essentially took over the investigation, if there even was one. She provided Sarah and the local police with evidence so thorough, so beautifully organized, so perfectly shaped to the contours of a successful arrest, that it felt like a case right out of a detective’s textbook.

  Sarah did her homework and had it all verified. Javier and the neighbor indeed had legitimate business together. They knew each other personally, so the neighbor had motive to involve himself with the wellbeing of Javier. It was all, technically, plausible.

  But. But…

  "If this is the same crew that touched the Tiamzon and De Vera residences," Sarah says, and here she pauses, like a surgeon before making the crucial incision, "they did not leave evidence. That was their whole thing. They were clean. And Sabina wasn’t the only ex-ISAFP officer that led the security of a victim, a former senator’s house was robbed half a year ago and his security was also ex-ISAFP. I doubt Sabina just got a lucky break."

  The office is quiet for a moment. The tablet with the report sits between them on the desk, radiating even more intrigue.

  Enzo taps it once with two fingers, the display lighting up once again. "So, let’s assume the Sabina manufactured the evidence. Or curated it. Sourced it. Performed it. Doesn’t matter. Then left cracks that a barely attentive beat cop could follow." He looks up. "She obviously wasn't hiding the fact that she’s distracting us from the real burglars."

  "No," Sarah agrees.

  "Which means she wanted to be seen doing it. Or she didn't care." He lets that settle. "Either way."

  "Either way," Sarah confirms. "It's an issue. Whoever the real burglars are may have links to Severino, and Sabina is protecting them somehow. If they’re working together, we need to know the how’s and why’s."

  Enzo nods slowly. "Did Lino see this yet?"

  "I sent it this morning together with a surveillance request."

  "And?"

  "He's out with the profilers again, he won’t be back till evening."

  Enzo pulls the tablet back toward him. Taps to a specific page, having already memorized which page he wants.

  "You didn't manage connect her to Severino." he says. An observation.

  "There's nothing to connect." Sarah's voice is even. "Severino spent his career in the PNP. Sabina was ISAFP. The AFP and PNP work together on occasion but there’s no records of Sabina and Severino ever crossing paths during their careers. Geographically…" she makes a small gesture, one that meant I checked "…they never lived near each other. Their offices were in different corners of the Metro. Probably never breathed the same air."

  "So we don’t know her stance on the issue."

  "Not in any way I can demonstrate. Not in any way that exists in any record I can access."

  Enzo nods. Sets the page down. "What about her employer?"

  Sarah blinks once, which for her constitutes a pause.

  "Marius Zhu, a consultant." She chose the word with a certain intentionality, the way one would describe a kitchen knife as a utensil. Technically correct, but also not quite. "He works with companies, government agencies, diplomats. He's done work for the NBI, actually. Civilian advisory. Off the books."

  "Off the books."

  "He's more widely known in certain circles as a fixer." She tilts her head slightly. "Nothing too dramatic. He mostly makes paperwork disappear or makes money appear. Mergers that won't close. Real estate developments blocked by red tape. ROW acquisitions that take forever." A beat. "He smooths out those kind of problems, and he’s earned a reputation doing it. If it were a different investigation I doubt we wouldn’t find skeletons in his closet."

  Enzo is quiet for a moment. He's knows of the archetype well, the country runs on men like that, on the lubricant between entities that were never designed to touch each other. Nothing remarkable about the species.

  "Local?"

  "Yeah, though he has ties to China. Actually…" and here Sarah pauses again, and this pause is different from the previous one, "…your family has hired him before."

  The chair stops swiveling.

  "My family?"

  "Yeah, their ferry business, I found that he helped them acquire 4 Japanese ships." Sarah says.

  A memory suddenly surfaced, one that had been sitting in the chatters among the dinners in his family home, too boring to examine, too far from his jurisdiction to bother with. His family's ferry business was looking to expand. They eyed four modern vessels that a Japanese operator was in the process of offloading them at a price that made sense. There had been a South Korean and an Indonesian firm on the way, fighting for the same ships. Based on the gossip he heard, his family had been losing the fight. But then one unremarkable day the matter had simply… resolved itself, and the ships were theirs.

  His family had celebrated at a dinner he had attended without asking questions, because asking questions about the family business was how you ended up having opinions about the family business, and Enzo had long ago decided that he would rather not have opinions on it.

  He looks at Sarah now with the expression of a man who realizes he has been, without knowing it, standing very close to something.

  "Huh… I didn't look into how that happened," he says.

  "Anyways, nothing connects the employer to the victims," Sarah continues. "Nothing connects him to Severino. And he has no motive. Severino's little crusade seems to be aiming to destabilize the upper class. That's Marius Zhu's entire client base which poses a problem for him. Severino runs directly counter to his financial interests."

  "So he’s not aiding Severino."

  "Not that I can see. Not for any reason that makes sense."

  Enzo leans back. The chair accepts him without comment. "Perhaps they’re acting against Severino then?"

  "I can't say that yet either, and it’s too early to approach them directly, we need to know more." Sarah's voice carries the patience of someone who has made peace with not knowing things, who treats uncertainty as a material to work with rather than a wall to break through. "Which is why I'm requesting approval for resources from Lino for monitoring and surveillance."

  And then Enzo is quiet.

  He stares at a point slightly above the report, slightly above the desk, somewhere in the middle distance where thoughts go to get organized. Sabina had not been subtle. Whatever she had done, she had done it with the lights on, and that was either stupidity or intentional, and he did not think it was stupidity. But the picture she was painting was a picture he couldn't see yet. He could only see the brushstrokes.

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  Worst is, he couldn't even be sure she was in the same painting as Severino. They could be chasing the margin of someone else's story entirely, and end up getting distracted from finding and stopping Severino. But they barely have anything on him as it is.

  "We can't ignore it," he says finally. "Even if it leads nowhere. Send me the formal request. I'll back it with Lino and see what favors I can shake loose on my end as well."

  Sarah nods once, a nod that says she already assumed as much.

  Then the door opened.

  Rocco entered grinning, two paper bags swinging from one hand, the logo of a local café printed on their sides in cheerful font that had no business being in a room that had just been discussing murder victims and surveillance operations.

  The bags went on the table. Rocco began unpacking great enthusiasm, as if he considers food procurement a form of serious field work. Coffee cups, a pastry box, everything arranged with unconscious precision.

  "Ten minutes," he announced, to no one in particular and everyone specifically. "Ten minutes I'm standing in that line because a group of people apparently discovered the concept of a menu for the first time in their lives."

  Enzo unfolded himself from the chair and stretched, vertebrae conducting a brief and quiet rearrangement. "They have an app you know," he said. "You can order ahead and skip the line."

  Rocco looked at him with smirk as if he was offered a solution to a problem he did not want solved. "And miss talking to their cute barista?"

  "Ah," said Enzo.

  Sarah, who had migrated to the couch with the unhurried pace of someone who had seen this before and would see it again, reached into the pastry box and extracted a bagel. She looked at Rocco., and simply smirked. The smirk said quite a lot.

  Rocco had the good grace to look unbothered.

  "Roddy Gonzales," Enzo said, biting into a Spanish bread. "Is he ready for his interrogation?"

  Rocco’s signature grin dimmed by a few watts. Not extinguished, Rocco’s good humor was a load bearing wall, not decorative, but can be adjusted. "He’s in a holding cell downstairs. We're just waiting on the cleaning crew to finish with the interrogation room."

  "What happened?"

  "The previous guys got too excited and physical." A pause, during which his jaw shifted slightly. "Tallanno’s guys booked it before us."

  The name landed in the room the way such names do.

  "They're the ones on the Camsur mass grave case right?" Sarah asked. She was pulling apart her bagel like her body was in a different conversation entirely.

  Enzo chewed on a Spanish bread. Swallowed. "Yeah," he said.

  * * * * *

  The monitoring room smelled like coffee and stale air, the ambient scent of bureaucracy. Through the one-way glass, Roddy Gonzales sat in the interrogation room looking like a man who had been haunted by ghosts in the previous week and hadn't recovered. He was till wearing the same clothes the last time Enzo saw him. Roddy was staring at the table, as if the table was the safest thing in the room to look at.

  "Anything before they brought him in?" Sarah asked. She wasn't looking at Roddy. She was looking at the way Roddy was sitting.

  "Just that he's willing to talk." Rocco crossed his arms. His body taking over much of the cramped space of the monitoring room. "Refused to elaborate."

  "He didn’t say a single thing when I interrogated him last week," Enzo said. He was watching Roddy's hands. They were flat on the table, pressing down, as though the table might float away.

  A week in a holding cell had a way of undoing all that. Five days of ceiling paint, dim lights, cramped together with other undesirables, and the sound of problems had a way of renegotiating a man's commitments.

  Sarah turned her gaze toward Enzo, and he felt it before he saw it, a question delivered without the inefficiency of words. Do you want me in there?

  He looked at Roddy more carefully. The pressed palms. The chest working harder than it needed to. The eyes making small, anxious circuits of the room, door, mirror, table, door again, the itinerary of a man cataloguing exits he knew he couldn't use.

  Enzo knew the type. Not the hardened kind, hardly. Not the kind who had been in rooms like this before and treated them as a familiar inconvenience. Roddy was the kind who had been surviving on the belief that staying quiet was the same as staying safe, until his mind stopped believing in it.

  "I’ll go in alone," Enzo said. "He’ll lock up if he sees two of us. Might even start forgetting things, misremembering details while he juggles his emotions." He straightened his tie with two fingers, a small, unconscious ritual. "He'll be more honest if he only has to be afraid of one person."

  Rocco said nothing. Sarah said nothing. Both were forms of agreement.

  Enzo took his jacket by the lapels, settled it on his shoulders, picked up the tablet from the console, and walked out to the interrogation room.

  The room was the same temperature as every interrogation room, calibrated precisely to remind you that comfort was a privilege. Enzo entered without hurry. Placed the tablet on the table. Pulled out the chair across from Roddy and sat down.

  Then he crossed his arms and said nothing.

  Up close, Roddy was worse than the glass had suggested. His eyes, which had looked merely restless from the monitoring room, were now visibly running on fumes, red at the rims, the pupils doing small, involuntary recalibrations every few seconds. A week without proper sleep had taken the skin under them and done something unfortunate to it. His breathing was uncontrolled, each inhale brought with it more panic.

  Enzo let the silence accumulate. It was a specific skill he’s honed, an inviting silence for lost people with no where else to be, one with an invisible expiration date.

  The tablet sat between them, screen dark. It could contain anything. It contained everything. Roddy's eyes went to it twice, then away, then back.

  His chest rose. Fell. Rose again.

  Enzo watched and waited to see if Roddy would take what he was being offered, the small, precarious dignity of speaking first. Of arriving at his own story before someone else arrived there with a shovel.

  He didn't have to wait long.

  Roddy's mouth opened, and the words came out like it had been pressing against a door for seven days.

  Little over a month ago, Roddy said. His fiancée, Julia, was kidnapped.

  He'd come home to a package. It bore no return address. Inside was a phone, a letter, and a ring. He'd recognized the ring before he finished processing what he was looking at, because he owned the same one, just bigger. Matching sets.

  A phone. Enzo took a mental note of that.

  Julia had left for a work trip the day before.

  He'd read the letter. It explained things in the clean, unambiguous language, by people who want to be clearly understood in the most efficient manner possible. Do what they said. Don't tell family. Don't tell authorities. While in denial, he'd tried every channel he had for Julia, her phone, chat apps, people who might know where she was, and each one returned nothing.

  Having no other choice, he did what they said.

  "Her family," Enzo said. "Did they not notice her missing?"

  "She doesn't have family." Roddy said it without bitterness, which was almost worse. "They disowned her when she was young."

  "And yours?"

  Something crossed Roddy's face. Not exactly pain. A scar tissue over where pain should to be. "My grandfather's a retired marine general. Father's in the army. Brother's in the navy." He said these facts, like charges against himself. "Growing up they had great expectations for me, expectations that I couldn't meet. So it wasn't a surprise that my whole family was against the engagement, against the whole relationship really. Julia had… she had a past. They didn't approve of her previous work. So when she stopped showing up at family things after her disappearance…" A pause. "They probably thought the problem had resolved itself."

  The room absorbed this.

  "Continue." Enzo said.

  They'd started him with something manageable, and dangled the promise of getting him in touch with Julia if he did what they said. They instructed him to lighten the house’s security on a specific night. Tiamzon would be out of the city, whatever they were planning, her personal safety wasn't at stake. So he'd reassigned the guards and disabled the automatic systems.

  The next morning, the house had been robbed.

  The same robbery that Enzo and Sarah were discussing earlier. He mentally looked to his back and imagined Sarah’s eyebrow perking up at the confirmed connection between the robberies and Severino.

  "Did they keep their end of the bargain?"

  "Yes." And for a moment, something moved in Roddy's wrecked face. Relief perhaps. "They got me on a call with her the day after."

  "What did she say?"

  "I don’t…" He stopped. Pressed his palms flat against the table again. "I wasn’t, I was just trying to hear her voice. I didn't get anything useful. There was no one else on the line I could hear." He looked at the table. "I just wanted to hear her voice."

  They were building a track record, Enzo thought, behind a face that showed none of it. Proof of concept. Establish compliance, establish reward. Make him a believer before you make your real request.

  For the next two weeks they instructed him to report on Tiamzon’s whereabouts, and who she was meeting. And twice in the next two weeks, he got to hear her voice again.

  "I’m going to need you to give us the same info you gave them." Enzo said. Roddy nodded without hesitation. "But first, continue."

  A week after that, they issued their last instruction. One last thing, then Julia gets to comes home.

  First, they wanted him to access the Tiamzon estate servers, pull specific project files, and send them over. Second, and here Roddy's hands had shifted, a small unconscious recoil, they sent some of their own files back, and told him to package everything together into an encrypted, routed email to be sent to Tiamzon herself.

  "What were the files they asked for?" Enzo asked

  "It was very specific, they asked for all the files related to a mining development in Benguet, 1999." Roddy shook his head slightly. "Permits. Contracts. Geological surveys. Certification documents. I didn't read through everything."

  "The files they sent you, were they copies from Tiamzon's servers as well?"

  "I didn't check." He said it simply, without excuse. "I didn't know who was listening. I didn't know what they could see. They said Julia would be released a day after I sent the email, and I didn't want to do anything they hadn't told me to do."

  Enzo looked at him. "Continue."

  "I sent the email two days before her abduction." A muscle in Roddy's jaw worked briefly. "After that, they went quiet. No contact."

  The phone. Enzo had read the search report. Field techs searched through Roddy's home, his office, his personal effects, They only found one phone, his own, and nothing else.

  "Where's the phone they gave you?"

  Roddy blinked. Then: "The guardhouse at the estate. I hid it there after her abduction… just shortly before the NBI came, I didn’t… I couldn't risk you guys finding it. Not while Julia was still…" He stopped.

  The blank had come over his face then. Like a power failure. Like something switching off.

  Detainees have calling rights, and he knew Roddy was exercising it daily when he was detained.

  "Who were you calling this past week?"

  Roddy didn't answer immediately. The silence stretched, but it was a different silence from before. This was the empty silence of a man who had already lost it.

  "I tried calling my family first," he finally said. "But they didn’t… they didn’t…" He moved on from that sentence without finishing it. "My neighbors first. Then friends. People who might still pick up. I was asking if anyone had seen Julia in the past week. Whether she'd surfaced anywhere. The kidnappers promised, they promised that she’d be released the day after I sent the email…"

  He looked at the table.

  "Yet none of my friends had seen her nor heard from her. And then yesterday I heard from the guards about what happened to Ma’am Tiamzon, and found out…" Roddy choked a bit. "I found out what kind of people they were, what kind of people abducted my Julia."

  Enzo watched Roddy's face and saw the playback of the realization again in miniature, which then exploded into a burst of tears and snot.

  If Tiamzon was dead. If the people who'd used him as an instrument had the capacity for that kind of brutality…

  He had nothing left to protect.

  The tablet sat dark between them, patient as a headstone.