Chapter 5 - The Badge
The second transmitter was older, dirtier, and installed with the same careful, patient hands.
Jonah’s technicians found no prints. They found no serial number. What they did find was a pattern: the first device covered the south lawn and the kitchen corridor. The second covered the private conference room, where Adrien discussed shipping routes, contracts, and the names of men who did not like their names spoken aloud.
Whoever had planted them had known exactly which walls mattered.
“Months,” Adrien said, looking at the report. “Months of my meetings.”
“Yes.”
“And the sweep found nothing else?”
“Nothing yet. We’re still in the cars and the chapel.”
Mara sat on the arm of the couch in the adjoining room with Sophie asleep against her shoulder. It was after midnight. The house had the hush of a held breath.
“There’s something else,” Jonah said. “We checked the access records against the maintenance worker Mara described. The one in the gray uniform on Tuesday.”
Adrien’s eyes moved to Mara. “You didn’t tell me about a maintenance worker.”
“You didn’t ask me what I’d noticed until tonight,” she said. “And before tonight, I didn’t think it mattered.”
Jonah continued. “No outside contractor was scheduled anywhere near that floor on Tuesday. But that’s not the strange part. There was no unauthorized entry logged that morning at all. Every badge used at every control door belonged to someone authorized to be here.”
Mara felt her stomach tighten. “So he lied his way in?”
“No.” Jonah’s voice was flat. “He didn’t have to. His badge was real.”
The room went quiet.
“Whose badge?” Adrien asked.
Jonah turned the tablet around.
Mara read the name twice before it made sense. Then she read it a third time, and the floor seemed to tilt a few degrees beneath her.
Teresa Balin.
“That’s wrong,” she said.
Adrien did not look at her. “Jonah.”
“Badge swipe at the lower service entrance, 9:14 a.m., Tuesday. Second swipe at the electrical access corridor, 9:26. Both under Teresa’s credentials.”
“Teresa doesn’t have access to the electrical corridor.”
“She does,” Jonah said. “Housekeeping master key. She’s had it for nine years.”
Mara stood up so fast that Sophie stirred and murmured. She lowered her voice, but not much. “Teresa would never. I don’t care what the log says. She’s the one who told me not to let Sophie near the west wing. She’s the one who took a risk keeping my daughter in this house when she could have sent me home and been right to do it. She would not do this.”
“Anyone can be bought,” Jonah said.
“Not her.”
Adrien watched her with an expression she could not read. “You are very certain.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve spent six months being invisible in her house, and she is the only person in it who ever looked at me like I was standing there.” Mara’s voice cracked. “She knows my rent is late. She knows Sophie’s shoe size. She gave me her own coat in November because I didn’t have one warm enough for the bus. If she were going to sell you out, she would have done it before I ever got here, and she would have been a lot less kind about it.”
Jonah looked at Adrien. Adrien looked at the tablet for a long moment.
“Wake her,” he said.
—
They did not wake her gently.
Teresa Balin came into the conference room at 12:40 a.m. in a gray dressing gown, her hair in a braid, her face composed in a way Mara recognized. It was the face she wore when something in the kitchen had gone wrong and she was deciding how much of her temper to spend.
“This is how it is now?” she said. “Guards at my bedroom door?”
Adrien slid the tablet across the table. “Explain this.”
Teresa looked at the screen. She looked at it for a long time.
Her face did not change in the way Mara expected. There was no flicker of guilt. There was confusion first, then a slow, spreading horror, like water finding a crack.
“That’s my badge number.”
“Yes.”
“I was in the linen room at nine. I was with Ana and the new girl. We were counting the shipment.”
“Cameras in the linen room corroborate,” Jonah said quietly. “She was there from 8:50 until 9:40.”
Adrien’s gaze sharpened. “Then someone used your credentials at 9:14.”
“Or someone copied them,” Teresa said. Her voice was steady, but her hands had begun to shake. “The master cards are kept in the office safe. Only three people know the code. Me, Mr. Vale, and Owen.”
The name landed like a dropped stone.
Mara saw it in Adrien’s face before he spoke. A door opening. Something behind it.
“Owen Rusk,” he said slowly.
“Owen has the facilities contract. He maintains the access logs, the wiring, the panels, the doors. Eleven years.” Teresa’s voice rose. “He signed in the electrical crew Tuesday. He signs in everyone.”
“And the badge safe?”
“In my office. He fixed the lock on it in March.” She stopped. Her face went very still. “He was alone in there for an hour.”
Nobody said anything for several seconds.
Mara felt the shape of it settling into place: the gray-uniformed man who had asked where the lower electrical room was, the cart in the wrong hallway, the propped door, the cigarette butt by the greenhouse, the transmitter hidden behind an electrical panel. All of it, running through the same hands.
“He wouldn’t,” Teresa said. Then, quieter, almost to herself, “His wife is sick. Corinne. She’s been on dialysis for two years, and the transplant list —” She stopped, swallowed. “He never said anything. He never asked for anything.”
“Someone did,” Adrien said.
Jonah had his phone to his ear before Adrien finished the sentence. “I want Owen Rusk’s badge history, all his work orders for the last six months, and his vehicle logs. And I want him brought in before dawn.”
Adrien stood. “No.”
Jonah lowered the phone.
“If he knows we’re looking at him, he’ll run, and the men he’s working for will disappear behind him.” Adrien’s voice was quiet and cold. “We watch him. We give him one more chance to make a mistake, and we make sure the mistake happens where we can see it.”
“What mistake?” Mara asked.
Adrien looked toward the window, and beyond it, at the dark shape of the south lawn and the hedge where a man in a gray uniform had once stood with a plastic case in his hand.
“He still needs to feed them information,” he said. “Which means he still needs to get into this house.”
—
The trap took less than a day to set.
Jonah’s technicians replaced the transmitter behind the conference room panel with one of their own, wired to a monitoring station in the security room. Adrien scheduled a meeting for the following evening with a shipping broker named Cyrus Hale and had a fake set of documents drawn up — a contract, an account number, a list of dates — and left them in the conference room safe. Whoever was listening would hear the arrangements. Whoever was reading would come for the papers.
Mara spent the day in the guest suite with Sophie, who had developed a cold and was delighted by the excuse to be carried everywhere. Twice, she saw Lena Ortiz in the corridor outside the kitchen, and twice Lena looked at her and then away too quickly.
The second time, Mara stopped.
“Lena.”
The girl turned. She was twenty-two, with a round face and nervous hands, and she had been the one to take Sophie to the fountain.
“I wanted to say thank you,” Mara said. “For watching her. I know you didn’t have to.”
Lena’s eyes filled so suddenly that Mara took a step back.
“It’s okay,” Lena said. “I mean — I’m sorry. I should have watched her better.”
“You watched her exactly as long as you said.”
Lena nodded hard, twice, and then hurried away down the corridor with one hand pressed to her mouth.
Mara stood there for a moment, frowning.
That evening, at 7:20, the alert came. Movement in the west service corridor. A door opened with a master key. A figure in a gray uniform moving toward the electrical access panel, where a technician had left a wire hanging conspicuously loose.
Jonah’s team took him from both ends of the corridor.
Mara heard it from the guest suite: the sudden scuffle of shoes, a grunt, a man’s voice saying, “Don’t — don’t —” and then nothing.
At 7:41, Jonah appeared at her door. His jaw was set.
“We have him.”
“Owen?”
“Owen.” He hesitated. “And there’s something else. His phone was in his pocket. There’s only one number in it. No name.”
Adrien came around the corner behind him, holding the phone in a gloved hand.
The screen was lit. The call was already connected.
A voice came through the speaker, pleasant and unhurried, the voice of a man ordering dinner.
“Owen,” it said. “Tell Mr. Vale I’m disappointed in the timing.”
Adrien raised the phone to his mouth. “Mr. Hale.”
May you like
“Adrien.” The voice warmed slightly, as though greeting an old friend at a party. “You’ve met my man, then. Good. We should talk about what happens to the child now.”
Mara’s hand found the doorframe and held on.
