Chapter 9: Geoffrey
They stopped Geoffrey Marsh at the garage exit.
I was not there for that part.
Daniel had been firm about it, and Evelyn had agreed, and I had not argued because I knew they were right.
I was thirty-two weeks pregnant and I had fallen from a helicopter the day before, and there were things that did not require my presence to be real.
I waited in Evelyn's car in the street above the garage and listened to the city.
Daniel called twenty minutes later.
"He's talking," he said.
"Already?"
"He knew it was over the moment he saw us.
Some people fight.
Some people calculate.
Marsh calculated — he decided that cooperating now was better than being the last one standing when the rest of them had already made deals." A pause.
"He's given us everything.
Hale's full network.
Three other companies Hale was targeting.
The names of two other individuals inside those companies who were feeding information." Another pause.
"And the name of the person in San Francisco."
"Who is it?"
"A woman named Sandra Voss.
She was Hale's point of contact on the West Coast.
She managed the forwarding service, the Pacific Heights address, and the communication channel between Marsh and Hale." He paused.
"She also, according to Marsh, was the one who first identified you as a target.
Three years ago.
Before Richard."
The street outside was ordinary.
People walking.
A coffee shop.
A woman pushing a stroller.
"She found Richard for Hale," I said.
"She found Richard for Hale," Daniel confirmed.
"She identified him as someone with the right profile — charming, financially desperate, willing.
She introduced them.
She helped design the approach." A beat.
"She attended your wedding, apparently.
As a guest of a mutual friend."
I thought back to our wedding.
Two hundred people.
A summer afternoon.
Richard smiling at the altar.
Somewhere in that room, a woman had been watching the plan she had built finally begin.
"Is she in custody?" I said.
"Being picked up now."
I leaned my head back against the seat.
"Evelyn," I said.
She was in the driver's seat, watching me in the rearview mirror.
"Did my father ever mention a Sandra Voss?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"No.
But your father had enemies he never named out loud.
He believed in knowing them without letting them know they were known." She paused.
"He would have found her eventually."
"He didn't have time."
"No," she said softly.
"He didn't."
We sat in silence for a moment.
"It's done," I said.
Not a question.
"The core of it is done," Evelyn said carefully.
"There will be legal proceedings.
Depositions.
Months of it.
But the people who built this — Richard, Hale, Marsh, Voss — they are all either in custody or cooperating.
The architecture is dismantled."
I put my hand on my stomach.
My daughter pushed back, steady and insistent, the way she had been doing since the beach.
"I want to go back to the house," I said.
Evelyn looked at me in the mirror.
"My house," I said.
"My father's house.
May you like
I want to go home."
She started the car.
