Two Little Secrets From My Boss

Chapter 104

I called Archie, the company's head of security, and the FBI liaison. Within two hours, we were in a conference room with David Lee on speakerphone.

"We don't pull the twins from school," I said. "We don't terminate Sentinel's surveillance contract, and we don’t change any routine, any schedule, any drop-off time.

If Gerald discovers we've found his operation, he vanishes again—and next time, he won't use a traceable firm. He'll go deeper, hire people we can't find, and we'll lose the only thread connecting us to his location."

"You want to leave your daughters in a school that's being watched by a man who may have committed murder," Archie said, his voice carrying the careful weight of someone confirming they've understood correctly.

"I will let him believe his surveillance is intact while we use it against him. The encrypted email address where Sentinel sends daily reports is our best lead. Every email has a destination, and every destination has a location."

"And in the meantime, the girls go to school like nothing is wrong," the FBI liaison, Agent Reeves, said.

"With invisible protection. Plainclothes agents at the school, undercover vehicles on the perimeter, a response team within three minutes. Gerald's surveillance sees normal routines. Our team sees everything Gerald's team does."

"What about misinformation?" David asked through the speaker.

"We feed Sentinel's surveillance team altered information about the family's movements, fabricated of course. Any operation Gerald plans based on those reports will be targeting empty spaces."

The room was silent for a long moment. Agent Reeves spoke first.

"The Bureau has run similar counter-surveillance operations, and the methodology is proven. The risk is duration—the longer we maintain the deception, the higher the probability of a mistake that tips Gerald off. I'd recommend a three-day window. If we haven't located him by then, we pull the twins and go to a direct search."

"Three days," I agreed. "That's enough."

Telling Xander was harder than planning the operation.

We stood in the kitchen that evening, security briefing documents spread across the counter. Xander read the plan twice, his face cycling through comprehension, resistance, and a terror that whitened his knuckles against the countertop.

"Absolutely not," he said. "We pull the girls tonight—I'll arrange a private flight, I have contacts in Switzerland, we can have them out of the country by morning and Gerald can watch an empty school until the FBI finds him."

"And Gerald discovers the surveillance is compromised, abandons his communication channel, disappears into whatever infrastructure he's built, and we're back to hunting a ghost with no leads and no timeline."

"At least twins' would be alive and safe, Daphne. That matters more than catching him on our schedule."

"Agent Reeves is putting a full protective detail on the school. What this plan gives us that your plan doesn't is an ending. A real one. Gerald found, Gerald arrested, Gerald permanently removed from our lives. Your way keeps us running."

Xander's hands were shaking—a tremor moving through his fingers, up his wrists, into the set of his jaw.

"I can't send my daughters to school knowing someone is watching them through a scope, Daphne. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to grab them and run."

"I know, mine is screaming the same thing. But—" I reached across the counter and placed my hands over his. "Let's try it my way at least once, and we'll see how it goes."

He stared at our hands—mine steady over his trembling ones—for a long time. Then he closed his eyes and exhaled, and the breath carried years of conditioning out of his body, leaving behind the raw, frightened, trusting man underneath.

"Your way," he said. "But I'm not sleeping until this is over."

"Neither am I."

The three days were the longest of my life.

On the surface, everything was normal. Nina and Lisa went to school at their usual time, and I kissed them goodbye with a smile maintained through physical force.

I held my expression steady while my cardiovascular system operated at sustained adrenaline that made my vision pulse.

Underneath, a covert operation hummed with coordinated precision. David monitored Sentinel's communications in real time.

Agent Reeves's team maintained invisible surveillance of the surveillance—plainclothes agents tracking Sentinel's operatives, mapping their patterns.

Xander struggled visibly. He paced during school hours, checking his phone every four minutes. I found him in the twins' bedroom on the second night, sitting on the floor between their beds, holding a stuffed animal against his chest.

"They're safe," I told him from the doorway. "The detail reports every fifteen minutes. Nothing has changed."

On the third day, David called at 2:17 PM.

"We've got him. The email trace resolved to a VPN exit node that Reeves's team was able to correlate with cellular data from a specific geographic area. The location is a rental property—a farmhouse forty minutes northwest of the city, leased three months ago through a shell company that traces back to one of Victor Ashford's dormant holding accounts."

"Is Gerald there?"

"Unknown—no visual confirmation yet. But the property matches the communication pattern perfectly. Reeves is assembling a team for entry."

The FBI executed the search warrant at 6:40 PM. Gerald was not inside, but what they found was worse than his presence would have been.

The farmhouse's second bedroom had been converted into an operations room. Agent Reeves walked me through photographs from the scene while I gripped Xander's hand.

Photographs of our family—Xander and me leaving the apartment, the twins at school, my parents' car three hundred miles away. School schedules annotated in Gerald's handwriting, drop-off times circled in red.

Maps of our daily routes with alternates marked and timed. A dossier on our security detail, including photographs of individual agents and shift rotations.

And on the desk, beside a laptop that the forensic team was already imaging–a one-way plane ticket. The departure was scheduled for tomorrow.

"He was planning to leave," I said, the words forming slowly as the implications crystallized.

"That's our assessment," Reeves confirmed. "Whatever Gerald Morrison planned to do, he intended to do it within the next twenty-four hours and then vanish to a jurisdiction where we couldn't reach him."

I looked at Xander. His face was gray, his grip on my hand so tight the bones ached.

Twenty-four hours. Somewhere in the darkness between the farmhouse and the city, a man with photographs of our children and maps of their daily movements was running out of time and options.