turned a blind eye because the results served his ambitions. Miller was not yet afraid for his freedom, not in the way O'Grady would soon be afraid, but he was afraid for his pension, for his reputation, for the career he had built by never asking how the numbers were obtained.
"Last chance," Miller said, but his voice had lost some of its force. It sounded less like a command now and more like a man trying to convince himself that he still had a choice. "Pack it up. Get out. Or face the consequences."
Carter did not pack it up. He did not get out. He tapped the screen once more, and the media player interface expanded to fill the tablet, and a thumbnail appeared, a still image from a camera mounted inside a car, showing a dark highway and rain and the faint reflection of red and blue lights. He held the tablet so that Miller and O'Grady could both see the image, and he waited, just a beat, letting them look at it, letting the familiarity of it register. O'Grady's face, which had been flushed, began to pale around the edges. He leaned forward, squinting at the small screen, as if he could make the image go away by looking at it more closely.
"What is that?" O'Grady asked, and his voice was thinner now, less certain. "Where did you get that?"
Carter did not answer him. He did not need to answer him yet. The answer would be in the video itself, in the timestamp, in the GPS coordinates, in the telemetry, in the wide-angle lens that had seen his hand go into his raincoat pocket and come out holding a bag he had not found but brought with him. Carter's silence was deliberate, and Cynthia understood it, because she had used silence the same way in interrogation rooms of her own, letting a suspect fill the quiet with his own fear, letting him imagine the worst version of what was coming and then showing him that the worst version was, in fact, accurate.
"Please," Carter said, gesturing with his free hand toward the two empty metal chairs on the far side of the table, the chairs that faced the mirror and the wall where the video would soon be projected, "hold your questions until the end of the presentation."
It was a polite sentence, and it was also a complete reversal of the room's power. An hour ago, O'Grady had told Cynthia to sit, and she had sat. Now Carter was telling O'Grady and Miller to sit, and the fact that he could say it