Chapter 9 Nine
Chapter Nine
Webb's office looked exactly the same as it had two days ago, which Ethan was beginning to think was intentional. Nothing added, nothing moved, the whiteboard still carrying its ghost marks from old cases. The kind of room that told visitors this was a place for work and nothing else.
Webb was already at his desk when Ethan arrived, a manila folder open in front of him and a coffee going cold beside it. He looked up, assessed Ethan the way he seemed to assess everything, and pointed at the chair across from him.
"Sit down. The information you sent last night changed things significantly."
Ethan sat. "How significantly?"
"The routing numbers you gave me — I was going to spend three weeks tracing those through public filings and correspondent bank records." Webb turned the folder around so Ethan could see the top page. "Someone already did that work. These numbers map directly to two shell entities registered in the Cayman Islands and one in Luxembourg. Both Cayman entities dissolved eighteen months ago, which is not a coincidence. That's cleanup. Someone inside Luther Holdings knew an investigation was possible and started tidying."
"Which means someone tipped them off."
"Which means someone tipped them off," Webb confirmed. "And that person is either still inside the company or was paid well enough to disappear quietly." He leaned back. "Where did you get those numbers, Ethan?"
Ethan had prepared for this question. "Someone who used to work adjacent to Luther Holdings. They came to me. I can't give you a name because I don't have one — it was anonymous, delivered in writing."
Webb looked at him for a long moment. The look of a man who had spent eleven years in federal service and knew exactly what a partial truth sounded like. But he also knew, apparently, when pushing would cost more than accepting.
"Fine," he said. "The information is good regardless of the source. But if this goes anywhere formal — and I mean a DA's office, a federal filing, anywhere with a courtroom attached — the sourcing becomes a problem we'll have to solve."
"I understand. Keep building. I'll work on the sourcing problem separately."
Webb nodded and closed the folder. "There's something else. Gerald Luther filed an amended return with the SEC last week. Minor adjustment, publicly visible, looks routine. But the timing relative to what you've given me suggests he's not tidying up because he thinks he's clean. He's tidying up because he thinks someone is looking."
Ethan absorbed that. "He doesn't know who."
"Not yet. But he's cautious by nature — that's how he's kept this clean for thirty years. If he gets even a suggestion that there's a live investigation, he'll accelerate the cleanup and we lose the evidence trail." Webb picked up his coffee, looked at it, and set it back down. "I need sixty more days without any external pressure on the Luther name. No lawsuits, no public moves, nothing that makes the newspapers."
"Sixty days," Ethan said.
"Can you manage that?"
Ethan thought about Lawrence. About the civil suit that had been quietly settled. About the fact that somewhere in this city a former employee had been paid to go away and had gone. "Yes," he said.
He left Webb's office and took a cab directly to the FiDi building.
Shelly was already there, standing in the lobby in a dark coat with a leather notebook under her arm, looking like she had been running offices for twenty years. The building manager, a thin man named Cortes, shook Ethan's hand and led them both upstairs.
The space was good. Ethan walked it slowly — corner office, open floor for a small team, a meeting room with a glass wall that looked out over the financial district. The kind of address that preceded you into rooms. Cortes talked about the fit-out allowance and the lease terms and Ethan half-listened and watched Shelly instead, who was measuring the windows with her eyes and making notes in her leather book without being asked.
She caught him looking and raised an eyebrow.
He turned back to Cortes. "We'll take it. Two year lease, full fit-out allowance, and I want access from next Monday."
Cortes blinked. He had clearly prepared for a negotiation. "I'll need to confirm with the building owner—"
"Today," Ethan said. Not unkindly. Just clearly.
Cortes confirmed by three in the afternoon.
On the cab ride back uptown Shelly sat beside him with her notebook open, already listing what the office needed. Furniture, a phone system, a registered business name, a basic website, stationery. She had thought of things he hadn't and was noting them in a handwriting so precise it looked like a font.
"What are we calling it?" she asked without looking up.
He had thought about this. Not long, but enough. "Cole Advisory."
She wrote it down. "Simple. Clean. It doesn't tell anyone anything they don't need to know."
"That's the idea."
She clicked her pen closed and looked out the window. "Webb called me," she said.
Ethan turned to look at her.
"He wanted to verify your character. Basic due diligence, he said. I told him you were the most careful person I'd ever met and that if he was working with you he should trust the process and not ask too many questions about the method." She paused. "Was that right?"
"That was exactly right."
She nodded once, satisfied, and opened her notebook again.
That evening Ethan sat at his desk with the system open and pulled up Daniel Cho's entry for the third time. He had been circling it for two days, picking it up and setting it back down. Webb needed sixty days of silence. He also needed a clean evidence trail that didn't rely on an anonymous system as its source. Cho was the bridge between those two problems — a real person, inside a real institution, who had seen real documents.
The question was not whether to approach him. The question was how to do it without frightening him, and without making Ethan into the kind of person who pressured a man with a sick daughter into doing something that could cost him everything.
He stared at the entry.
Then he opened a new tab on his laptop, separate from the system entirely, and started researching Renwick Capital the old fashioned way. Public filings, press releases, staff profiles on the company website. If he was going to approach Cho it would be with an offer, not a threat, and the offer needed to be real enough that saying yes felt like safety rather than risk.
An hour in he found something that the system had not flagged.
Renwick Capital was currently under internal review following an HR complaint filed six weeks ago. The details were not public but the review itself had been disclosed in a routine regulatory filing. Internal reviews at financial institutions created a specific kind of atmosphere — people watching each other, management distracted, compliance officers suddenly aware of how exposed their paper trail made them.
Ethan leaned back and looked at the ceiling.
Daniel Cho was not just an asset sitting on useful information. He was a man who was probably already uncomfortable, already aware that his position carried risk, already calculating quietly whether loyalty to a firm that had never guaranteed him anything was worth what it might eventually cost.
That changed the approach entirely.
Ethan closed the laptop and picked up his new phone. He did not call Cho — not yet. Instead he called Webb and left a short voicemail saying he had a potential clean source and would have more in a week.
Then he opened the system and checked the mission log.
[Mission 3: D-Rank Dungeon — unlocking in 19 hours.]
One level higher than the last. He noted it, closed the screen, and went to make coffee. The city glittered beyond the window, indifferent as always, and somewhere inside it the pieces were moving into position one careful step at a time.
