Chapter 290: Chapter 292: : The Thread
MARCUS’S POV
It was the book.
He kept coming back to the book.
Everything else Victoria had done was clean. The server access....routed through three servers, wall at the third layer. The car outside the hospital registered to a rental company under a name that didn’t exist anymore. The hotel....cash, no forwarding, gone. Claire Mercer’s source trail encrypted communications, nothing that pointed anywhere useful, he’d spent four days on it and hit the same wall every time.
But the book.
The book was different.
Not because she’d been careless with it. She hadn’t. She’d been careful with it the same way she’d been careful with everything. But the book was a different kind of move....not operational, not strategic in the cold clinical way of the server access or the article. The book was personal. It was the move of someone who wanted Aria to know she’d been seen.
Personal moves left different traces than operational ones.
He pulled up everything he had on it again.
Rare pharmacology text. Chinese botanical medicine. Print run of approximately two hundred copies, 1987, a university press in Hong Kong that had been defunct for fifteen years. Out of print and largely unfindable through standard channels.
He’d already run the standard channels.
He went back further.
The specialist rare book network was not something most people knew existed.
It wasn’t hidden exactly.....it just operated in a register that most people didn’t have access to. A series of dealers who communicated through a private forum, buying and selling texts that didn’t appear in any mainstream catalogue, matching obscure requests with obscure inventory. Marcus had used it twice before for unrelated investigations.
He knew how it worked.
He submitted a request to three dealers who specialised in medical and botanical texts. Not identifying himself. Just.....asking. Describing the book. Asking whether anyone had sourced a copy in the last three months.
Two of them came back with nothing.
The third came back in four hours.
The dealer’s name was Bernard Lau.
He operated out of a shop in Wan Chai, Hong Kong, that sold mostly academic texts and that had a back catalogue of rare medical publications that he’d been building for thirty years. He was seventy one years old and had an email response time of under an hour at all hours of the day which Marcus found both impressive and slightly concerning.
Bernard had sourced a copy of the book.
Eight weeks ago.
He remembered it specifically because the text was genuinely rare.....he’d only seen two copies pass through his hands in thirty years.....and because the request had come through an intermediary he didn’t usually deal with. A proxy service out of Singapore that he’d used twice before, legitimate, the kind of arrangement that was common in the rare book world when buyers wanted privacy.
The proxy service was called Meridian.
Marcus looked at that name for a moment.
He knew Meridian.
Not because he’d used them. Because eighteen months ago he’d been doing a background sweep on Alexander Wei’s financial infrastructure....standard procedure when someone entered Aria’s life.....and Meridian had appeared in the edges of it. Not connected to Wei directly. Connected to one of the holding companies in his network.
He sat back.
He made himself think it through carefully before he went further. Meridian was a legitimate proxy service used by hundreds of clients. The connection to Wei’s network was peripheral.....the kind of thing that showed up in a thorough background check and meant almost nothing on its own.
Almost.
He kept pulling.
Meridian’s client list was not public.
He didn’t need it to be.
He needed one thing. He needed to know whether the purchase of Bernard Lau’s book had been made through Meridian’s standard client channel or through their private arrangement service, which operated differently and had a different payment structure.
He found out through a contact in Singapore who owed him considerably more than a favour.
Private arrangement service.
Private arrangement service clients had a different onboarding process. More verification. More documentation. They required a proof of identity that standard clients didn’t.
His contact couldn’t give him the identity documentation.
But he could tell Marcus when the account had been opened.
Seven months ago.
One month after Victoria Ashford had arrived in Sydney.
Marcus looked at the screen.
He thought about a woman doing physiotherapy exercises in a Sydney apartment. Learning patience. Building something carefully. Setting up infrastructure she was going to need when she was ready.
She’d opened the Meridian account in Sydney.
She’d used it to buy the book eight weeks later, after she’d landed in New York, because she didn’t want the purchase traced to a New York location.
She’d thought proxy plus eight weeks plus international routing was enough distance.
It was almost enough.
Almost.
He opened a fresh document.
He started writing.
He called Damien at eleven PM.
"I have her," he said.
The line was quiet for a second.
"Tell me," Damien said.
He told him. The book, Bernard Lau, Meridian, the Sydney account opened seven months ago. The chain of it.....each link thin on its own, all of them together forming something that held.
When he finished Damien was quiet for a moment.
"Is it provable," he said.
"Not in a courtroom," Marcus said. "Not yet. The links are circumstantial individually. Together they’re compelling but a good lawyer dismantles compelling." He paused. "It’s enough to know. It’s not enough to move on."
"What do we need."
"One more link," Marcus said. "Something that puts her name directly on the Meridian account. Right now we have timing and pattern and reasonable inference." He paused. "I need something that isn’t reasonable inference."
Damien was quiet.
"How long," he said.
"I’m already working on it." Marcus looked at his screen. "Forty eight hours. Maybe less."
"And in the meantime."
"In the meantime she doesn’t know we have this much." Marcus paused. "She thinks she’s invisible. She checked out of the hotel thinking she’d covered everything. She hasn’t covered everything." He let that sit for a second. "That’s the advantage. She doesn’t know the book was a mistake."
