“Comm check at oh-eight-hundred,” I said.
“I’ll be in your ear.”
The SUV pulled out at seven-oh-five. My phone buzzed.
Dane:I’m carrying you with me.
Farrow:Always there.
I pocketed the phone and went to find Wiley. He was already at the desk. Both laptops were open, and he had his hair swept back with his glasses on top of his head.
“You’re up early,” I said.
“Couldn’t sleep past four. I think I got something.”
He turned the left screen.
“The Onyx Bay vocabulary shift. I’ve been calling it a two-week shift. It isn’t. The shift happened in a window of about ninety minutes. It was October seventeenth, between two-fifteen and three-forty-five.”
He turned the second screen. It had Henry’s last email to Patterson dated two fifty-one p.m., October seventeenth.
“I cross-referenced his outbound traffic against vocabulary shifts in the channels going back two years. There are seven inflection points.”
“Henry triggered the network?”
Wiley nodded. “Henry was a tripwire, signaling Maria. She was watching his outbox. Every time he sent something operational, she pushed the network forward to the next phase.”
He pulled a fourth page from a stack on the floor.
“And I went back further. The drafting voice Köhler ID’d. It goes back to 2021 cleanly. There are fragments from 2018 and 2019 that I can’t authenticate to the same standard, but they match.”
“Meaning?”
“Onyx Bay has been live since at least 2020, possibly 2018. Maria has been running it for three to five years. The wedding has been on her calendar for eighteen months. She’s been building around this target the entire time.”
I walked to the dormer. The sun was up. I thought about Köhler sayingHenry was a tool.
I turned back.
“How fast can The Guardians find her people inside the house?”
“Not fast enough and not with traditional tradecraft. We need a name from inside, and we need it today. Cabot’s the only door.”
“And he’s on the way,” I said. “Send Eamon what you have.”
“Sent at five-fifteen.”
I checked my watch. It was seven-fifty-two.
I went down the hall to the comm station. At eight on the dot, I tapped.
“Dane.”
“Copy. Woods Hole. Cabot’s eating a bagel that he doesn’t want.”
“Wiley broke something. Maria’s been at it for at least five years. Henry’s outbox triggered every operational phase shift.”
A beat of silence passed between us. “Eamon has it?” Dane asked.