Page 71 of Violent Possession

And in that, I was right. The moment he found Kirill, the interrogations of Ivan’s men began. Only later, seeing us together, did the disease of distrust spread.

Everything is going well. Almosttoowell.

Then the report from my head of security arrives. It’s concise, but one word irritates me:compromised.

“The asset was found in an alley behind the convenience store,” he says through the communicator, trying to keep his tone neutral, but there’s too much hesitation. “He was… emotionally compromised.”

I’m allergic to that word.Compromised. It’s a filter, not a fact. A soft interpretation, a layer of subjectivity over what should be concrete. I try to remember the last time I allowed such imprecision in my operations and conclude that I’venevertolerated it.

“Define ‘compromised,’” I say.

There’s a hesitation. “…He was crying, sir. He refused to move. We had to physically extract him, but without violent resistance.”

I hang up without responding.

Crying.Griffin. I try to imagine his face in an expression that goes beyond his usual combination of sarcastic calculation and bitterness. The concept of tears on Griffin’s face is soincongruous. Perhaps it’s a bought report? Or real, a performance by Griffin himself to manipulate my men? Genuine weakness? But I don’t work with “maybes”. I work with facts, derived from data, from images, from patterns. Not with tears. Not with “compromised”.

I open the surveillance network. First, the cameras in Griffin’s apartment. I see his message on my phone, the sardonic signature. I see him leaving the building, with long, confidentstrides, shoulders straight. I fast-forward the clips. He returns less than an hour later, accompanied by two of my men. His walk has changed; each step is heavy, his head is down, his face is swollen and pale, his cheekbones are wet with trails that even Sacramento’s dry weather couldn’t erase. The Griffin who returns is not the same one who left.

My head of security’s description was, if anything, anunderstatement.

I pull the reports from the last forty-eight hours, cross-referencing them with intercepted messages, calls, pings on the cell phones of all relevant people. There’s nothing unusual in the period before the event.

I expand my search to cameras scattered throughout the city, not just mine, but also public ones, those from other companies, and any private ones I bought at data auctions. I assemble a mosaic of images from around the convenience store in the hours before and after.

The visualization confirms: Griffin is followed by the black sedan with two of my men inside. He enters the convenience store, talks to the clerk.

I fast-forward the frames. Griffin looks back. He seems to have seen a ghost. He throws money on the counter, grabs the pack of cigarettes, and exits the camera’s view towards what looks like the beginning of a side door.

Here, the coverage ends. It’s a shadow, a strategic blind spot no more than ten meters wide. It’s irritating,humiliating, that a professional like me still depends on physical hardware and the residual limitations of the real world. The alley is out of reach of all lenses, except for a blurred reflection that appears, by chance, on the glass of the beverage refrigerator inside the store—an artifact, a coincidence, but enough to capture a silhouette: tall, thin, light hair. Exactly in the blind spot. On purpose? It’s not Griffin. It’s not one of my men.

I go back to the footage of the store’s facade. The black sedan remains parked for ten minutes until one of my men gets out. He checks the store, and then goes straight to the back—the way you exit when you don’t want to be seen. Then, in the cameras’ view, Griffin returns, followed by my man, with red eyes and the walk of someone who has lost something.

I replay the images in slow motion, analyzing the rhythm of the steps, the micro-gestures of the body, the exact time between each movement. Before leaving the camera’s field of vision, Griffin hesitated at the store door, looked around. But Griffin knows he’s always being watched. Still, he walked into the alley.

Why would Griffin, knowing the risk, agree to walk into a blind spot?

The traffic camera next to the alley is at the wrong angle. I try the warehouse one… and it’sstatic. Out of order for “maintenance”. Too convenient.

I pull the ambient audio from the surroundings. Not all cameras capture sound, and those that do only pick up traffic noise, a broken refrigerator, a bottle on the asphalt.

The alley file is a black box. I have the before and after, but not the main event.

Griffin met someone. Someone who managed to dismantle him in less than five minutes, someone professional enough to move through blind spots.

And I have no idea who it is beyond a vague silhouette. The lack of data is a threat.

I check the current footage. Griffin is, at this moment, being monitored by more than four cameras, in silence, sitting on the couch, staring at the wall like a prisoner in solitary confinement.

I want to ask how he is.

No. I stifle the idea. I need to understand what happened. Ivan wouldn’t be so careful, Vasily wouldn’t have the means to upset him like this. Not evenIwould.

I sigh, pressing my temples. This is a problem. If something really important had happened, would he have contacted me?

I force myself to bury that question. I have commitments and cannot cancel them without concrete evidence of a problem.

I get up from my chair for another sleepless night.