Priya Holden, standing 4 feet behind him, heard those words. The upload indicator on her secondary device, invisible under her vest panel, had gone green 8 minutes earlier. The footage was already off her device and stored somewhere that was not accessible by any standing request from a precinct captain in Duval County. She looked at the road. She looked at the tree line.
She looked at the women. One in cuffs against a ruined car. One standing at the roadside with her hands visible and her face giving away nothing. She thought about a memo she'd received 6 months ago, an internal affairs inquiry about asset seizure discrepancies in her precinct. A memo that had been quietly retracted 2 weeks after it was issued.
A memo that she now noticed had referenced three LLC names, which were the same three LLC names she had just read upside down on the tabs of the folder Calhoun had taken from the black case. She thought about that memo for 11 more seconds. Then she pressed her hand flat against her vest, feeling the small shape of the secondary device. She made her decision. A white sedan had slowed on the opposite lane, then stopped.
The driver was a woman in her 60s, silver-cheeked, wearing a church hat on a Thursday for reasons known only to herself, had a phone raised at window height. She was recording. A pickup truck had stopped behind the sedan. The driver, a man in a contractor's vest, was already out of the cab with his own phone up. Calhoun noticed them.
He walked toward the road's edge. ""Move along. This is an active scene."" "The woman in the church hat did not move along. She lowered her window the rest of the way." "My nephew had his truck taken on this road," she said two years ago. "Cash in it, too.
Never saw either one again." Calhoun stopped walking. ""Ma'am, I need you to move your vehicle." "I'm on a public road," she said, "and I'm not breaking any law." She kept recording. A second vehicle had stopped behind the pickup.
Then a third until the road that had been empty 20 minutes ago now had a small stationary audience on its opposite shoulder and every one of them had a phone and none of them were moving. Calhoun walked back to Sharp. "Finish up, and someone get those civilians back." Okafor moved toward the road. Priya did not.
She stayed where she was, near the rear of the ghost, and watched Sharp pull the last of the interior paneling from the driver's door. The car had been open, searched, and partly dismantled. The module was destroyed. The case had been broken open. The two women stood at the roadside, one in cuffs, both composed, both watching Calhoun with a particular patience of people who are not waiting for rescue.
They are waiting for process. Calhoun came back to Nadia. He stood close, closer than professional distance, in that deliberate way that is not quite a physical action, but is meant to be felt as one. ""You want to tell me who you really are?"" "My identification is in your sergeant's hand," Nadia said. ""Your ID says you're a federal employee. It doesn't say much else."" "No," she agreed. "It doesn't."