Oracle Veil

The Vanguard Logistics terminal sat on the south end of the Seagirt Marine Terminal like a bruise. Floodlights on forty-foot poles burned white against the black sky, killing the stars. The smell of the bay came off the water in cold waves. Diesel, brine, and something underneath both of them Miranda had never been able to name.

She pressed her back against the corrugated steel of the container stack and checked her watch. 1:54 am.

Bill was two feet away, binoculars up, watching the channel.

The radio on his belt was down to a whisper. The standby team, twelve agents and a Baltimore PD tactical unit, were staged three blocks east in a parking structure, engines cold. They'd been there since midnight. Everyone waiting on the Meridian Star.

"She's running late," Miranda said.

"She'll come." Bill didn't lower the binoculars.

Miranda pulled her jacket tighter. The October cold off the Patapsco had teeth, and she hadn't dressed for sitting still. She shifted her weight, rolled her neck, listened to the distant clang of a buoy somewhere out in the dark.

"You eat anything today?" Bill asked.

Miranda shifted in her seat.

Bill sighed.

How does he always know?

"I had a granola bar."

He lowered the binoculars and looked at her.

"What?" she said.

"A granola bar?"

"It was a big one."

He made a sound in his chest that wasn't quite a laugh. He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and produced a foil-wrapped sandwich, held it out without ceremony.

"Bill…"

"Jennifer made two. Take it."

She took it. Turkey and swiss, mustard, no tomato. She ate without talking. Bill went back to the binoculars.

That was the thing about working with him that she couldn't explain to people who hadn't experienced it.

Eighteen months we've been working together. He's never once mentioned anything he's done for me.

She watched him scan the channel. The gray at his temples had gotten more pronounced in the last year. This case did that. Seventeen months after they'd picked up the first thread, a money transfer flagged out of a shell account in Nicosia, running through two holding companies before it landed in a payroll account for a trucking firm in Dundalk. That thread had pulled, and kept pulling, and what unraveled was the largest integrated human trafficking network the bureau had documented in the western hemisphere. The women and girls moved like freight. Because to these people, that's exactly what they were.

"My father used to do that," she said.

"Do what."

"Just hand you food like it was nothing. Like a magician."

Bill was quiet for a moment. "Good man."

"He was."

Another silence. Comfortable. The kind that only happens when two people have spent enough bad hours together.

"Jennifer and I tried for a long time," he said. He wasn't looking at her. Still watching the channel. "To have kids."

Miranda didn't say anything.

"Went through the whole process. Twice." He lowered the binoculars and rested them against his chest. "It just wasn't in the cards."

She looked at him. He wasn't asking for anything, she could see that. He was just saying it the way you say things that have finally settled, after years of being too sharp to touch.

"I didn't know that," she said.

"Not something you put on the office bulletin board." He almost smiled. "She's good. We're good. We found our way." He glanced at her, brief and direct. "You remind me of her a little. When she was younger. That same..." He seemed to search for it. "Pain in the ass, that you can't help but like."

Miranda looked at the ground. "That's either a compliment or a warning."

"Both," he smiled. "Definitely both."

He raised the binoculars again.