From A Producer To A Global Superstar

Michael had stopped asking whether Silas could still be trusted.

The question had become less useful with every passing day.

Silas was in custody. Michael was also in police custody but still dealing with investigations that were spreading into parts of his business he had spent years keeping away from public attention. Whatever trust had existed between them had already been damaged long before the current crisis. Neither man was going to repair that now.

What mattered was information.

Michael sat in a "private room' his people had secured for him, in the station with two laptops open and a printed map spread across the table. The room was quiet except for the air-conditioning and the occasional sound of a phone vibrating somewhere outside.

Across the table, one of his senior men was waiting for instructions.

"Put everything from the courier investigation on the screen," Michael said.

The man connected his laptop to the larger monitor.

A second call was already open. Silas's people had sent their material through an encrypted channel, and Michael had insisted that both sides work from the same information rather than continue investigating separately.

For several minutes, nobody spoke.

The first set of files showed the replacement courier's movements. His name was not particularly useful. He was one of several people who accepted anonymous delivery work through intermediaries and had no meaningful connection to the organizations involved.

Michael read through the report carefully.

"He still says he was given the package by a woman."

"Yes."

"And he never opened it?"

"He says he didn't. Silas's men reached the same conclusion. They questioned him before we did."

Michael looked up from the report. "Before us?"

"Yes."

That detail bothered him.

He already knew Silas's people had been investigating the courier. The confirmation was useful, but it also meant there was very little left to gain from questioning him again.

"What about the drop?"

The screen changed.

The location appeared.

It was an ordinary place in a quiet part of the city, far enough from the main roads that there was little reason for anyone to spend time there. The courier had been instructed to leave the packet there and walk away.

Michael studied the map.

"There are cameras."

"Several."

"Anything useful?"

"Not really."

A second report appeared. The camera positions were marked around the location.

One camera covered part of the road. Another showed the entrance to a nearby property. A third caught a section of the street from too far away.

The footage had already been reviewed.

The courier appeared.

He left the packet.

He walked away.

Later, someone came into the area.

The image was too poor to identify the person.

Michael watched the footage twice.

"Vehicle?"

"We can't confirm one. There are several vehicles in the area during the relevant period, but none can be tied to the collection."

"Face?"

"Nothing."

"Plate?"

"Nothing useful."

Michael leaned back in his chair and looked at the frozen image on the monitor.

The person who collected the packet had been careful.

Or lucky.

He had spent enough years working with people who understood surveillance to know that the difference between the two was sometimes impossible to establish afterward.

One of the men at the table said, "We can keep working through the cameras."

"You can," Michael replied. "But I don't think that's where we're going to find the answer after sll this is not the irst tome we are analyzing thesamefootage we have to change strategy."

The room became quiet again.

Michael reached for the printed map and moved it closer.

"We know where the courier left it. We know roughly when he left. We know the person who collected it came afterward. What we don't know is where that person came from."

His man looked at the map again.

"You want the surrounding area?"

"I want everything. Traffic cameras. Phones that were active nearby. Vehicles that entered and left. Anything unusual around the time the packet was collected."

"That's a lot of data."

"Then start with the time window."

The man made a note.

Michael continued, "Don't search for someone carrying a package. Search for someone who had no obvious reason to be there and suddenly had one."

That changed the investigation.

Instead of staring at the same useless camera footage, his people began reconstructing the area around the drop.

They looked at mobile activity.

They checked traffic patterns.

They compared vehicles that had remained in the area longer than expected with those that simply passed through.

Most of it led nowhere.

People lived nearby. People drove through. Delivery workers came and went. Someone stopped at a shop. A taxi waited for several minutes before leaving. A resident returned home during the same period.

Nothing stood out.

Michael remained at the table while the reports came in.

On another screen, Silas's people were doing much the same thing.

The cooperation was still uncomfortable. Michael could see that from the way information was being shared. Each side gave enough to prove they were working, but neither side volunteered anything that was not necessary.

It was understandable.

Silas and Michael had spent years keeping certain resources away from each other. Even now, with both of them in serious trouble, old habits had not disappeared.

Michael did not care.

As long as they continued sending useful information, he could tolerate it.

Almost an hour passed before one of his men returned with a different report.

"We found something."

Michael looked toward him.

"Not the person," the man added quickly. "A device."

The screen changed.

A location appeared on a map.

"What device?"

"An old handset. It was active around the area during the collection window. It wasn't registered under a real name, and it went offline afterward."

Michael studied the information.

"How did you find it?"

"It was discarded later. We recovered the device and pulled what we could."

"Where was it discarded?"

"A residential area."

The map zoomed out.

The distance between the drop location and the residential area was not particularly large, but it was not close enough to make the answer obvious.

Michael asked for the movement history.

The device had been active before the packet collection, disappeared from the relevant area, and later appeared in another part of the city.

Nothing about that alone proved anything.

It was simply another piece.

"Can we identify who used it?"

"Not directly. The registration was false, and the handset had been wiped. But we recovered enough location information to narrow the area."

"How narrow?"

The man brought up another screen.

Several streets appeared.

Michael stared at them for a moment.

"That's still too many people."

"We're working on that."

"Do it we have.a system that would narrow the search for us to people we suspect or their subordinate."

The investigation continued.

The device had been used briefly and carefully. Whoever owned it had not used it for normal communication. There were few records and almost no personal information.

This was the phone used to cut the communication from M and th3 original carrier so this was a huge lead in a way.

That made the device interesting.

People who carried ordinary phones left ordinary traces.

This one did not.

Michael asked his people to compare the device's movement with the movements of vehicles and other phones in the same period.

Several possibilities disappeared.

Then several more.

Eventually the search area became smaller.

A residential complex appeared on the screen.

"There's something else," the investigator said.

Michael waited.

"We have a likely user as she leaves the closest to the area and is the suspect security personnel.

"Who?"

The investigator opened another file.

A photograph appeared.

Michael stared at the woman for several seconds.

He knew her.

Not personally.

But he had seen her before.

She was one of Dayo's security personnel.

The image had been taken during a public appearance months earlier. She stood several steps behind Dayo, dressed plainly, watching the people around him rather than the cameras.

Michael did not speak immediately.

His man looked at him. "You recognize her?"

"Yes."

"She's with Dayo."

Michael looked back at the photograph.

The connection was too clean to ignore, but it was not clean enough to prove anything.

That distinction mattered.

He had already considered Dayo.

Dayo had become impossible to ignore over the past few years. He had built a record label that now operated across several markets in the world witg his artist breaking recirds in their various ground. His technology interests had grown alongside the music business. His restaurants had expanded. His relationships with people in government and business had given him access that most artists could not claim.

More importantly, attempts to get inside his systems had repeatedly failed.

Michael had seen people underestimate Dayo before.

He had made that mistake himself once... Maybe more than once.

The young artist had survived attacks that should have damaged him badly. When pressure came from one direction, he somehow seemed prepared from another. Information appeared at inconvenient moments. People who expected him to retreat often found him moving forward instead.

Michael had never been able to understand the pattern completely.

Now one of Dayo's people had appeared somewhere inside the trail leading to the packet.

He picked up the phone.

"Send this to Silas."

His man hesitated.

"How much?"

"Everything."

The file went through.

Michael waited.

A message came several minutes later.

Silas wanted to speak.

The call was routed through the same secure channel they had been using.

Michael answered.

Silas's voice came through quietly.

"I saw the photograph."

Michael looked at the woman on the screen.

"You know her?"

"No. But I know who she works for."

They both for a bit and said. "Dayo."

"Yes."

Michael turned the photograph toward the men in the room even though Silas could not see the movement.

"The device was active around the collection. It was later found in a residential area connected to her."

Silas was silent for a moment.

"Connected how?"

"She lives there."

That changed the weight of the information.

Michael heard papers moving on Silas's side.

"How certain are you?"

"Certain enough to investigate. Not certain enough to accuse."

Silas agreed.

Michael understood why.

They had already learned the danger of assuming too much from incomplete evidence.

The packet itself had been altered.

Michael's name had been added.

Evidence against Silas had been increased.

Neither man had ordered that version of the operation.

They were looking for the person who had done it.

Dayo being connected to the collection did not automatically mean Dayo had created the entire operation.

Silas spoke again.

"What do you know about the woman?"

"Security. She has been around him for some time."

"How close?"

"Close enough that she has handled his personal security."

Silas was quiet again.

Michael looked through the rest of the file.

There were photographs from airports, concerts, offices, restaurants, and public events. The woman appeared in several of them. She was rarely at the center of the frame, but she was there.

Always close to Dayo as a person so the chances that she was the one was there.

Michael understood why the discovery bothered him.

The person who collected the packet had not looked important on camera.

That was probably the point.

Silas finally asked, "Why would Dayo need the file?"

Michael did not answer immediately.

That was the problem.

He could think of reasons upon reason after all he was knew exactly how he had done to Dayo.

Dayo had already benefited from the collapse of several powerful people. He had every reason to dislike Michael. Their interests had crossed before, and Michael knew Dayo had been affected by the pressure coming from his side.

But there was something else.

The evidence had not simply exposed Silas.

It had damaged Michael too.

If Dayo had arranged the entire operation, then he had done something extremely calculated. He had found a way to hurt both men at the same time while making the evidence appear to come from somewhere else.

Michael looked again at the photograph.

"Maybe he has been preparing for us."

Silas did not respond immediately.

Michael continued, "Think about it. He has survived everything we've thrown at him. We've tried to get into his systems. We haven't managed it. We've pressured people around him. We've attacked parts of his business. He keeps moving."

"And you think this is part of the same thing."

"I think we should stop treating it as a coincidence."

Silas remained quiet.

Michael could hear the faint noise of the facility around him through the phone. A door opened somewhere. Someone spoke in the distance.

When Silas finally answered, his voice was measured.

"I'm not saying you're wrong."

"You don't have to."

"We still don't have proof."

"I know."

"And if we're wrong?"

"Then we find that out before we do anything and its not like we needed any reason to do what we have been doing for what he had."

Silas accepted that as Michael said the truth they wanted what Dayo had which was why they attacked him and that was the ability to blow almost anything, so never needed a reason to attack.

Michael appreciated the answer more than he expected.

Neither of them could afford another mistake.

He looked at the photograph one last time.

Dayo stood beside the woman in the image, smiling toward a crowd while she watched the people around him this was one of many pictures they have in their file.

Michael had spent years studying powerful men.

He knew how they protected themselves.

He knew how they hid money, how they moved information, how they surrounded themselves with people who could take risks for them.

Dayo had built the same kind of protection, only differently.

The difference was that Michael had never fully understood where Dayo's reach ended.

Now they had found one small piece of it.

Silas spoke again.

"What do you want done?"

Michael turned toward the investigator who had found the device.

"Pull everything we can on Dayo's security team. Start with her. I want her movements around the date of the collection, where she went afterward, and whether the device was ever active near her home."

The investigator wrote it down.

Silas added, "And don't approach her."

Michael paused.

"Agreed."

"If she knows anything, we don't want her disappearing before we understand what she knows or informing Dayo as that would spoil our plans of surprise."

Michael looked at the photograph again.

"Then we watch."

"Alright update me if there's anything new."

The call ended.

For a while, Michael remained seated.

The room had changed without anyone saying much. An hour earlier, they had been looking for a stranger who had collected a packet from an empty-looking location.

Now there was a possible connection to one of the men Michael had already considered dangerous.

Dayo.

The name had been sitting somewhere in Michael's mind for a long time.

He had never had enough reason to bring it to the center of the investigation.

Until now.

His people continued working through the information. More files appeared on the screens. Security records, public appearances, travel movements, known associates, company structures, and old reports were pulled together.

Michael stopped them before the work became scattered.

"We're not looking for gossip."

Everyone looked toward him.

"I want facts. Where he goes, who works for him, who handles his security, who has access to him, and what changed around the time this happened. Don't fill the report with things that don't matter."

They went back to work.

Michael stood and walked toward the window.

Outside, traffic continued through the afternoon. People were going home, going to work, meeting friends, buying food, living lives that had nothing to do with the problems inside the room.

He envied them for a moment.

Then the thought passed.

His empire was already collapsing.

Silas's was collapsing with it.

Neither man was in a position to rebuild what they had lost, at least not now. The investigations had gone too far, and too many people had started talking.

That left one question worth answering.

Who had started all of this?

Michael had believed the answer was somewhere inside the network they had already built.

Now he was no longer sure.

Perhaps the person had been outside it all along.

Perhaps they had been watching them.

Perhaps Dayo had nothing to do with it.

Michael knew better than to decide before the evidence was complete.

Still, the possibility had become too serious to dismiss.

He turned back toward the room.

"Find out everything about what that man is doing currently."

Nobody asked which man.

They already knew.

Michael's people returned to the investigation, pulling together every piece of information they could find about Dayo and the people closest to him.

For the first time since the packet disappeared, Michael and Silas were no longer searching for an unknown enemy.

They had a name.

Dayo.

Whether that name belonged to the person responsible or simply led them toward another dead end was still unknown.

But Michael intended to find out.