Chapter 71: Golden Hour
The coffee was his sixth of the day and he’d stopped tasting them around the fourth.
Ryan sat at a corner table in a cafe somewhere between the federal building and nowhere in particular, a place that existed in every city block in Manhattan — small, independent, slightly too warm, the espresso machine loud enough to cover most conversations.
He’d walked in because his legs had decided to stop and his brain had needed somewhere to put itself.
He drank the black coffee slowly.
No cream, no sugar. He didn’t usually drink it this way. But the bitterness was doing something useful — cutting through the specific adrenaline residue of four hours in a government office answering questions from men who were very good at their jobs.
A battle won.
Not the war.
He put his phone on the table and looked at the unknown number texts again. Both of them, read so many times the words had lost their texture and become just shapes.
*You’re running out of time.*
He turned the phone face down.
The question wasn’t whether someone was watching — clearly someone was. The question was who had the specific combination of knowledge and motive to point federal agents at his bank account.
You needed to know the account existed, know what the deposits looked like, know enough to understand they were irregular, and care enough to act on it.
That wasn’t a random tip. That was someone with access or proximity or both.
James. His former boss, now engaged to Emma, who would know Ryan had left the company under bad terms and might have enough residual bitterness to make a call. Except James didn’t know about his bank account and wouldn’t have the means to access it.
Someone at the bank. Possible, but the texts had a personal quality — ’Russo’ specifically, not ’account holder’ or any of the neutral language a financial institution would use.
Someone connected to Diana. Someone who knew about the investment and didn’t like its terms or its implications.
He didn’t know. He turned the phone back over, opened his contacts, and started making calls.
Patricia first. Confirmed all the consulting contact verifications would hold. Both men had been reached, both had confirmed the informal work, both were prepared to speak to it if contacted.
She was thorough and unbothered and Ryan reminded himself to pay her well.
The legal firm next. Brief conversation with the junior partner handling Rebuild Tech’s documentation. Everything filed correctly, everything consistent, nothing that could be pulled apart under scrutiny.
He’d checked it three times before today and was now checking it a fourth time because he was sitting in a cafe on his sixth coffee with nowhere else to put his energy.
He made two more calls. Both short. Both confirming what he already knew.
When he put the phone down for the last time the sun had moved considerably and the cafe had turned over its afternoon crowd for the early evening one — people stopping on the way home, laptops opening, the temperature of the room changing slightly as the day shifted.
He ordered a seventh coffee, which was objectively too many, and sat with it.
His mind flashed with the image of Morales closing the folder.
’I think that’s probably a good place to pause for today.’
Not finished. Paused. There would be a second meeting. The consulting verifications would come back clean and they’d have to find a different angle or close the file. He was reasonably confident they’d find a different angle, because whoever had pointed them here had done so with conviction, and conviction without evidence didn’t stop — it looked harder.
He needed to know who it was.
He picked up his phone, scrolled to Diana’s number, and called.
She picked up on the first ring.
"Hey," he said.
"Afternoon, Mr. Russo." Her voice was professional register, precise and composed.
Ryan smiled despite himself. "We’re back to super professional today."
"I’m always professional."
"I could name a few exceptions."
"Ryan."
"Sorry, sorry." He leaned back in the chair. "I thought you’d have called to ask how it went."
A brief pause. "I didn’t want—"
"—to seem eager and unprofessional. God forbid that."
A sound that was almost a sigh. "Just tell me what happened."
He gave her the outline — the two agents, the approach, the documentation questions, the consulting verification, the way Morales had closed the folder. He kept it factual and brief without all details.
"It went alright," he said. "They had angles but I was prepared. I can’t go through all the details over the phone though — they might be listening."
"Your phone isn’t tapped, Ryan. You’re dealing with the IRS, not the CIA."
"I’d argue the IRS is more dangerous. At least the CIA has operational expenses. The IRS has all the time in the world." He paused. "Besides, the details are too much for a call. We should meet."
"Meet."
"Yeah. I’m in the city. Where are you."
"At the office."
"Perfect. I’ll be there in ten."
A pause that lasted exactly long enough to be deliberate. "Alright then."
---
It took closer to thirty minutes.
The sun was almost gone by the time he pushed through the lobby of Diana’s building, the sky outside doing the thing it did in the last minutes before dark — a deep amber fading at the edges, the city catching it and throwing it back in pieces off glass and steel.
The desk cleared him. He took the elevator to forty-seven.
The floor was quieter than it had been on his previous visits — most of the staff gone, the open workspace largely empty, the overhead lights dimmed to the evening setting. He walked through to the corridor and knocked once on Diana’s office door.
The electronic lock released.
He stepped inside.
The office was lit entirely by the last of the sunset through the floor to ceiling windows — gold and amber, the whole room warm with it. The city outside was transitioning, the first lights appearing in the buildings across the skyline.
Diana was at her desk.
Her hair had come partially loose from however she’d arranged it that morning — not disheveled, just a natural result of a full day, a few strands at the sides.
Her shirt had the top button open in a way that was entirely unremarkable at the end of a ten hour day. A pair of reading glasses sat on her face that Ryan was fairly certain were real reading glasses and was also fairly certain she knew the effect of.
She looked up when he came in and something moved through her expression briefly before her composure resettled over it.
Ryan was aware he didn’t look like he had at ten this morning.
The jacket was over his arm, had been since early afternoon.
His shirt was untucked, the collar button open, the tie loosened to the point of being decorative rather than functional. His hair had been running on its own authority since about noon.
He looked, in the warm amber light of her office at seven in the evening, like a different version of the man who’d walked into the IRS building with a folder and a suit.
Diana said, "Mr. Russo."
"Stop it," Ryan said immediately.
Something at the corner of her mouth. "Ryan." She adjusted her glasses. "I still think we could have handled this over the phone."
"We could have." He stepped further into the room. "But I wanted to see you."
Diana looked at him. "What does that mean."
"About the IRS situation. Felt like it warranted a face to face."
"Oh," she said.
He noted how she said it. The single syllable landing differently than it would have in a boardroom at ten in the morning.