Chapter 8 - Betrayal
Security guards swarmed us within seconds, pulling Sarah and me into the lobby of the Times building, slamming the heavy glass doors shut behind us. Alarms blared. People shouted into radios. Outside, police sirens wailed, growing closer by the second.
Sarah was shaken but unhurt. She stood, brushing glass from her coat, her face pale but her eyes already hard with determination. “They’re not gonna stop us,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Not now. Not when we’re this close.”
She led me upstairs to the newsroom — a massive, open floor filled with hundreds of desks, phones ringing, people shouting, the air electric with energy. She herded me into a glass-walled office in the corner, where three senior editors were already waiting, their faces grim.
For the next six hours, I was interrogated. They went through every document, every line of the ledger, every file on the laptop, cross-referencing, verifying, fact-checking. Sarah’s team worked like a well-oiled machine, pulling court records, financial statements, old news articles, building the story piece by piece.
By ten p.m., they were satisfied.
“It’s solid,” the executive editor said, leaning back in his chair. He looked older than he had when we’d started, the weight of what they were about to do settling on his shoulders. “Every check passes. Grimes is dirty. Vandenberg is going down. We publish at midnight.”
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. It was almost over.
I stepped out of the office to call Marnie, to tell her it was done, when my phone rang. The burner. Unknown number.
I answered, my hand already reaching for the Glock in my waistband. “Hello?”
“Julian.” Voss’s voice. She sounded exhausted. Hurt. “Where are you?”
“New York. At the Times. We’re publishing everything at midnight. Grimes. Vandenberg. All of it.”
Silence on the line. Then, in a voice barely above a whisper: “No. Julian, you can’t. It’s a trap.”
I froze. “What?”
“Sarah Chen,” she said. “She’s not clean. Grimes got to her six months ago. Threatened her family. She’s been feeding him information on the investigation ever since. She’s not there to help you. She’s there to get the evidence and destroy it. And to make sure you never talk again.”
My blood turned to ice. I looked through the glass wall of the office. Sarah was standing by the printer, talking on her phone, her back to me. She glanced over her shoulder and saw me watching. She smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes.
“The shooting this afternoon,” Voss continued. “That was Grimes’s backup plan. If Sarah couldn’t get you alone, they were gonna take you out on the steps. She probably tipped them off to when we’d arrive.”
“How do you know this?” I asked, my voice tight.
“Because I just took down Grimes’s communications team in a raid on a house in Jersey,” she said. “We have the texts. The calls. Everything. She’s dirty, Julian. You have to get out of there. Now. Before she takes the evidence and disappears.”
I hung up. I slipped the phone back into my pocket, never taking my eyes off Sarah. She was still on the phone, but now she was walking toward the office. Toward the laptop. Toward the ledger.
I moved fast. I stepped back into the office, grabbing the laptop case from the table, shoving the ledger inside. The editors looked up, surprised.
“Julian?” one of them said. “What’s wrong?”
“Sarah Chen is working for Grimes,” I said. My voice was steady, despite the panic roaring in my ears. “She’s been feeding him information. The shooting today? That was her. I’m taking the evidence. You’ll get copies — but not through her.”
Before they could react, I turned and ran for the exit. Sarah saw me go. She shouted something, dropping her phone, and sprinted after me. But I had a head start. I wove through the desks, jumping over cables, ignoring the shouts of reporters as I barreled toward the stairs.
I burst out into the hallway, slamming the stairwell door behind me, and ran down the steps as fast as I could. Behind me, I heard the door crash open. Sarah’s voice, calling my name.
I hit the lobby running. The security guards at the front desk reached for me, but I dodged them, throwing my shoulder into the heavy glass exit door. It burst open. I stumbled out onto the sidewalk, gasping for air, and sprinted toward the nearest cross street.
A black Town Car — Sarah’s car — peeled out from the curb ahead of me, cutting me off. The driver’s door flew open. It wasn’t her usual driver. It was a man I recognized from the bank in Trenton. One of Vandenberg’s men.
He pulled a gun.
I dove sideways into an alley just as he fired, the bullet slamming into the brick wall beside my head. I scrambled to my feet, running deeper into the dark, the laptop case bouncing against my back. The alley was a dead end, blocked by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
I turned. The man was there, blocking the entrance, his gun leveled at my chest. Behind him, Sarah appeared, breathing hard.
“Give it to me, Julian,” she said. She had a gun now, too. Small, silver, held steady in both hands. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be. Grimes will pay you well. More than you’ve ever seen. You and your family can disappear. Start over. No one has to get hurt.”
“Like you hurt my father?” I said. My back was against the fence. There was nowhere to go. “You sold him out. You sold everyone out. For what? Money? Fear?”
Her face twisted. “They had my daughter, Julian. Okay? They were gonna kill her. What was I supposed to do?”
“Anything but this,” I said.
The man behind her shifted his weight, his finger tightening on the trigger. “Enough. Shoot him. Take the case. Grimes is waiting.”
Sarah hesitated. Her eyes met mine. For a split second, I saw it — the guilt. The shame. The knowledge that she’d thrown away everything she’d ever stood for.
Then her expression hardened. She raised the gun.
“Goodbye, Julian,” she said.
Before she could pull the trigger, a shot rang out from the roof above. The man beside her jerked, a hole appearing in his forehead, and collapsed. Sarah screamed, spinning around, her gun flying from her hand.
Voss dropped from the fire escape above, landing in a crouch between Sarah and me, her rifle still raised. She was wearing body armor over a black tactical suit, her face streaked with dirt and blood, a cut above her left eye.
“FBI,” she said, her voice cold. “Drop the weapon, Chen. It’s over.”
Sarah stared at her, at the dead man on the ground, then slowly raised her hands. “I want a lawyer,” she said.
“Good,” Voss said. She nodded at me. “You okay?”
I nodded, my legs still shaking. “Yeah. Thanks.”
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“Elena Voss?” Sarah said, her voice shaking. “Grimes said you were dead.”
Voss smiled, a sharp, dangerous thing. “Lots of people have said that about me. Most of them are in jail now.” She nodded at the entrance to the alley, where blue lights were flashing, growing closer. “Backup’s here. They’ll take Chen. We need to go. Grimes knows we have the evidence. He’s gonna run. And we have to catch him before he does.”
