Chapter 8

It was past midnight and Freen was losing her mind.

Not literally. She was too disciplined for that. But the document in front of her – Admissibility of Documentary Evidence Under Section 226 of the Criminal Procedure Code – had broken her in a way that three days in a jungle without sleep had not.

She read the paragraph again.

Then again.

She understood individual words. Document.Admissible. Court. The words were fine. It was when they were arranged in this particular order, in these particular sentences, that they stopped meaning anything. Legal writing was its own language and she had not learned it and three days of reading was apparently not enough to learn it.

She made a note in the margin. What does this mean. Then she looked at the note and crossed it out because it was not a useful note.

She turned the page.

Her phone buzzed. Nam.

threat assessment update?

Freen looked at the files spread across her apartment floor. She had brought everything home – the full Viroj bundle, the threat log Charlotte had compiled, the background documents on the network. She had been at it since eight. It was now twelve forty.

She typed back: working on it. case is bigger than briefing suggested.

Three dots. Then: how much bigger

Freen looked at the page in front of her. It was a financial transfer record. Part of a chain that Becky had been building for eight months – money moving through shell companies, through procurement channels, through accounts that looked completely ordinary until you put them all together and saw the shape of what they were doing.

She had understood that part. The map of it. The structure.

It was the legal arguments around it that lost her entirely.

significantly, she typed back. talk tomorrow.

She put the phone down and picked up the next document.

This one had photographs attached.

Crime scene photographs first – warehouses, shipping containers, equipment that meant nothing to her without context. She moved through them quickly. Then court photographs. Filed as part of the evidence record, taken during earlier hearings.

Becky in court.

Freen stopped.

There were four photographs. Different hearings, different dates. In all of them Becky was mid-argument – caught by the court photographer at various moments during the proceedings. In the first she was standing at the bar table, one hand resting on a document, looking at the judge with the expression Freen already recognised. Focused. Completely certain.

In the second she was cross-examining someone. Freen couldn’t see the witness but she could see Becky’s face and the quality of her attention – like a light narrowed to a single point.

In the third she was listening. Head slightly tilted. Pen in her hand. The listening expression was different from the arguing expression. Quieter. More dangerous somehow.

The fourth was the one Freen looked at longest. Becky was mid-sentence, looking at something to the left of the camera, and she was completely unaware of being photographed. That was the difference. The other three had the quality of someone who knew, on some level, that they were being observed. This one didn’t. This was just Becky, in a courtroom, doing the thing she was built to do.

Freen became aware that she had been looking at it for a while.

She turned it face down.

She turned all four of them face down.

She needed to focus.

She picked up the next document. Financial records again. She read the first paragraph three times and understood it approximately as well as she had understood it the first time, which was not very well. She made a note. Ask Becky tomorrow. No – don’t ask Becky. Figure it out.

She turned the page.

The next section was better. It was a summary – someone had written a plain language overview of the transfer chain. Probably Heng, judging by the formatting. She read it once and understood it. Read it again to make sure. Yes. The structure of the fraud, laid out simply: money coming in from Viroj’s network, moving through procurement accounts, ending up in the pockets of people who then facilitated weapons movement through official channels.

And in that chain. Names.

She had seen the first one an hour ago and stopped. Sat very still. Then kept going. She had seen the second and done the same thing. By the third she had stopped stopping. She just read and noted and kept her face very still even though she was alone in her apartment and there was no one to keep her face still for.

Three names. Senior officers. People whose careers she knew, whose reputations she knew, one of whom she had shaken hands with at a function two years ago and who had spoken about the importance of integrity in the armed forces for approximately fifteen minutes.

She looked at that name for a long time.

Then she turned the page.

This was what Engfa had meant. When she said the corruption ran deep. When she said this had to be off the books. When she looked at Freen across the table in that bare room and said *I mean it* – this was what she meant. Not just that the network was dangerous. That the danger was inside. That the people who should have been the safeguard were the threat.

And Becky was building a case that would expose all of it.

Freen sat back.

She looked at the ceiling for a moment. Outside her window Bangkok was still going – it always was at this hour, the night market two streets over still audible, distant music from somewhere, the city absolutely unbothered by the fact that she was sitting on her floor at 1am having a quiet reckoning with the scale of what she had walked into.

She picked up her phone again.

She typed a message to Engfa. Deleted it. Typed it again. The names in the procurement chain. How many people know.

She sent it and put the phone down.

Engfa wouldn’t reply tonight. She never replied to operational messages after midnight unless it was urgent. This was urgent but not immediately urgent and Engfa would make that distinction.

Freen picked up the next document.

Legal argument again. Something about authentication standards. She read the first sentence and it dissolved immediately into nothing. She read it again. Nothing. She looked up authentication standard on her phone, read the explanation, read the sentence again.

Slightly less nothing. Progress.

She made a note. A real one this time. Then another. She was building a vocabulary – slowly, painfully, one term at a time. It was not efficient. It was the only method available to her.

She turned the page.

At two thirty she reached the end of the bundle. She sat for a moment with the last page in her hand and looked at the spread of documents around her on the floor. Two hundred pages. Financial records, legal arguments, evidence summaries, court photographs.

Four photographs face down in the corner.

She looked at them.

She looked away.

She started stacking the documents back into their folders in the order she had taken them out. She was methodical about it. Everything back where it belonged, everything organised, ready for tomorrow.

When she got to the four photographs she stacked them with the others without looking at them.

She closed the folder.

She sent Nam a second message. names in the procurement chain are senior. Three of them. Brief you tomorrow.

Then she went to bed.

She lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about authentication standards and shell companies and the way Becky looked in that fourth photograph – unaware, unguarded, completely alive in the work she was doing.

She thought about the three names.

She thought about Engfa saying the three of us.

She fell asleep at three and was up again at five thirty and when she got to the office at seven forty five the lights in Becky’s office were already on.

She sat at her desk.

She opened a fresh notepad to the first page and wrote at the top: things I do not understand and need to figure out without asking.

The list took up most of the page.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she turned to the Viroj bundle and started again from the beginning.