The Third Name

Six months after Solomon Hatch's arrest, four months into the fifth-name investigation, Damon Reyes returns to Washington. The initial case — built across three months, delivered to the classified proceeding, now moving at the speed of classified federal reviews — is not his reason for returning. The reason is the third name from the compressed file the unknown-protocol sender delivered at forty thousand feet above the Carolina coast. The third name is the person whose instructions the consulting entity has been executing from inside the federal oversight body. Reaching them requires a different thread from the fifth-name investigation: not the consulting entity's financial architecture, which Selena has already mapped, and not the oversight body's institutional records, which Adrienne's SDNY jurisdiction is already approaching. The thread is the oversight body's own classified internal review logs — documents that exist specifically because the body was required, by its founding charter, to review its own activities annually. Those review logs were never intended to leave the body's secured environment. Damon has a federal investigative contractor credential, a source inside the NSA inspector general function, and the specific patience of someone who has been building toward this for four months. He is ready for the third name.