Chapter 1
My name is not Naomi, and the night Carmine Falco followed me into the alley behind the rail yard, I had been waiting for someone like him for eleven months.
Not him specifically. I had not known his name when I arrived in Seattle with an Oregon birth certificate and a Social Security number that would hold up to anything short of a federal database query. I had known the shape of the man I was looking for, which was the shape of a man who controlled the movement of certain cargo through certain ports, who had relationships with certain union officials and certain dock supervisors and certain intermediaries who connected the legitimate shipping infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest to people whose business interests were not legitimate and not Pacific Northwestern and not anything the Seattle Harbor Commission had a form for.
The man whose shape I was looking for turned out to be Carmine Falco, and I had understood this by month three, and I had spent the subsequent eight months being the waitress at the diner where he sat every night in the corner booth with black coffee and no sugar and a hundred-dollar bill under the saucer.
My actual name is Mara Voss. I had been working for the Defense Intelligence Agency for nine years at the point I arrived in Seattle, and the assignment had been built over fourteen months by a team of seven people, of whom I was the only one operating in the field. The others were analysts, support personnel, a liaison to the FBI's organized crime division, and a man named Gerald Park who served as my case officer and who communicated with me through a series of protocols that I will not describe in detail except to say that one of them involved a loose brick in the wall of the Catholic church I walked past every night on my route home from the diner.
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The Vulov organization was the target. Carmine Falco was the thread.
Dmitri Vulov ran a logistics operation based in Vancouver that had, over the previous four years, been using the Seattle port infrastructure to move a category of material that I am not at liberty to name but whose movement constituted a federal offense under three separate statutes and an international treaty obligation. The material moved through the docks in container shipments that were accurately manifested in every particular except one, and the one particular they were inaccurate about was the thing that mattered, and the reason they had been able to remain inaccurate about it for four years was that the dock supervisor who processed the relevant manifests was a man named Carl Briggs who had been on Falco's payroll since 2019 and who processed those manifests with the same signature he put on everything else because Falco had made the arrangement worth his while and had made the consequences of the alternative worth considering.
