Chapter 79: A Provisional Teammate
"Okay," Gisele said. "You win. Now we can actually talk."
Simon handed her the slide assembly without comment. She took it, set it on the coffee table beside the disassembled pistol, and didn't immediately reassemble either piece — which was its own kind of signal. She was choosing conversation over options.
She went to the kitchen and came back with two beers, handed one to Simon, and sat down across from him on the other end of the sofa.
"What do you need from me," she said, "and what do I get out of it?"
"I'm building a team," Simon said. "Small, capable, operating outside normal channels. I need specialists. You're a weapons expert with field experience and you know how to move through environments that require a specific kind of judgment." He leaned back. "What you get — I can't promise specifics yet. What I can tell you is it'll be more than what Campos pays, and considerably more stable."
"What's the team's purpose?"
"That I'm keeping close to the chest for now. What I can tell you is it won't be worse than what you're doing. And it'll be interesting."
He paused. "I'm also not forcing anything. You can say no. That's a real option."
Gisele studied him. There was a quality to her attention that reminded Simon of Casey — the practiced assessment of someone who spent their professional life reading situations and people and had gotten very good at both.
"Before I answer," she said, "can I see what you actually look like? If you want me to consider working with you, showing up in a fake beard isn't much of a foundation."
She gestured at his chin.
Simon touched his jaw — and felt the prosthetic beard shift loosely under his fingers, barely attached, hanging at an angle that explained why she'd noticed.
He pulled it the rest of the way off.
"I need to work on my makeup technique," he said. He stood. "May I use your bathroom?"
"As long as you're not worried I'll call someone while you're in there," Gisele said.
"I think we've established enough preliminary trust that you won't," Simon said. "Also you're curious about the face. I'll tell you in advance — it's worth the wait."
She didn't say anything to that, which he took as permission.
The bathroom had makeup remover on the shelf beside the mirror, which he used efficiently. The aging lines came off with three passes of cotton. He looked at himself — eighteen, clean-faced, the particular combination of features that had been getting him unsolicited commentary since he was sixteen.
He went back out and sat down.
Gisele looked at him for a moment.
Then she whistled. "Okay. You weren't lying about that."
"I generally don't," Simon said. "And the fact that you stayed while I was in there means you're interested. So — are we having a real conversation?"
"We're having a real conversation," she said. "Tell me more about the team's goals."
"Current objective: revenue. There are criminal organizations with significant liquid assets, and redirecting those assets toward more constructive purposes seems reasonable. Long-term goals I'm not ready to share yet — not because I don't trust you, but because they'd require more context than one conversation can provide."
Gisele considered this. "You're targeting Campos's money. Not Campos himself."
"Campos's money," Simon confirmed. "Taking down the organization is the DEA's job. Taking their operational funds is mine."
"Campos will want to kill you when he finds out."
"He's welcome to try," Simon said, in the same tone he'd use to accept or decline a coffee offer.
Gisele looked at him with the specific expression of someone recalibrating their estimate of another person. "You're either very confident or very stupid."
"I've been told those can look the same from the outside," Simon said.
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "I'll join. Provisionally. If your long-term objectives turn out to conflict with my principles or my interests, I'm out — no complications, no hard feelings."
"That's a fair arrangement," Simon said. He reached into his jacket and set two banded stacks of bills on the coffee table. "Initial operating expenses. I need you positioned as a trusted member of Campos's organization. Don't take risks you don't have to take — your safety matters more than the timeline."
Gisele looked at the money, then at him. "Do we have a communication protocol?"
They exchanged numbers. Simon's was a dedicated burner, changed monthly.
"Welcome to the team," Simon said. He extended his hand.
"Provisionally," she said, shaking it.
He returned the station wagon to the parking structure, switched to the Mustang, and drove home through the empty pre-dawn streets.
In bed, he ran through the evening's events with the methodical attention he brought to any completed operation.
Gisele was a good first recruit — skilled, disciplined, experienced in field conditions that would translate to what he was building. The provisional nature of her commitment was honest rather than problematic. Forced loyalty was a liability. Conditional loyalty, clearly stated, was at least predictable.
The path to making it unconditional was straightforward in principle if not in execution: give her reasons to trust him, show her what the work actually looked like, and let the missions speak for themselves.
The exposed fake beard was a more embarrassing problem. He'd been sloppy with the adhesive and hadn't checked it before the target arrived. That was the kind of detail that could compromise an operation entirely under different circumstances, which meant makeup application needed to join the list of skills he was actively developing.
He thought about that list.
Casey represented one style of operational work — direct, disciplined, physical, built on decades of institutional tradecraft. Sarah represented another — social, adaptive, able to move through environments where Casey would be conspicuous, built on a different set of skills that were no less demanding.
Beckman had promised training over the summer. But summer was months away, and both Casey and Sarah were available now, and there was no reason to wait for a scheduled classroom when the classroom was showing up to his workplace every day.
He'd start asking better questions. Watch more carefully how they operated. Let the proximity teach him what it could.
He closed his eyes.
Outside, Los Angeles was doing what it always did in the last hours before morning — running on reduced power, quieter than it pretended to be, moving at the speed of a city that hadn't quite decided to start the day yet.
Simon let it do its thing and went to sleep.
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