The Enemy at My Desk
The travel from Public coffee shop and school parking lot to Rowan’s agent’s high-rise office consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The high-rise office of Michael Chen, Rowan’s agent of twelve years, smelled of lemon-scented polish and the kind of ambition that left a metallic taste on the tongue. Rowan had been in this corner suite a hundred times, but today the floor-to-ceiling windows felt like surveillance screens rather than invitations to the skyline. The morning light fell across Michael’s desk in precise geometric slabs, illuminating nothing but the polished obsidian surface and a single cup of tea that had long gone cold.
“You’re pacing,” Michael said, not looking up from his tablet.
Rowan stopped. He hadn’t realized he was doing it. “I don’t like being watched.”
“You’re an actor. Being watched is the job description.”
“There’s a difference between a camera and a pair of binoculars from a van across the street.” Rowan moved to the window, checking the curb below with a practiced slide of his eyes that didn’t telegraph as a search. A black sedan had been parked there since he’d arrived. No driver visible. Engine off, but the windows were tinted past legal limits. “Michael, who else knows I’m here?”
The question landed with unexpected weight. Michael set down his tablet, and for the first time that morning, his attention was fully on Rowan. Michael was fifty-three, with silver hair that made him look distinguished rather than old and a face that had learned how to say no without moving a muscle. “My assistant. The building’s front desk. Standard.”
“And your executive assistant. The one who schedules your appointments.”
“Tanya? She’s been with me for four years. She’s a grandmother, Rowan.”
“I don’t care if she knits sweaters for orphaned puppies. Someone on your staff is sharing my calendar with Owen Sterling.” Rowan pulled out his phone, the burner he’d bought that morning from a bodega three subway stops from his hotel, and placed it on the desk between them. “I’ve been living out of a suitcase for two days. My son and his mother are in a borrowed car right now, driving toward a safe house I haven’t even been told the address of. And the minute I walk into your building, I get this.”
He turned the screen toward Michael. The text glowed in stark black-and-white: *You can’t hide what belongs to us. We have eyes everywhere.*
Michael read it. His face didn’t change, but his hand moved slowly to the tea, his fingers wrapping around the porcelain as if steadying himself. “This came from an unknown number.”
“No shit.”
“I meant, they’re not even bothering to hide the source. That’s either arrogance or a message.” Michael finally looked up, and the warmth in his eyes had gone cold. “Who’s the mole?”
“Your building has thirty-seven people on staff who could have seen my name on the appointment book. Your agency has a dozen more. I need access to your security system for the last seventy-two hours. Specifically, the server room logs and any keycard swipes that don’t match employee schedules.”
Michael’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “You want me to hand over my building’s security data to an actor.”
“I want you to hand it over to the man who’s about to lose everything because he trusted the wrong people.” Rowan’s voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. The silence in the room did the work for him, pressing against the glass walls like a held breath. “The Sterling family doesn’t just want to ruin my career. They want to make an example of me. And if I’m the example, you’re the cautionary tale for every agent who thinks they can protect their clients from the Sterlings.”
The clock on the wall ticked. Four seconds passed. Five.
Michael reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a keycard with a magnetic strip that had been scratched raw from use. “The security office is on the third floor. Ask for Jasper Cole. Tell him the lion has a headache.”
Rowan took the card. He didn’t ask what the phrase meant. That wasn’t the kind of question you asked in a room where every surface could hold a listening device.
He left the office through the service corridor, taking the stairs two at a time. The stairwell was concrete and harsh fluorescent light, the kind of space that stripped away pretense and left you with nothing but the sound of your own heartbeat and the distant hum of the building’s circulatory systems. He counted the steps between landings. Twenty-three. Twenty-three. Twenty-three. The rhythm steadied something in his chest, a centering mechanism he’d developed during the long months of the custody battle, when every phone call could bring news that would end his world.
The third-floor security office was behind a door that looked like a janitor’s closet. No signage, no plaque, just a steel door with a card reader that glowed a dull red until he swiped the keycard. The lock clicked open, and he stepped inside.
Jasper Cole was not what Rowan had expected. For a head of studio security, he’d imagined someone larger, someone with shoulders that blocked doorways and a voice that carried the weight of authority. Instead, Jasper was lean and unremarkable, the kind of man who could stand in a room and be forgotten within seconds. His hair was brown and cut short, his clothes were off-the-rack, and his eyes were the color of slate—flat, watchful, and utterly unrevealing.
“Rowan Mercer.” Jasper didn’t stand. He sat behind a desk covered in monitors, each one displaying a different angle of the building’s interior. “Michael called ahead. Said you had a problem with your schedule.”
“I have a problem with a corporate espionage operation being run out of your building.”
Jasper’s expression didn’t flicker. He reached for a keyboard and typed something with practiced efficiency. The main monitor shifted to a grid of timestamps and camera feeds. “Seventy-two hours. You said that’s what you needed.”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific. I have twelve thousand hours of footage to sort through.”
Rowan pulled up a chair, his knees popping as he sat. He was thirty-four, but recent months had added years to his body. “Start with the server room. Someone accessed the building’s appointment database outside of normal business hours. They knew I was coming here before Michael even confirmed the meeting.”
Jasper’s fingers moved across the keyboard. The footage on the main monitor began to fast-forward, a blur of shadows and light. “Normal access hours are seven AM to six PM, Monday through Friday. Outside of that, the server room requires administrative override.”
“Who has override privileges?”
“Building manager. Two assistant managers. Michael. And the IT director.” Jasper paused the footage. “Here.”
Rowan leaned forward. The timestamp in the corner read 3:47 AM, two nights ago. The camera angle was grainy, shot from the ceiling corner, showing a figure in a building maintenance uniform entering the server room. The cap was pulled low, the face obscured.
“That’s not IT,” Rowan said.
“No. IT director is five-foot-eleven, two hundred and twenty pounds. This person is shorter. Leaner. And they don’t have the walk of someone who knows the room. Watch.” Jasper played the footage at normal speed. The figure paused at the door, looking left, then right, before entering. “Too much hesitation. This is a first-timer who memorized a map.”
“Can you see the face?”
“I can try.” Jasper zoomed in, enhancing the image with a series of commands that meant nothing to Rowan. The pixels shifted, sharpened, and then resolved into a profile that was still too shadowed to identify. “The cap is doing its job. But I can tell you one thing.”
“What?”
“The uniform is real. This is a genuine building services outfit, which means our mole either has access to the building’s uniform locker or they have a partner on the inside who does.”
Rowan’s mind began to move through the possibilities like a chess player calculating three moves ahead. “If they have a partner in building services, they could have access to any floor. Any office. Any meeting room.”
“Including the one where you and Michael are supposed to discuss your audition for *The Breaking Point* tomorrow morning.”
Rowan’s attention snapped to Jasper. “You know about that audition?”
“I know everything that happens in this building.” Jasper pulled up another file. A calendar entry, marked as private, with Rowan’s name attached to a meeting room reservation for nine AM. “This was added to the system four hours after Michael confirmed your appointment today.”
“I didn’t schedule that.”
“I know. I pulled the audit trail. The reservation was made from an IP address inside the building, but the user account belongs to a temp worker who was fired last week for stealing office supplies.” Jasper turned his chair to face Rowan fully. “Someone is building a paper trail to make it look like you’re preparing for a meeting that you were never actually going to attend. They want to create confusion, make it seem like you’re hiding something.”
Rowan felt the pieces clicking into place with the cold precision of a lock engaging. “They want to sabotage the audition. If I miss it, or if the studio thinks I’m unreliable, the role goes to Owen Sterling’s client. The Sterling family gets another foothold in the industry.”
“And you get a reputation as a liability.”
The word hung in the air between them, ugly and sharp. Rowan had fought too hard to be called anything else. He’d spent eight years building a career that was solid, respected, bankable. He’d turned down roles that would have made him a fortune but compromised his values. He’d chosen integrity over expedience, and now that choice was being weaponized against him.
“I need you to do something for me,” Rowan said. “I need you to create a fake script meeting in the system. Same room, same time, but I need the title to be for a project that doesn’t exist. Something that will look real enough to draw attention.”
Jasper’s slate eyes glinted with something that might have been approval. “You want to flush out the mole.”
“I want to give them something to report. If they think the audition is a decoy, they’ll shift their focus. That buys me time to make the real meeting happen without interference.”
“And where is the real meeting happening?”
Rowan pulled out the burner phone again. A text had come in while they were talking. He didn’t recognize the number, but he recognized the area code. It was from a town two hours north, where June had taken Evangeline and Max. The message was only four words: *Safe. Settled. Waiting.*
He typed back a single response: *Hold.*
Then he looked at Jasper. “The real meeting doesn’t have a location yet. It’s going to be wherever you can find me a room without a camera, a window, or a paper trail.”
Jasper studied him for a long moment. Then he reached beneath his desk and produced a manila envelope, thick with papers, and slid it across the surface. “Inside is a ledger. It’s a list of every piece of intelligence that’s been leaked from this building in the last six months. I’ve been tracking it, waiting for the right moment to hand it over to someone who wouldn’t bury it.”
Rowan opened the envelope. The first page was dense with dates, names, and descriptions. Corporate contracts. Confidential script treatments. Personal whereabouts of high-profile clients. It was a blueprint of systematic theft, and at the bottom of every page, in the margin, was a single recurring symbol: a stylized capital S.
Sterling.
“This is enough to burn them,” Rowan said, his voice low. “Enough to take to the police, the guild, the press.”
“It’s enough to start a war,” Jasper corrected. “But it’s not enough to win one. The ledger is missing something. A debt. A secret debt that ties the Sterling patriarch directly to this building’s ownership.”
“What kind of debt?”
“The kind that’s written in money that doesn’t exist on any balance sheet. I’ve been trying to trace it for months, but the trail goes cold at a shell company in the Caymans. If you want to finish this, you need that last piece.”
Rowan closed the envelope. His mind was already moving, already building the next move, the one that would come after this. He would study the ledger tonight, memorize every name, every date, every connection. He would find the debt. And then he would use it to tear down everything the Sterlings had built.
But first, he had to survive the next five minutes.
A sound reached him from the hallway. The hydraulic hiss of the elevator doors opening. Then footsteps, measured and deliberate, moving across the marble floor toward the security office.
Jasper’s hand moved to a drawer, his posture shifting into something that was no longer casual. “Company,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Rowan stood, the envelope tucked under his arm. He had nowhere to go, no exit that wouldn’t be seen, no path that wouldn’t intersect with whoever was coming.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
And then the handle turned.
Just as Jasper hands over a burner phone with encrypted files, Owen steps out of the elevator, smiling coldly: “Rowan, I see you’re auditioning for a role you’ll never play.”