A Necromancer's Guide to Clearing a Game Like Tower

Chapter 146: Chapter 146: Foreign Interference I

By morning the investigation room at the Bureau smelled of cold coffee, old sweat, and screens that had been running too long.

Nobody had slept. The main wall was split into a dozen feeds, half of them replaying pieces of the stream on a loop and the other half scrolling records pulled up beside them — Langford’s delegation file, James’s protected Challenger profile, the Ganner Corp prototype paperwork, a stack of diplomatic access approvals, and the emergency travel freeze sitting over all of it in red.

O’Shea stood in the middle of the room with his sleeves pushed up and did not sit down. None of them moved slowly, because every one of them knew that England’s people would run the moment they were given the room to.

Niamh came in with a tablet and two answers.

”The inheritance trail’s a wall,” she said. ”The England trail isn’t.”

She set the tablet down where he could see it.

”The old money first, so we can put it aside.” She pulled up a file and let it scroll. ”Your father’s payout, the insurance, the estate transfer — all of it disappears behind settlement papers and a family trust that was sealed years ago. There are gaps. There’s nothing in those gaps I can use today. Maybe with a court order and a month, not this morning.”

”Leave it,” O’Shea said. ”That’s a fire for next week. What’s burning now?”

”Langford.”

She closed the inheritance file and opened a new board.

”We stopped treating the car park as the start,” she said. ”We started treating Langford as the road. He didn’t walk into Ireland and into that hotel on his own. Somebody cleared the way.”

She tapped through it as she spoke, and the names came up one at a time.

”Who approved his delegation access. Who upgraded his clearance from observer to consultation. Who signed off on England requesting a restricted Challenger consultation in the first place.” She paused on the next one. ”Who opened your protected file for an outside party. That one’s the worst of them. That file does not open without three signatures, and one of those three works two floors above us.”

”Keep going,” O’Shea said.

”Who let the Ganner Corp prototype review stall for four months when it should have been flagged in two weeks. And who tried to move three England-linked staff out of the country in the six hours after you froze travel.” She set the tablet flat. ”Two of those three are already at airports. They didn’t decide to leave this morning on their own.”

O’Shea said nothing while she laid it out. He only watched the board fill, his arms folded, his eyes moving from one name to the next.

By the time she finished, it was not a list of strangers who had happened to be near a crime. It was a line of Irish officials who had built the road Langford walked, one approval at a time, long before anyone reached that car park.

”That’s the case,” O’Shea said.

”That’s the case.”

”Then it isn’t a boy and a dead Paladin anymore.” He pushed off the table. ”It’s our own people letting a foreign government reach inside this Bureau. Pull the warrants.”

He brought in Bureau internal security, two state prosecutors, and the national-security branch, and he kept the word he used in the room narrow.

”I’m not calling it treason,” he said. ”The case isn’t there yet, and I won’t hand a defence lawyer a word I can’t prove. We call it foreign interference. Move on the first wave now, before the names on that board start talking to each other.”

They moved across Dublin inside the hour, and it was clean.

The first official was still at his desk in the Bureau when they came for him. He stood up too fast and started explaining before anyone had said a word — that Langford’s expanded clearance had been ordinary diplomatic procedure, that everyone had signed forms like it, that this was a misunderstanding they could clear up in a meeting. The officers let him talk and walked him out anyway.

A second was stopped near a restricted terminal across the river. He had part of James’s protected file already exported onto a drive, and the drive was in the inside pocket of his coat, and he was twenty meters from a service exit when they reached him.

A Tower Affairs adviser was taken in a ministry corridor. He stayed perfectly composed, straightened his jacket, asked which department had authorised this. Then one of the officers said the order had come from O’Shea, and the adviser went quiet and did not say another word the whole way down.

A board aide was caught with a second phone in his hand. He had already cracked the casing against the edge of a sink, but the chip inside was whole, and the officer simply held out a hand for it.

The last was a movement-clearance official, stopped mid-signature. He had a pen on an exit approval for a man tied to England’s delegation, the form half-filled, when the door opened behind him.

One or two of them asked the same thing on the way out, quiet, almost professional.

”Did O’Shea sign this himself?”

When the officers said yes, none of them asked anything after that. They understood what it meant. They had not been swept up by accident. They had been seen.

James was still in containment when O’Shea came down to him.

The room was clean and cold and built for someone like him, suppression seals worked into the chair and two guards on the far side of the glass. James sat with the monitoring restraints on his wrists and his head back against the wall.

He looked calmer than a man in his position had any right to be. But the moment the door opened, his eyes came up and sharpened, and he was reading O’Shea before the man had crossed the room.

”My mother,” James said.

”Safe. The girl too. Both of them, under guard, exactly where I left them.”

James let out a slow breath, and only then did he ask anything else.

”What’s happened?”

”We moved this morning.” O’Shea pulled the chair around and sat. ”The first people tied to England’s side of this are in custody or suspended. The ones who cleared Langford’s path.”

James did not look pleased. He did not look relieved.

”How many?”

”Enough,” O’Shea said. ”Enough to prove Langford didn’t reach that car park by himself. Enough that the story stops being one boy and a dead Paladin and starts being what it actually was.”

James sat with that for a moment, his jaw tight, the anger still there under everything but held down.

”Good,” he said.