Crane Vanishes
Guilty men make for terrible guests of the state.
Pursuit || Escape || Investigation || Danger
By the second day, Crane was gone. Not dead, not — as far as anyone could determine — in custody anywhere in Europe. Simply absent. His apartment was empty. His car was at the institute building. His PA said he had left the office at 6 a.m. the morning the first article published, before the story broke, which meant he had received advance warning — which meant someone in her chain of communication had a leak, which was deeply unpleasant information and which she filed away to deal with after the more immediate problems were managed. His passport had been used to cross two borders. After the second crossing, the trail went cold: whatever the Ferren Institute provided its leadership in the way of contingency exit, Crane had used it, and it was good enough to lose the digital trail in a way that required the cooperation of foreign intelligence services she did not have easy access to. She flagged his name with Interpol. She flagged his passport. She sent the warrants. She did everything correct and procedural and by the book, and she was fully aware that a man with Crane’s resources and the institute’s century of global connections might remain unfound for a very long time. Possibly forever. She was not, she told Finn, willing to let that stop the investigation. The investigation was not about Crane. Crane was a symptom. The institute was the disease, and the institute’s disease was not one man but a structure — legal, financial, institutional — that had been built over a century to protect a discovery that should never have been protected privately. She redirected her energy to the structure. To the holding companies and the client list and the revenue flows and the political connections that had kept twenty thousand people displaced from their homes for eleven years. Crane could run. The structure couldn’t. She would dismantle the structure first. Then, eventually, Crane would have nowhere to run to.