Chapter 9: Infrastructure

The LLC took eleven days.

Reyes handled the articles of incorporation through a registered agent in Nevada — a shell within a shell, the kind of layered structure that didn't attract attention precisely because it was too mundane to look at twice. New Mexico had a thousand LLCs formed every month. This one was called Cerro Advisors, which meant nothing, which was the point. She texted Marcus the entity number on a Tuesday morning while he was writing the day's objectives on the whiteboard and he read it, memorized it, and deleted the message before the bell rang.

The storage unit was in a facility on Coors Boulevard, three miles from the school, next to a self-storage operation that catered primarily to the residential overflow of people whose apartments had run out of room for their previous lives. The unit Marcus leased was climate-controlled, twelve by twenty, with a standard padlock hasp that he replaced within forty-eight hours with a system that would not have looked out of place in a secure evidence locker. He paid six months in advance through Cerro Advisors. The facility manager was a man in his sixties who watched an early-morning cable news program on a mounted television and had no interest in anything that wasn't happening on that screen.