Savannah is in my room. I told her to stay there, and for once she didn't argue, which either means she trusts me or she's planning something I'll find out about later. She kissed me before I left. Not the hard, hungry kiss from last night. A short one with her hand on my jaw, her eyes on mine.
"Come back," she said.
"I always come back."
"You've known me for two weeks. We don't have an always yet."
"Then I'm starting one."
She let go of my jaw and stepped back while I walked out and the door closed behind me. I haven't stopped thinking about it since, which is exactly the kind of distraction Leone warned me about and exactly the kind of motivation I need.
The marina operation goes first. Two teams, one Bonaccorso, one Castillo, approaching from opposite ends of the dock. The Meridian Star is in its berth. Lights on below deck, signalling that the Tuesday handoff is in progress.
I lead the Bonaccorso team from the north approach. A Castillo lieutenant named Dario leads the south. We've met once, for fifteen minutes, in a parking lot behind Marcello's, and the entirety of our relationship consists of him saying don't fuck this up and me saying same to you and both of us meaning it.
The approach is clean. We move along the dock in two columns, boots quiet against the wet wood, guns up, comms open. The marina is empty this time of night. A few boats with deck lights on, a security booth with a guard who Carmelo already handled on the perimeter, and the Meridian Star at the far end, engine idling, cabin windows glowing.
"In position," Dario says through the comm.
"Copy. On my count… three, two, one."
Both teams hit the boat at the same time. North and south boarding, men on deck in under four seconds. The two handoff operatives are at the cabin table with a briefcase open between them and the look on their faces when armed men pour through both doors would be hilarious if not for the situation.
They don't fight. One reaches for a weapon under the table and Carmelo puts a boot on his wrist before the hand gets there. The other raises his hands and starts talking in a language I don't understand.
Doesn't matter. We're not here for conversation.
Vidal isn't on the boat. The usual Tuesday pattern had him arriving at ten-forty, but it's eleven-fifteen and the sedan that usually brings him hasn't appeared. Either the pattern broke, or someone warned him.
I click the comm. "Vidal's a no-show."
Leone's voice comes back calm. "Proceed with the extraction. Bring the two operatives and everything in that briefcase. We'll find Vidal separately."
We zip-tie these two, bag the briefcase, and clear the boat in under three minutes. The Castillo team secures the rest and Dario's voice comes through the comm with a single word. "Clean."
The operatives go into separate vehicles. Bonaccorso takes one, Castillo takes the other. The briefcase comes with me.
In the SUV, I open it and inside is not what I expected. Not paper intelligence, not financial documents, not the hard-copy briefing materials the Tuesday handoffs were supposed to contain. Instead there are four phones, three USB drives, and a printed manifest with names and dates and locations that takes me about ten seconds of reading to understand.
It's the real transport manifest. Names of women and girls with ages listed beside them, the youngest fourteen, the oldest thirty-one. Pickup locations all over Eastern Europe. Transfer points through Turkey and Greece. Arrival dates at the Apex Meridian Holdings facility, and distribution routes going outward fromthe facility to destinations that are listed only as codes I can't read.
I close the briefcase. My hands are stable but the thing happening in my chest isn't. It's the feeling I get before I hurt someone. The cold thing, the still thing, the part of me that Claudio has too but wears differently. In Claudio it looks like nothing, a blank face, an empty room. In me it looks like the grin disappearing and the energy dropping to zero and everyone around me understanding that the man they're sitting with has stopped being charming and started being dangerous.
I call Leone because this can’t be said over the comms. "We need to move on Kreiss tonight."
"The plan was to interrogate the operatives first and build the approach."
"The plan changed. I've got a transport manifest in this briefcase with names and ages and a schedule that shows the next shipment arriving at the facility in four days. Fourteen-year-old girls, Leone. We don't have time to build an approach. We know where Kreiss is. Vidal's safe house address is in the Maryland documents. We go tonight."
I can hear him breathing, hear the chatter quieting around him, and Claudio's voice murmuring something I can't make out.
"Hold," Leone says.
I hold. The SUV idles and Carmelo sits beside me looking at the briefcase the way he looks at everything, without visible emotion, but his hand is on his knife, and his thumb is moving along the handle back and forth. I recognize what it is because Savannah does the same thing with her bottle cap.
A grounding gesture… even Carmelo needs one tonight.
Leone comes back. "Castillo team is in. Dario is redirecting men to your position while he takes his operative back to their compound. You take the safehouse… and Emilio? Kreiss doesn't leave alive."
