“Yes.” She meets my gaze. “Under the tracking marks. It looked like a product label.”
“Feeding the parameters now.” Cipher types furiously. “Barcode pattern, inner arm, geometric. Initializing search.”
The screen blurs as hundreds of images flash by in a fraction of a second. The AI tears through the encrypted cache, analyzing pixels.
Ping.
The scrolling stops.
A single high-resolution photo fills the main screen. Dark hair. A small scar on his chin. He’s wearing a soccer jersey, hisarm awkwardly angled to display the precise black lines of a barcode tattooed below his elbow.
“That’s him.” Her voice trembles, but she doesn’t look away. “That’s the boy who died in my ER. The ‘overdose.’”
“Name: Andrei Volkov.” Cipher pulls up the metadata. “Origin: Kyiv, Ukraine. Status: Deceased. Disposal: Clean.”
“Disposal?” Rook repeats the word. It hangs in the air like smoke.
“Look at the directory structure the AI pulled him from.” Iris traces the screen. “It’s an inventory list.”
Cipher zooms out. The screen populates with rows and rows of faces, each linked to a similar barcode file. Documents appear next to the photos: medical transfer forms, humanitarian visas, charity flight logs.
“It’s a pipeline.” Cipher zeroes in. “They’re using a medical charity as a front. ‘The Gemini Foundation.’ They move kids from conflict zones, Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, under the guise of medical treatment or refugee placement.”
“And then they disappear.” Bronco crushes the coffee cup in his hand.
“They’re trafficked.” Hutch’s face turns to granite. “Labor, sex, organs. It’s a full-service chop shop.”
“And Senator Thompson?” I step closer.
Cipher brings up another file, a ledger.
“Thompson isn’t running it.” Cipher highlights a line. “He’s a subscriber. He paid fifty thousand dollars for ‘priority access’ to Asset L-294. That’s Andrei.”
The room temperature drops ten degrees.
This isn’t political corruption. This isn’t a cover-up.
This is a monster.
“The Consortium.” Rook rests both hands flat on the table, the command presence of him filling the space the way a load-bearing wall fills a frame. “We knew they moved weapons and drugs. We didn’t know they were moving people.”
“We know now.” My hand fists at my side.
I look at Iris. She stares at the screen, at the face of the boy she couldn’t save. Tears shine in her eyes, but underneath the grief burns rage. The kind that burns cities down.
“This is too big for the DOJ.” Hutch paces the room. “If we hand this to the FBI, it leaks. Thompson has friends in the Bureau. The evidence disappears. The charity rebrands. The kids vanish.”
He stops pacing. A muscle works in his jaw, once, twice. He stares at the bank of screens and not at any of us. “And the Bureau isn’t the only problem.” His voice drops, a quiet that costs him something. That’s how I know it’s bad. Hutch is never quiet unless the threat has a face he recognizes. “There are names on that list I can’t touch. Not yet.” His finger traces the edge of the monitor without landing on any specific file. “Not without the right leverage.” He looks up. Whatever he saw closes off behind his gaze like a door.
“So we don’t hand it over.” Wraith pushes off the wall. The knife in his hand gleams under the fluorescent lights.
“We can’t operate on US soil without a sanction.” Hutch stops pacing. “If we hit a senator or a charity foundation, we’re rogue. We’re domestic terrorists.”
“We’re already rogue,” Bronco rumbles. “We just dropped a helicopter on a mining facility killing a dozen contractors.”
“Mercer got away.” I point at the screen. “He knows we have the laptop. He knows Iris is alive. He isn’t going to stop. He’s going to scrub the operation and liquidate the remaining inventory to cut ties. Those kids have a timeline. If we follow protocol, they die.”
Hutch looks at the team.
