I move to Iris.
No hesitation. I step into her space and wrap my good arm around her waist.
She leans into me instantly. A reflex now. Magnetic pull. She rests her head against my shoulder, her hand rising to rest on my chest, right over the scar.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” I kiss the top of her head.
“How’s the arm?”
“It works.”
“Don’t push it. You tear those sutures, I’m stapling you next time.”
“Kinky.” Bronco takes a bite of his burrito.
Wraith throws a cleaning patch at him.
Hutch clears his throat. He stands at the head of the table, the holographic map of Europe glowing blue in the dim light.
“Alright. Focus up. Thanks to Dr. Kincaid’s translation of the manifests, we have a target profile.”
The room shifts. Banter dies. The wolves snap to attention.
Hutch taps the console. The map zooms in on a location in the Mediterranean.
“The Gemini Foundation has a logistics hub in Malta. Listed as a medical supply depot. But according to the shipping logs Irisdecoded, it runs as the primary sorting center for human assets coming out of Eastern Europe.”
“Malta.” Rook studies the map. “High traffic. Deeply corrupt port authority. Easy to hide things in plain sight.”
“Exactly.” Hutch points to the satellite overlay. “They move the kids from Kyiv to Malta. From there, they scatter them to buyers in the Middle East, South America, or back here to the States.”
“So we hit Malta.” Bronco cracks his knuckles. “I can have the bird ready in an hour. C-130 hop to Italy, then infiltrate by sea.”
“Not yet.” Hutch shakes his head. “We need to know who runs the hub. We need a name. We go in blind, and the snakes scatter. We need to cut off the head.”
“And Thompson?” Iris hasn’t moved from my side, but her voice cuts clean across the room. “He bought that boy. Fifty thousand dollars for a human being, and he’s still sitting on a committee. I made Andrei a promise.”
Hutch doesn’t dodge it. “Thompson’s untouchable through the Bureau. Half his oversight committee owes him a favor.” He lets the bad news land, then turns it over. “So we don’t use the Bureau. Cipher already pulled the senator’s name out of the cache and walked it, sealed, to a federal prosecutor here in Denver who’s been trying to put Thompson in a cell for six years and owes nobody in that building a thing. It won’t move fast. The day Malta breaks, her file stops being theoretical.” He holds Iris’s gaze. “He doesn’t walk, Doctor. He just doesn’t fall today.”
It isn’t the head she wants on a pike. But something in her unknots all the same. A wheel turning, where an hour ago there was only a wall.
He turns to Cipher.
“Cipher. Status on the banking records.”
Cipher spins his chair around. The humor vanishes from his face. Frustrated. Annoyed.
“I’m hitting a wall, Chief.”
“A wall.” I frown. “I thought you said Mercer’s security was a joke.”
“Mercer’s was. The Gemini Foundation is different. Their accounts sit layered through shell companies in four different tax havens. I traced the money from Senator Thompson to a holding company in Cyprus. But when I tried to breach the Cyprus server...”
He trails off and types a command.
The big screen changes.
