Page 11 of Havoc

"Lennox Vance, thirty-three, Baton Rouge. Mama died in April, house went back to the bank in June, and she ain't had a job since two thousand twenty-two." He taps the middle screen. "Motel on the north end of town. Room eleven. Been there since last night."

Nineteen hours.

Storm gave him two days and told him to make it one, and Blitz got it in less than that, and he's sittin' there in the chair with his knee goin' up and down waitin' on me to say somethin' about it.

"How?"

"How what?"

"How'd you get the motel?"

"Man." He laughs. It comes out a half second late. "You want the whole⁠—"

"I want how you got the motel, Blitz."

He turns back to the screen so he's talkin' at it instead of at me.

"Her phone's on. She never turned it off, not once, not since New Orleans. So I ran the number." He shrugs one shoulder. "Got a location off it. Narrowed it down to about a hundred yards, and there's exactly one thing in a hundred yards up there that ain't a soybean field."

"Ran it how?"

"Through a thing I got access to."

"Access how?"

"Havoc."

"Blitz."

"It's fine." He says it too fast, and then he says it again slower like the second one'll take better. "It's fine. It's a system, I got a login, ain't nobody gonna⁠—"

"Whose login?"

The knee stops.

He looks at the screen and I look at the side of his face, and neither one of us says anything for long enough that the window unit cycles.

He's twenty-four. He's been patched for a year and a half, and he's the youngest man at that table by a decade, and every single day of his life he wakes up and goes lookin' for somethin' he can put in front of us that nobody else could have got.

I know what I'm supposed to do here. I've watched Storm do it. I've watched Warden do it, which is worse.

"There's somethin' else," Blitz says.

"Say it."

"She's been gettin' calls." He pulls up a list. "Same number, six times since yesterday evenin'. First one at eleven forty last night, then all through today. Five oh four."

New Orleans.

"She answer?"

"Not once."

So Lucien's got her number and he's been dialin' it for a full day, which means he was workin' his own side of this before he ever called Storm, which means the favor he asked us for last night was never a favor.

It was a second line in the water.

And I stand there in a cold room that smells like burnt plastic and let the login thing go.