Page 115 of The ARC Unit: Breach

Wolf stared at the screen. “That’s what this network does,” he said. “They treat people like inventory.”

He looked at the file in front of me, where I had been staring at the word closed long enough that the letters no longer looked like English.

“Mercer.”

I lifted my eyes.

“You with us?”

“Yeah.”

My voice came out rougher than I wanted, and Wolf stayed where he was, leaving several feet between us.

“Then keep building it.”

Keep building it. His words gave me something I had not expected from him in that moment: trust without an attempt to soften the work in front of me. He needed me useful, and after the last two days, that felt better than being handled carefully.

I turned back to the paperwork, and the deeper we went, the more the Cerberus pipeline stopped looking like an intelligence diagram and started looking like a business process designed by people who had removed every word that might remind them what they were selling.

Once Raven de-duplicated the Haus Eberhardt records against the older routes, fifty-seven distinct women sat inside the wider Kade-associated network picture. His face from the pool kept returning to me while I looked at the coded photographs. More gentle in my memory than the weight of his designation suggested, with green eyes fixed on mine while he spoke as though the conversation belonged to us even with Luca standing beside him.

I needed him alive because a man who could move through this many parts of Cerberus was worth more talking than dead, and that remained the correct operational decision no matter how many times I had to repeat it to myself. Standing in that room simply made the thought feel less clean than it had before.

Raven pulled another ledger from a locked drawer near the desk.

“Mia.”

I moved beside him.

The ledger tracked document packets leaving the property after each group transfer, and one name appeared repeatedly in the collection column: E. Varga. The entries were boring enough to miss at first, covering cash reconciliation and document pickup along with returned phones and temporary IDs. Four separate movements over six weeks ended with the same initials and a handwritten time.

Raven entered the name into his tablet. “Emil Varga.”

The first result was a thirty-four year old Hungarian national with German residency and a consulting business registered to an apartment in Augsburg. The business had almost no visible work beyond occasional invoicing to logistics firms we already knew.

Something from the pool party surfaced in my memory. “Wait.”

Raven looked over.

“Luca asked Kade about an Emil.”

His fingers stopped. “At Stuttgart?”

“Before the conversation shifted toward Morgenstern. I don’t know if it’s the same man, but Luca asked where Emil was and Kade answered him.”

Raven opened the party transcript and searched. The audio around Kade had been poor, but Luca’s voice was clear enough to catch the name Emil exactly where I remembered it.

Raven looked at me. “That just got more interesting.”

Wolf returned when Raven called him over. We showed him the ledger, then the Augsburg registration and the party audio. Viper added that one Südweg vehicle associated with the property had been photographed outside Varga’s apartment address three weeks earlier.

Wolf studied the timeline before asking, “When is his next pickup?”

Raven tapped the final page.

“The site expected him tomorrow morning. 7:30. Looks like he collects records after transfer days.”

I looked around the room at the open cabinets and evidence markers already appearing beside the tables.