Page 116 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“He’s going to know this place is gone before then.”

“Maybe,” Raven said. “Depends how insulated he is from the guards.”

Wolf turned toward the window where the first faint gray of morning had begun replacing the darkness outside.

“Nobody contacts him. Nobody touches the Augsburg address. We build surveillance and see whether he runs.”

Jackal had come back into the room during the discussion. The dirt from the pursuit had dried along one side of his trousers, and his face had returned to the hard, unreadable version I had seen throughout the operation.

Wolf looked at him. “You good to work him?”

For the first time since the wrist confrontation, the question sounded like more than an assignment.

He held Wolf’s gaze for a second before answering, “Yeah.”

Wolf gave him one nod, and Jackal held it for a beat before looking away. It was the closest either of them had come to repairing anything since morning.

By sunrise, German investigators had taken over the evidence rooms and medics were moving the rescued women toward waiting vehicles one at a time instead of herding them together. They had blankets around their shoulders and shoes where the teams had been able to find them, while every person working the courtyard seemed to understand without being told that nobody would use the word inventory anywhere near them.

I stood beside the rear steps with Raven while the farmhouse filled with people whose job was to document everything Cerberus had tried to make disappear.

Seventeen women had already been moved beyond our reach, and there was nothing satisfying about knowing we had arrived too late for them. Eleven were leaving the property alive, which counted enough that I refused to let the missing seventeen erase it.

Raven handed me his tablet.

Emil Varga’s photograph filled the screen. He looked ordinary enough to disappear in any airport line, with short brown hair, a narrow face, a business-casual jacket and the neutral expression people wore for identification photos. Average men like that were becoming Cerberus’s most effective disguise.

Wolf came out of the farmhouse and stopped beside us, and I passed him the tablet. He looked at Varga’s photograph for several seconds before handing it back to Raven.

“Build him.”

The property behind us had shown me what Cerberus did when nobody interrupted the process. Now the man who collected its records after the women were moved had a name and an address, plus a routine he did not yet know we understood.

If we moved carefully, Emil Varga could lead us farther into the machinery than any empty warehouse ever had.

Chapter Nine

MIA

By the time Emil Varga finally came out of his apartment building in Augsburg the next morning, we had been watching the place long enough that I could have identified several of his neighbors by routine alone. None of us had slept properly, so we had started rotating through short shifts in the back of the van, twenty or thirty minutes at a time whenever someone could afford to close their eyes.

Raven had two street cameras feeding the main screen while Wolf watched the building from the passenger seat. I had spent most of the last hour comparing Varga’s known movements against the records from Haus Eberhardt, which had turned him from a forgettable face in a residency photograph into the man who collected documents and identities after Cerberus moved women through its holding sites.

ARC wanted to know where he took that material before anybody put a hand on him. If he led us deeper into the chain, we followed; if he ran, Wolf wanted him alive and whatever he was carrying intact.

Varga stepped onto the sidewalk at 7:21 wearing a navy jacket over a pale shirt, the same combination he wore in almost every photograph we had found. A black leather messenger bag hung at his side. He locked the building behind him and started east at an easy pace after a brief look down the street.

“He’s moving,” Raven said.

Jackal answered from somewhere outside our view. “Have him.”

When he stepped back into sight a moment later, he had stripped out of the tactical gear and changed into a black t-shirt and dark cargo pants, making a reasonable attempt to blend in for a man with tattoos climbing his neck and the general appearance of someone who had recently kicked a door in.

Jackal stayed nearest Varga on foot while Viper moved farther ahead. Bear waited with the second vehicle, and Hawk covered the roads that opened toward the station.

Varga walked past the corner bakery without going in, which disappointed Jackal enough that he murmured something in Korean before Wolf told him to stay off the channel. After that, we followed in silence while Varga took a route that made less sense the longer it went. He doubled back around a block before continuing south and paused once beside a pharmacy window long enough to study the reflection behind him.

I watched the line Raven drew across the map. “He’s checking for a tail.”