Page 26 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“I mean the work.”

“Right. Wouldn’t want to accidentally validate me.”

His eyes narrowed.

I returned to the keyboard before he could answer. The registration gave us a pattern but it didn’t give us an identity.

Kade remained the obvious answer because everything eventually pointed toward him, but obvious answers were how investigations became trapped inside their own assumptions. Whoever operated the cloned vehicles could be Cerberus security protecting important people. They could belong to another service watching the same network. They might even be a separate criminal organization with an interest ARC didn’t understand yet.

I hated the number of possibilities. Wolf seemed to hate possibilities in general.

By early afternoon, Raven and I had reduced the problem without solving it. The vehicles appeared before ARC became involved, though the lead time changed by target: Prague came first, Budapest latest, with Romania between them. Whoever was watching these people seemed to know they mattered before the formal intelligence process caught up. The timing supported my original theory even if it still did not explain who was watching.

Then Raven showed me the photograph.

He pulled it onto the screen almost casually while searching through Wolf’s archived messages. The image had been taken from across a narrow street at night and all six ARC operators were visible.

Wolf stood nearest a dark van with his head turned toward something outside the frame. Bear and Jackal were farther back near the curb while the twins stood beside another vehicle. Raven was partially obscured by an open door. Nobody looked toward the camera. Whoever had taken the picture had been close enough that I could distinguish the shape of Wolf’s mask.

Two words had been added along the bottom in white.

TOO SLOW.

A chill moved across my shoulders before I could stop it.

“When was this?”

Raven looked toward the metadata window. “After Budapest. About three weeks ago.”

“How long after the operation?”

“Forty-six minutes after we returned to the staging area.”

I looked more closely. “So whoever took this knew where you were after you changed the departure time.”

“That’s the problem.”

“Could they have followed you back?”

“Possibly.”

“Did anybody notice surveillance?”

“Nobody.”

That answer seemed to bother Raven personally. I looked at the photograph again and Wolf appeared completely unaware. The whole thing just felt wrong.

Everything I’d seen in less than twenty-four hours suggested very little happened around that man without him noticing it. The idea that somebody had stood across a street photographing his entire team and walked away made the image feel more invasive than threatening.

“Was it sent directly to Wolf?”

Raven nodded. “Secure phone. Number disappeared before I could do anything useful with it.”

“Kade?”

“We don’t know.”

“Can we assume it’s him?”