Page 13 of Property of the Bikers

“Not operationally. Not yet. I’m flagging him because he’s a variable we don’t have full information on, and variables we don’t have full information on have a habit of becoming relevant at inconvenient times.”

Ghost nods.

Cade looks at me steadily. “Viktor won’t stop.”

“No. A plan this documented doesn’t get abandoned because the subject has relocated. He’ll adapt. He’ll look for her through whatever channels he has, and a man with his network has enough channels that we should assume he finds her direction within a few days, even if he doesn’t find her exact location.” I pause. “The window we have right now is the only window we’re going to get. We use it to get the compound locked down before he knows where she is.”

“What does she need from us?” Priest asks from the far end of the table. He asks it genuinely, not as a challenge.

“Right now she needs to be classified correctly,” I say. “She’s not a civilian, and she’s not a liability. She’s an asset under siege. Those are different things operationally, and how we handle her needs to reflect that. A liability creates exposure through her own actions. She didn’t create this. It was constructed around her. What she needs is the kind of coverage we’d give anyone on this compound who a hostile external party has marked for removal.”

The room takes that in.

“Security,” Cade says. “Perimeter rotation doubles tonight. Two man circuits, staggered timing so the pattern isn’t predictable from the outside. Anyone watching the compound trying to map our schedule needs to find a schedule that doesn’t repeat. Ghost, I’ll send you the rotation framework after church, and you can adjust it to the personnel you have available.”

Ghost nods once.

Cade continues. “She goes into the main house. Not the guest cabins. The cabins are exposed, and the response time from there if something comes through the perimeter is too long. The main house gives us a single control point and better coverage. No solo movement for her anywhere on this property. She doesn’t walk to the main building, outside, or anywhere without a patched member I’ve personally cleared to accompany her. That’s not a suggestion, and it doesn’t have exceptions.”

“She’s not going to love that,” Jax says. He’s not arguing. He’s just noting the reality.

“Most people don’t love it,” I say. “It stands regardless.”

Cade taps the table twice, which is the signal he uses when he’s heard what he needs to hear from a briefing and is ready to move on. “Anything else?”

“Her phone. The clean one from Spokane. I want to run it before she uses it further. If Viktor’s network has passive monitoring tools that can be pushed to devices associated with her identity, I need to verify the phone is actually outside that reach before we let her use it freely.”

“I’ll handle it,” Jax says.

Church runs for another thirty minutes after that. The perimeter logistics, a question from Hayes about the supply chain implications of a tightened compound, and two more items from Ghost about personnel availability for the new rotation. By the time Cade brings the gavel down, I’ve added several more items to the follow-up list and sent Ghost the rotation framework from my phone.

I walk back to the monitor room.

She’s still in the chair. The bag has shifted to her side now, one hand resting on the top of it loosely rather than holding it. Her other hand is in her lap. The fluorescent light overhead is still doing her no favors, and under it, she looks paler than she did an hour ago, the pallor of someone who has been running on adrenaline and is starting to feel the place where the adrenaline ends.

She’s looking at the wall across from her.

I sit down at the desk and look at the screen for a moment.

I think about the email chain. The language in it. Closing the maternal loop. Written by someone who looked at a pregnant woman and arrived at the conclusion that the cleanest description of what needed to happen to her was a loop being closed. Not a person being harmed. Not even a problem being solved. A loop. An administrative action taken at the appropriate point in a sequence.

I worked alongside people who thought in those terms once. Not about pregnant women specifically. About people in general, in certain contexts, under certain operational frameworks. The removal of a human being from the category of human being and into the category of variable to be managed. It made certain decisions easier. It kept the work clean in a way that had nothing to do with cleanliness.

I made a choice about that kind of work a long time ago. It cost me something, and I don’t spend a lot of time examining what it cost because examining it doesn’t change it, and I’d make the same choice again.

Chapter Seven

MIRA

My back has been making arguments for the last hour, and I’ve been losing them.

The chair is wooden and straight-backed, and after two hours on a bus and however long I’ve been sitting in this room, my lower back has stopped asking politely and started insisting.

I shift my weight to the left, which helps for about thirty seconds, and then I shift back and press my spine flat against the chair and try to remember the breathing exercise the OB showed me at my last appointment, the one I thought was unnecessary at the time.

I think about that for a moment. My last appointment. My OB in Seattle, who has no idea that the husband listed as my emergency contact has a separate doctor lined up to make decisions about my body the moment I’m in a position where I can’t make them myself.

I file that away and look at the wall across from me.