Page 69 of Property of the Bikers

My phone buzzes at the thirty-minute mark. Ghost. Two words.

Location clean.

Five minutes out, a vehicle I don’t recognize pulls into the diner lot.

Dark blue SUV, no visible plates from this distance. It parks at the far end of the lot, sits there with the engine running, and nobody in our car says anything. Jax slows without being told to. I have Ghost’s number ready and my eyes moving between the SUV, the diner entrance, and the road behind us.

The vehicle sits. Engine running.

Thirty seconds. Sixty. Ninety.

The doors open, and a woman gets out with two small children and a diaper bag and walks toward the diner without looking at anything except where she’s going.

Family stopping for lunch.

Jax pulls into the lot.

Neither of us says anything about the ninety seconds.

Dmitri is already inside when we push through the door.

He’s in a corner booth with both hands flat on the table and a cup of coffee in front of him that he hasn’t touched, and he looks worse than his file photo.

Considerably worse. Thinner through the face and jaw, the kind of thin that comes from not eating properly rather than exercise. His eyes move to the door when we enter, and something in his shoulders releases, the involuntary drop of a man who has been bracing for something worse than what just walked in.

Then he sees Mira behind me. His eyes find her, and he goes very still. Just for a second. Then he looks away.

She slides into the booth across from him.

I sit beside her.

“You verified the channel,” he says.

“Yes,” I say.

He nods. His hands are still on the table. He’s been told to keep them visible, or he learned it somewhere, and either way, it tells me he came here understanding this is an adversarial meeting, even if he’s on the cooperative side.

“Viktor hired a contractor,” he says. “Patient Transfer Solutions. They specialize in extractions that appear to be legitimate medical transport. Private company, Oregon registration, legitimate on every surface.” He pauses. “He used them once before. Vancouver, 2019. The woman disappeared. Officially, she was transferred to a private care facility. Nobody looked too hard because the paperwork was clean and the medical necessity was documented, and the people who might have asked questions had already been paid not to.”

He reaches into his jacket.

I go still.

Across the diner, Ghost’s hand comes off the table.

Dmitri pulls out a manila envelope and sets it between us carefully, like it’s something fragile, and puts his hands back on the table.

“Contract, team composition, approach plan, hospital details, timeline,” he says. “Everything Viktor gave me to hold in case he needed it retrieved quickly. He trusted me with the physical copy because digital leaves trails, and he needed one clean version outside his own network.” He looks at the envelope. “I didn’t give it to him when he asked for it back last week. I said I’d lost it. He didn’t believe me. That’s when I knew.”

“Knew what,” I say.

“That I was already on the list,” he says quietly. “That the request wasn’t about the documents. It was about finding out whether I was still reliable. And I wasn’t. And he knows I’m not.” He looks at his coffee cup. “I have maybe two weeks before he stops waiting to find out for certain.”

The diner runs its Monday morning around us. The family from the SUV is three tables over, the kids coloring on paper placemats, the mother looking at her phone.

I pick up the envelope and open it.

The contract is three pages on professional letterhead. I read every word of it before moving to the next page, then I read the approach plan, which is eight pages with diagrams of the hospital floor layout and entry and exit points marked, and a timeline broken into fifteen-minute increments.