Page 81 of Property of the Bikers

He leaves.

Jax comes in at nine. He drops into the chair and looks at the screens for a moment before looking at me.

“Social engineering,” I say. “Walk me through it.”

“Hospital front desk has a note on the admission flagging it as a privacy-sensitive case,” he says. “Media protocol, which means any inquiry about the patient gets routed to the floor supervisor, who is Doc’s contact, who routes it to me. Any external personnel claiming medical authorization gets the same treatment.” He pauses. “If Viktor’s team tries to move through official channels instead of force, it goes through me first.”

“Response time.”

“Thirty seconds from flag to my phone,” he says. “I’m in the hospital from five forty-five.”

“Position.”

“Main lobby, service desk. I look like a hospital administrator. I’ve done harder covers.”

I look at the brief. “One scenario,” I say. “Viktor’s team presents credentials that clear the front desk before the flag triggers.”

Jax looks at the ceiling for a moment. “Credentials that clear the front desk have to go through the system. The system has the flag. The flag triggers regardless of credential quality.” He looks back at me. “It’s covered.”

“Good,” I say.

He goes.

Doc comes in at ten with his medical bag and the monitoring data from last night’s simulation run. He puts the data sheet on the desk. I look at the numbers. Mira’s vitals through the half-strength simulation, blood pressure, heart rate, and fetal monitoring. All within acceptable range. The baby’s readings are clean throughout.

“Full strength tonight,” Doc says. “Ten PM. I’ll monitor through to four AM, confirm presentation, and clear her for admission.”

“Risk to the baby at full strength.”

“None if we monitor correctly,” he says. “And we will monitor correctly.”

He says it the way he says everything medical, flatly and without hedging, the voice of a man who has been doing this for thirty years and knows the difference between a real risk and a theoretical one.

“Blood pressure,” I say. “Hers has been elevated for weeks.”

“Monitored,” he says. “If it spikes during the simulation, I stop it. We have contingencies.”

“If it spikes during the operation.”

“Then I pull her,” he says. “Viktor is secondary. I don’t care what stage the operation is at.”

“Cade will tell you the same thing,” I say.

“I know he will,” Doc says. “That’s why we’re having this conversation now instead of tomorrow morning.”

He picks up his bag and goes.

The nurse rotation variable. I’ve been working on it since I flagged it days ago. The east wing duty nurse rotation on Fridays runs twenty minutes off the standard schedule, narrowing the intercept window from the planned two hours to approximately one hour and forty minutes.

Seventeen minutes of buffer gone.

Not fatal. But tight enough that a deviation from Viktor’s approach timeline, if his team moves faster than the documented methodology suggests, creates a window where Ghost’s second checkpoint is unconfirmed before the team reaches the floor.

I spent last night building around it.

The solution is a position adjustment on Ghost’s third man. Instead of covering the stairwell access from the landing, he covers it from inside the floor corridor, which extends his sightline by forty feet and closes the gap the rotation creates. It adds exposure risk for the third man but removes the timing vulnerability entirely.

I run the numbers one more time. The adjusted position works.