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“No one follows the signals.” Maksim opened the command channel. “Hold every perimeter. Report movement, but don’t pursue without my order.”

The three false markers continued traveling across my screen, inviting us to panic. I shut off the map, and Kirill tilted his face toward one of the cameras mounted beneath the warehouse eaves. “That had to hurt. All that fucking planning, and Roman refuses to play.”

“My heart is broken.” I sent the drone toward the first mask.

It circled the hook twice. No wires ran into the crane, and the thermal image showed nothing warm enough to suggest an explosive charge. I checked the other two before we crossed the exposed concrete as one unit, with Anika shielded between Maksim and me. The masks swung on thin metal cables, their edges clicking softly against the hooks. Up close, the workmanship became even less convincing. Sokolov hadn’t cared about reproducing the objects. He wanted the memory we’d attach to them.

I steadied the first mask with a gloved hand and slid my knife beneath the lining. Someone had glued a tracking unit no larger than my thumbnail behind the cheek. Its identification number matched the signal traveling toward the north pier. I dropped the tracker into a shielded evidence pouch, and the false marker vanished from my tablet.

The second unit killed the rail-yard signal. I reached for the final mask, then stopped. The wind pushed the others toward the warehouse before swinging them back. This one barely moved.

“It’s heavier.” Anika reached toward it but waited until I nodded before touching the lower edge. “Something’s inside.”

I removed the third tracker, and the western marker vanished. The extra weight remained. I cut the lining from the opposite side, revealing folded oilskin inside the hollow space between the mask and its backing. No wire connected it to the transmitter, and the scanner found nothing else, but I still opened it on the wet concrete with the point of my knife.

A hand-drawn map covered the paper, crude and rushed but clear enough to follow if we trusted it.

Anika dropped beside me so quickly Maksim caught her vest to keep her knees from striking the ground. “That’s Alina’s handwriting.”

Short labels marked the north warehouse, three loading cranes, and the old pump station beneath the dock. One line cut through all of them before disappearing under the seawall, and an arrow pointed to a square hidden behind the eastern platform.

I rotated the map until the shoreline matched the one beyond us. Whoever had drawn it accounted for structures missing from the public plans, including a maintenance building demolished years ago. Alina hadn’t copied this from a modern record. She’d walked the route or received it from someone who had. We were, once again, struck by the decision to trust or not, and I looked to Anika for a clue on which direction we might need to go.

“Could Sokolov have made her draw it?” Anika held the edge of the oilskin between two fingers, protecting it from the rain.

“Yes.” I refused to soften it, to potentially let Sokolov into her head. “He could’ve copied her writing too. The trackers sat just beneath the lining, but someone sewed this behind the backing where we might miss it. I can’t prove Alina hid it from him, but we have no way of knowing if she’s trying to play us again.”

The ground vibrated beneath my knee. I placed my palm against the concrete and separated the steady pulse from the wind battering metal overhead. Machinery operated somewhere below us, too slow for a generator and too regular for anything moved by the tide. The vibration must be from pumps. Nothing else made sense.

I reopened the property records I’d transferred in the SUV, files built from years of watching Sokolov move cash and weapons through the port. The public plans ended at the seawall. An older set showed a smuggling passage running beneath the docks with three drainage pumps keeping the harbor out, explaining why an abandoned shipyard still drew so much power.

“The tunnel is still open.” I matched Alina’s square to an old maintenance hatch. The utility log showed the pumps were already running when Nora called.

Maksim examined the route. “Can we reach it?”

“Yes. The entrance is behind the eastern platform, and the tunnel runs beneath the center dock.” I folded the map and sealed it inside my vest. “We keep the surface teams in position and enter together.”

No one argued as we crossed between the cranes and followed the seawall. Black water struck the pilings below, flinging cold spray through the grated walkway. Chains knocked against steel somewhere beneath us, the sound close enough to resemble footsteps before the tide dragged it away. Every surface shone with rain, and rust flaked beneath our boots. I saw it all, mentally documented it all, in case we needed the information. Kirill studied men and what they might do, I studied this, because we never knew when the information might save our lives.

The eastern platform ended at a pump housing half-hidden behind collapsed fencing, with fresh scratches cut through the corrosion on its locking bar. Kirill pulled it free while Maksim covered the narrow walkway and I checked the hinges for a secondary trigger. An alarm would make sense, so the hair lifted on the back of my neck when everything remained quiet. Damp air pushed through the opening with the heavy stink of standing water and oil.

A steel ladder descended beneath the dock, and I held out a hand to stop Kirill from scrambling down like a fucking monkey in a tree. He was too anxious to descend into danger for my liking, but that was Kirill. I lowered the drone through the hatch, but its signal weakened before it reached the bottom. The camera caught old brick, a narrow walkway, and water churning several feet below it before the image steadied on the lowest rung.

Fresh blood gleamed against the metal.

Kirill drew his gun and started down. Anika went next, with Maksim close enough to catch her if she slipped. I secured a signal relay beneath the hatch, braced the steel door open, and followed.

31

KIRILL

Beyond the ladder, the blood smear turned into a handprint dragged along the wall.

Whoever left it had used the tunnel to remain upright. Red streaked the mortar at shoulder height, disappeared where the passage narrowed, then returned on a rusted pipe farther ahead. The pumps thudded beneath the metal walkway, shoving harbor water through the grates hard enough to spray my boots and shake the ground hard enough Anika wobbled where she walked next to me.

Maksim guarded her back while Roman brought up the rear, dropping signal relays so the concrete and black water didn’t cut us off from the men above.

Every muscle strained to run. Standing still long enough for Roman to check each bend made my fingers itch for a throat, but charging ahead would leave Anika exposed and give Sokolov the separation he’d spent five fucking years trying to create.