3. Chapter 3
Ghost's read on the manifest data matched three separate tracking pings along a route that hadn't stopped moving since Marcus first flagged it. Real. Verified. Already underway.
This wasn't something that Marcus could deliver in a call, even though everything in him wished that he could.
He would have spared him the need to crack open his own chest and trust his team to hold his guts in their hands.
There was no way he could hide this from them, keep what seeing Andre would do to him from showing.
They knew him to well. Andre needed to see the maps, the timeline, the scale of it, laid out across an actual table where he could look at it himself, which meant asking him to come here.
To Lakefront. The actual walls of it, the long fluorescent hum of it, the smell of old coffee and dry-erase marker that had never fully left the air, not just the idea of a him as a man running a vigilante, anti-trafficing opporation.
Marcus typed the message four times before he sent the one that said the least.
He set the phone down screen-up on the desk and didn't pick it back up. Outside, the lot sat empty under a flat gray sky, the kind that made distances hard to read.
Twelve minutes. Then…
He spent those minutes in the meeting room instead of his office, the long steel table already covered with what Ghost had pulled: shipping manifests, a marine traffic overlay thrown up on one of the wall monitors, coordinates marked in red along a route that ran up the coast and inland through the waterways.
Ghost stayed at the monitors, headset half on, one ear still tracking a live feed nobody else in the room could follow.
The knock, when it came, wasn't at the meeting room.
The front half of the building looked like the security company it was supposed to be; converted warehouse, office rooms, boring and normal.
Seth got to the front door first, unhurried in the way that made people trust him faster than the rest of them, and Marcus heard the low exchange of voices in the hall before he'd even pushed back from the table.
Marcus didn't wait for Seth to bring him.
He crossed the room himself, the same unhurried economy that used to make opposing counsel recalculate their whole strategy watching him walk to a podium.
Sleeves rolled back from an hour spent hunched over the table, forearms bare, no jacket between him and whatever this turned out to be.
His eyes were the blue people always meant to describe better afterward and never quite managed.
The silver at his temples had come in sometime during the last six years and stayed, and he carried it the same place he carried everything else that had happened to him since: close to the skin, never mentioned.
Andre came into view a few steps behind Seth, shoulders set the way Marcus recognized from courtrooms and worse: deliberate, controlled, every step reading like something rehearsed before he ever got out of the car.
He didn't look at the building around him.
Marcus noticed immediately, and it read like effort, not indifference, like something being managed rather than simply not done.
Somehow that was worse than if he'd just stared.
Then Andre stepped into the meeting room, and Marcus caught it: the same cedar and something darker underneath, unchanged, a fact about the world that had apparently just kept being true while Marcus had spent five years not knowing it.
The room went gray around him. The table, the gray light through the window, the maps still spread open where he'd left them, all of it dropped away, and there was only Andre standing in a place that had cost them everything, close enough that Marcus could have closed the distance in two steps and undone the last five years with them.
He knew exactly how that would feel. He knew exactly why he couldn't.
Three seconds. Four. He counted them off, precise as anything else he counted, and then his hands found their instructions again, and he was a man extending a professional greeting to a colleague, nothing more, and if his voice cost him anything to keep even, nobody in the room but him would ever know it.
"Andre," he said.
"Marcus."
That was all either of them let it be.
Marcus tipped his chin toward the wall monitor where Ghost had already painted the digital air with an overlay of the eastern seaboard.
Three ships glowed as red dots, their real-time positions pulled from marine traffic databases clean enough for a Senate hearing.
They crawled north along a coastline all three men knew in their bones, past the shallow menace of Cape Fear, past the sprawling mouth of the Chesapeake, into grey water that grew colder and darker with every nautical mile.
"They aren't stopping at any U.S. port," Marcus said, voice low. "St. Lawrence Seaway. Then south through Huron. Into Detroit by water, not road."
Andre's gaze traced the glowing route once, then again, calculating fuel, time, current. "That's not the most efficient way to move cargo that size."
"It's the efficient way to move it without anyone stopping to ask why.
" Ghost flicked his wrist; the coastline dissolved, replaced by columns of volume numbers and container counts that laid bare the operation's staggering scale.
"Trucks this size, moving this often? They get seen.
A ship that's scheduled, expected, already supposed to be there?
" He shook his head. "Nobody looks twice.
And he owns the port on the other end. Owns it so completely that whatever comes off those ships walks right through customs without a second glance. "
The door didn't stay shut for long. Trip came in first, quiet the way ex-agents were even after they'd stopped needing to, and pulled up short at the sight of Andre before he covered it with a nod.
Zain was two steps behind him, arms already crossed, and he didn't bother with the nod at all.
There was a rebellion already deploying across his features, his dark eyebrows furrowed.
"Trip used to run interdiction cases," Marcus said, by way of an introduction neither of them had asked for. "He'll know things about how that port operates that the rest of us don't."
Trip studied the overlay before he spoke.
"If Drakov's got the harbor master's office, he's not moving cargo through blind.
He's got eyes on every manifest that crosses that dock, which means anything you build against him has to survive someone on his payroll reading it first." He looked at Andre directly for the first time.
"Your warrant request goes through the wrong hands, he knows you're coming before you do. "
Zain didn't say anything yet. He didn't need to.
The set of his jaw was doing enough talking for both of them.
Seth gave his man a wry grin, clearly very familiar with his surly attitude and distrust of anyone and everything outside of their team.
Somewhere behind them, Nate's phone buzzed with a text only half the room could see, and whatever it said made Nate snort quietly into his coffee before he caught himself and put his professional face back on.
Small mercies, on a night that wasn't going to hand out many more of them.
Andre was silent. Whatever was happening behind his eyes stayed there, locked down tight the way Marcus had seen him do back when the job required things neither of them liked to remember.
"How long?" Andre asked finally. It wasn't really a question.
"Once the ships dock, the cargo atomizes.
" Marcus kept his tone neutral because there was no emotion that fit.
"Regional trucks, loaded and gone within hours.
Headed in every direction you can drive out of Detroit.
After that…" He let the implication hang in the air like smoke.
"There's no single point left to hit. No warehouse.
No depot. Nothing that sits still long enough to raid.
We might get lucky if they use nodes we have already uncovered, but my team isn't big enough to help once they clear the state lines.
The Atlanta tip off was luck only because one of my team had business down there at the time.
" He waited a beat before landing the truth like a hammer.
"This isn't cargo. You understand what I'm telling you.
Every number on this screen is a person. "
Andre's jaw didn't so much as twitch, but something shifted deep behind his eyes, a fracture his expression fought hard to conceal.
"I understand exactly what it is," he said.
Marcus watched him take that in, saw the flash of hurt and anger that were so obvious when you knew how to read them in Andre's face.
In that moment, Marcus would have done anything to spare the man he had loves…
maybe somewhere still did… the part that would cost him more than the truth already had.
But, there were fourty people on three ships who couldn't afford for him to be soft. For any of them to be.
"You could run this," he said. "Officially. Get whatever agency has jurisdiction on the water moving, get a warrant that'll survive somebody actually asking questions about it later. I'll give you everything Ghost pulled, clean enough to source, and step back."
Andre's eyes came off the monitor and found him instead. "You're offering me first crack at this."
Zain made a sound low in his throat, not quite a word, not quite swallowed either. Marcus didn't look at him. Not yet. There would be time for that once Andre was gone, and Zain would make sure of it whether Marcus gave him the time or not.