Chapter Three #2
Bear smiled and went back to the stove, hand towel hanging over his broad shoulder. I was halfway through breakfast when Jackal leaned his elbows on the table and looked at me with an expression I had already learned meant he was about to become a problem.
He smiled mischievously. “We forgot something yesterday.”
“If this is about shampoo, I don’t care.”
“You need an animal.”
I looked at Raven.
He immediately smiled into his coffee. The traitorous bastard had just earned strike two
“I do not need an animal.”
Jackal pointed around the room. “Bear. Raven. Hawk. Viper. Jackal.”
“I know everyone’s names. I read the folders.”
“And now Mercer.”
“Mercer is a surname.”
“Exactly. It ruins the ecosystem. It ruins morale.”
Hawk took another bite of his apple. “Mongoose.”
I whipped my head toward him. “Why mongoose?”
“Small. Aggressive.”
“I’m not three feet tall.”
Viper looked up from his yogurt. “Goose.”
He shrugged. “Taller. Also aggressive.”
Jackal slapped the table once and pointed at Viper. “Goose is strong.”
“No.”
Bear finally sat down with his own plate. “Fox would make more sense.”
“Thank you, Bear. At least somebody is trying.”
Raven looked thoughtful. “Magpie.”
“Why?”
“Collects interesting things and refuses to leave them alone.”
“That’s not even accurate.”
“You spent ten hours yesterday chasing license plates because the spacing looked strange.”
“That’s called doing my job.”
Jackal shook his head. “Magpie sounds too elegant.”
“I’m sitting right here.”
“I’m aware.”
Hawk leaned back against the counter. “Badger.”
“Again with the small aggressive animals.”
Jackal looked delighted. “Honey badger.”
“Absolutely not.”
Raven’s smile widened. “That one has potential.”
“You are all terrible at this.”
The side door opened.
Wolf entered carrying a black mug, his hair pulled back now and his mask still covering the lower half of his face. His arrival pulled everyone’s attention without stopping the conversation.
Jackal looked at him.
“Perfect timing boss. Mercer needs a callsign.”
Wolf kept walking.
“No, she doesn’t.”
“We have options.”
“I don’t care.”
Jackal persisted because self-preservation was apparently an intermittent condition. “Mongoose, goose, fox, magpie, honey badger.”
Wolf stopped near the coffee machine. I watched him, curious despite myself. He poured coffee and looked at me over the rim of the mug.
“She’s temporary.”
The table went quiet.
Jackal lowered the hot sauce bottle he had somehow recovered and Raven looked at Wolf with a flicker of disapproval that vanished almost immediately.
I swallowed the bite in my mouth. “Temporary?”
“You don’t need one.”
“Because I’m… temporary.”
“You said it.”
There was enough casual certainty in his voice that irritation crawled straight up my spine.
I leaned back in my chair. “Whatever.”
Wolf’s eyes rested on me for another second.
“6:30,” he said to Raven.
Raven glanced at the clock. “She’s ready.”
“I can see that.”
Wolf’s gaze flicked down once, taking in the fitted training clothes and the shoes Raven had requested, then returned to my face without comment. For some reason, I became sharply aware of the leggings against my thighs and the way the quarter-zip fit across my chest.
Wolf walked away.
Jackal waited until the side door shut behind him before saying, “Shit, temporary is kind of a metal name.”
“I will put hot sauce in your shampoo.”
Raven nearly choked on his coffee and Bear laughed loudly enough that Viper actually smiled.
“Welcome to the zoo,” Jackal said.
I pointed my fork at him. “I saw you in your underwear before six this morning. I think I’ve been welcomed enough.”
That ended breakfast with considerably more yelling than it had started with.
◆
Raven gave me the tour at 6:38, which he claimed still counted as 6:30 because eight minutes was apparently within what he called “operational tolerance.”
I suspected this was the kind of technicality that kept people sane around Wolf.
We started with the operations floor because Raven insisted I had only seen the portion of it while occupied by my own problems. In daylight, the room felt larger than it had when I arrived.
Four primary workstations faced the wall of screens, though Raven’s had clearly metastasized across two of them.
The long central table could hold a full briefing without anyone needing to move laptops, and a secured communications room sat behind a thick door near the rear of the floor.
Raven tapped the badge clipped to his waistband and opened it.
Inside, server racks hummed beneath cold white lights. Portable radios charged along one wall beside encrypted handsets, compact drone cases and enough cabling to make me immediately understand why nobody else was allowed to organize Raven’s things.
“This is your actual bedroom,” I said.
“If I could fit a kettle in here, yes.”
“You probably could.”
“Wolf said no.”
“Typical douchebag.”
Raven looked toward the open doorway before whispering. “You’re adjusting quickly.”
He showed me the equipment storage room next, where shelves were organized with the kind of precision that suggested Bear had been involved and Jackal had been threatened.
Plate carriers hung by callsign. Cases held night-vision devices, optics and communications equipment, while another secured cabinet contained training flashbangs, smoke canisters and other equipment Raven only described broadly because there were limits to how much classified material I was allowed to absorb before breakfast settled. The armory door stood beside it.
Raven stopped, and for a second neither of us said anything.
“This is the armory.”
“I gathered that from the sign.”
“Good. Tour complete.”
“Open it.”
“No.”
“Raven.”
“Wolf specifically told me to keep you out of the armory.”
“Yesterday.”
“His orders do not expire at midnight.”
“Did you check?”
He stared at me.
I smiled.
Raven sighed, scanned his badge and opened the door while remaining planted directly across the threshold.
“You are viewing it from here. If one shoe crosses that line, I am closing the door.”
“You are deeply afraid of him.”
“I have survived this long by recognizing avoidable risks.”
I leaned forward without moving my feet.
The room beyond him was narrower than I’d expected, with secured racks along both walls and larger cases stacked beneath them. The weapons were arranged with the same lack of ornament as everything else at ARC. They were tools, maintained and stored according to whoever used them.
Raven pointed toward the nearest rack.
“Wolf usually runs an HK416A5 for direct action. Configuration changes depending on where we’re going. Viper prefers a short SIG MCX SPEAR-LT when we’re working tight interiors. Jackal uses the MP7 you saw yesterday more than anything else, especially if he expects to move.”
He nodded toward a long hard case on the lower rack.
“Hawk’s AXMC lives there when he isn’t attached to it.”
“The sniper rifle?”
“One of them. He changes caliber and system depending on the job, but you’ll see that one this morning.”
My attention shifted to a separate cage holding a short breaching shotgun, several heavy hand tools and compact cases marked with warnings I didn’t need translated.
“Bear?”
“Bear.”
“So the largest person here is the one who opens doors.”
“Sometimes by asking politely.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You shouldn’t.”
I looked toward his hip. “And you?”
Raven tapped the Glock 19 holstered there. “This.”
“Your emotional support pistol?”
“I regret showing you anything.”
“Too late.”
He closed the armory before I could discover anything else.
The medical room surprised me more than the weapons had.
It was small but serious, with an examination table, trauma bags, tools and enough emergency equipment to make the rest of the compound feel less theoretical.
A locked refrigerator sat beneath one counter.
Cabinets were labeled in German and English, and an entire rack of sealed blood packs had been arranged by type.
“Who handles medical?”
“All of us have advanced trauma training. Bear’s probably the best at keeping somebody alive until we reach actual medicine.”
“That’s oddly specific.”
We moved through the garage next.
Several vehicles occupied marked spaces beneath industrial lights.
An armored Mercedes G-Class sat nearest the equipment door, followed by a gray BMW X5, a black Ducati Panigale V4, an unmarked Volkswagen Transporter and a dirt-streaked Toyota Hilux that looked as though someone had driven it through half of Europe without considering a car wash necessary.
“Who drives that?”
Raven followed my gaze toward the Hilux. “Jackal, when Wolf loses the argument.”
“That explains the condition.”
“It explains several conditions.”
The garage smelled like fuel and cold concrete mixed with rubber.
Tool chests lined one wall beside spare tires and recovery equipment, and a section at the back had been converted into a workbench where Bear repaired things whenever replacement parts took too long to arrive.
The infamous second bathroom was through a metal door in the far corner.
Raven opened it.
I took one look at the single toilet beside a utility sink and a showerhead mounted directly over stained tile.
“No.”
“I told you.”
“This looks like a rest stop bathroom in a horror movie.”
“Jackal uses it sometimes.”
“That tracks.”
We went back through the main building and upstairs briefly. Raven pointed out the bedrooms again, a balcony at the end of the corridor and Wolf’s office tucked into the corner.
The door was closed.
“What’s in there?”
“A desk.”
“That’s all?”
“Chair too.”
“Luxurious.”
Raven put one hand on the railing. “Don’t go in unless he asks you to.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
“You say that now.”
I looked toward the closed door. “Does he sleep in there?”
“No.”
“Brood?”
Raven considered it. “Sometimes.”
I smiled.
He pointed toward the stairs. “Training yard before you get me killed.”
Outside, the morning had burned through most of the fog.