Chapter Nine #2
Viper helped Bear get Jackal onto the compact stretcher from the response vehicle.
Jackal tried to argue that he could walk until Bear told him, with surprising calm, that he could either lie down willingly or discover how humiliating it felt to be carried over Bear’s shoulder in front of half the garage.
Jackal stopped arguing after that, though the fact that he had no better insult ready frightened me more than the exchange helped.
Raven started the van as soon as Bear’s vehicle cleared the garage. “We’re going to the hospital.”
I looked toward Wolf’s position on the feed. “What about Varga?”
“Wolf has him. German investigators are two minutes out, and Hawk is staying until the handoff is done.”
“I can stay with the evidence.”
Raven looked at me before pulling into traffic. “I need you on Bear’s channel while I drive. If the medical team changes the rendezvous, you keep everyone on the same route.”
I could actually help with that, so I took the tablet and stopped asking to be somewhere else.
Bear’s vehicle moved ahead of us through Augsburg while the radio stayed mostly quiet.
When he spoke, it was to give Raven Jackal’s condition or to tell Viper what he needed.
Jackal answered questions when Bear asked them, though the pauses between his answers grew long enough that I started counting them without meaning to.
“Jackal,” Bear said after one silence stretched too far. “Stay with me.”
“I’m here.”
“Tell me what you stole from Raven this morning.”
Jackal took long enough to answer that I started watching the seconds again. “Nothing.”
Raven looked personally offended even while driving.
“He’s absolutely concussed.”
“Not a head wound,” I reminded him.
“Then he’s lying under medical duress.”
Jackal’s voice returned, weaker but recognizably his.
“C-coffee pods.”
Raven let out a breath through his nose. “It’s a miracle.”
Hearing Jackal answer Bear’s questions was the reassurance we needed while the vehicles kept moving toward the rendezvous. The medical team met Bear where Raven had arranged it and took over without wasting time.
By the time our van reached the hospital, Jackal was already through the emergency entrance with Bear beside him. Viper arrived moments later carrying the black pack Jackal had dropped near the response vehicle. Wolf arrived almost forty minutes later.
He had stayed long enough to transfer Varga into German custody under ARC authority and personally preserve the messenger bag with the phone inside its evidence chain instead of letting either disappear into a random room for the next six weeks. His trust issues were well warranted.
When he walked into the waiting area, his mask was still on and a dark smear had dried along one glove near the wrist. I knew whose blood it was before I looked away.
“Status?” he asked.
Raven closed the laptop he had been pretending not to work on. “Surgery. Bear says the knife went through the abdominal wall on the left. They don’t think it hit anything immediately catastrophic, but they’re checking the depth and controlling the bleeding.”
Wolf looked at the clock on the wall. “When did they take him back?”
“Thirty-one minutes ago.”
He nodded and sat across from us.
The waiting room was ugly in the way hospitals usually were when nobody inside cared about the furniture. A television played silently near the ceiling, and I spent the next hour pretending to read Varga’s preliminary evidence inventory while every opening door pulled my attention away from it.
I had known Jackal for only a little while, yet his voice already belonged in the kitchen before sunrise and somewhere behind me whenever Raven was trying to work.
I knew the expression he made before saying something vulgar, and I knew about the red ribbon he thought nobody had seen.
The possibility of those becoming memories instead of habits I could keep complaining about made my chest hurt.
Across from me, Wolf appeared almost indifferent if I only watched his body. He sat forward with his forearms on his knees and spoke to nobody unless they brought him information. When Bear sent the next update, Wolf read it before Raven did.
Five minutes later, he asked Raven whether the surgical team had requested blood.
When Raven said yes, Wolf wanted to know how much.
He asked when Jackal’s pressure had stabilized in transport and whether Bear had seen any change in consciousness after the handoff.
None of the questions sounded panicked, but he kept collecting details as if knowing the exact sequence could keep the outcome from surprising him.
I looked down at Varga’s evidence inventory again when Raven nudged the laptop toward me.
“We have one useful thing already.”
Varga’s messenger bag held two paper transfer packets and several temporary identity cards.
One of the photographs was familiar enough that I pulled up the Haus Eberhardt files and found the woman within a minute.
She had tried to escape during an earlier transfer and been brought back to confinement.
Before our raid, Cerberus moved her again under heavier restraints and the packet in Varga’s bag gave her another name and a new destination.
Raven opened the party transcript beside the record.
Luca asking Kade about an Emil had sounded almost incidental when we first heard it.
Now we had E. Varga collecting paperwork from Haus Eberhardt and Emil Varga carrying the next identity for a woman Cerberus had already punished for trying to run.
“I still don’t know if this proves Kade sent him,” I said.
“No,” Raven replied. “It proves Kade knew the same Emil we’re holding now. That’s enough until Varga tells us more.”
Wolf held out his hand for the screen and read the woman’s record before giving it back. “Find where they sent her.”
“And Varga?” I asked.
“He wakes up in custody,” Wolf said. “Then he tells us what we need to know.”
The doors opened before anyone could answer, and Bear came into the waiting room wearing a hospital scrub top someone had given him after his clothes became too bloody to keep on. He looked tired enough that everyone was on their feet before he reached us.
“He’s out,” Bear said. “They controlled the bleeding. The knife missed the spleen and the major vessels, so they repaired the muscle damage and they’re keeping him overnight for observation.”
Viper closed his eyes and dropped back into his chair. Hawk rubbed a hand over the back of his neck before asking when Jackal could have visitors. Wolf waited until the question was answered before looking at Bear.
“Stable?”
“Stable,” Bear said.
Wolf sat down after that. A week ago I might have missed how much the movement gave away, but I had spent the entire wait watching him hold himself together by collecting information and keeping the rest of us moving.
Now his hands rested loosely between his knees while he stared at the closed doors, with nothing left to command until Jackal woke up.
Bear pointed at Viper. “They’ll let one of us in when he’s awake enough. You go first.”
Viper looked toward Wolf.
Wolf nodded. “Go.”
Viper left without arguing, and Raven closed Varga’s evidence file for the first time since we arrived.
I did the same with the Haus Eberhardt records.
The woman under the false name still needed to be found, and Varga still needed to talk.
Neither problem was going anywhere before morning and our exhaustion was catching up to us.
Jackal was alive behind those doors, and I could finally let myself believe he was going to come back to the compound and become everybody’s problem again. I wanted that more than I had any right to after knowing him for such a short time.
I had underestimated how quickly ARC could become important to me.
The work moved fast enough that everything around it did too, including the people.
Somewhere between the cereal, nudity, stolen shampoo and the song he hummed while he sat beside the window with that ribbon, Jackal had stopped feeling like one of the six personnel files I had read on an airplane.
Seeing him bleeding on a parking garage floor had only shown me how completely he had worked his way into the life I was building here.
He was going to come back to the compound and recover, and I was already looking forward to complaining about it.