Chapter 19 #2
Vihaan spun his laptop around. The screen showed compound schematics, satellite imagery, and guard rotations.
"Nevada got the raw intel out through the dead drop.
I did the rest." He spun it back. "There's a gap on the north side rotation between the second and third shifts.
Same window every night. Their head of security is either lazy or incompetent, and I genuinely don't care which. "
Lorenzo leaned over and said quietly in Spanish, "I like this kid."
"Don't tell him," I said. "He'll stop being useful."
Rhadamanthys pulled up a different screen. "The plan runs on one fact about Patroklos. He's a long way from home, and he misses it. Kazakhstan, originally. He hires musicians, traditional music, the kind that reminds him who he was before."
I glanced at Mr. Nobody. He sat exactly where he'd been, against the wall with his scars and his fiddle and that readiness with nowhere to point yet. The man was either the calmest person I'd ever met or the most dangerous. In my experience, those were usually the same thing.
"Vihaan books Mr. Nobody as entertainment, making it look legitimate in their system. He gets inside, performs, and creates a distraction when we need one. While Patroklos is occupied, Jasper and I go in through the north gap and pull Nevada out."
Jasper's knee went rigid against my spine.
I kept facing forward because I already knew what his face looked like.
He was running the same math I was: two men inside a Pantheon compound, one way in, one way out, and everything riding on a gap in a rotation that might not hold.
The last time we'd split up, he'd walked into headlights and I'd spent four hours wearing a hole in hotel carpet, bargaining with a God I didn't believe in.
I reached behind me without looking and stole my pen back from Lorenzo. He slapped my hand. I kept the pen.
"Just the two of you," Jasper said. His voice was flat, but his knee pressed harder against my back.
"Two operators are harder to spot than four. Small footprint, surgical." Rhadamanthys looked at me. "Diego flies us in and holds the exit. Vihaan rides with him, cameras, alarms, communications, all of it runs from the vehicle." He looked at Vihaan. "You good with that?"
"I'm not here for this one rescue," Vihaan said. "I'm here because Patroklos runs a forced labor operation out of that compound, and I've been building a case against it for months. You get your man out, I get their files. Everybody wins."
The room went quiet in a different way than before. Rhadamanthys studied him for a long beat.
"The mission is Nevada," Rhadamanthys said. "That's the priority."
"Your priority." Vihaan met his stare. "Mine's bigger. But tonight they overlap, so let's not waste time arguing about whose matters more."
Lorenzo kicked my ankle under the table. I kicked him back.
"Lorenzo stays here."
Lorenzo opened his mouth.
"You just got Rafael back," Rhadamanthys said. "Your stitches are barely healed. And I need someone I trust holding this location."
Lorenzo closed his mouth. He looked at Rafael across the room, then back at Rhadamanthys, and whatever fight he'd been loading up died before it reached his teeth.
"The north gap," Mr. Nobody said.
Every head in the room turned. His voice was low and unhurried, the kind of voice that didn't need volume because it had never been ignored.
"The rotation gap is clean," he said. "But the approach isn't. Someone has been running that corridor ahead of you.
Same compound, same routes, over the past year.
The guard rotations adapted once already.
" He ran his thumb along the neck of the fiddle.
"Whoever they are, they're good. And they'll be watching the same window you are. "
Vihaan pulled up something on his screen and frowned. "He's right. There's ghost traffic in the logs. Someone's been probing their perimeter, but they never breach. They just look."
He set his hands back on the fiddle and returned to the middle distance like he'd never left it.
“Well, let’s hope he’s not planning to crash the party,” Rhadamanthys said.
"And Nevada has Zeus's location," I said. "And if we're right about where Eight ended up."
My voice held steady on Eight's name, but my hands didn't. I pressed them flat against the table and kept them there.
She was out there somewhere in the dark of the Pantheon, the same machine that had trained her to kill before she could read, and every hour I spent in this room was an hour she spent alone.
"Then we'll know where to go next," Rhadamanthys said.
"I need fuel specs and a strip near Amritsar that doesn't ask questions," I said.
The Kalderash had been running routes through that corridor since before the Pantheon had a name.
My tío's contacts ran back to my father's, a web of fuel depots and landing strips and border men who owed us favors older than I was.
I wasn't offering Rhadamanthys a pilot. I was offering him an organization that could move people across sovereign borders like they were suggestions.
Rhadamanthys nodded. I pushed my chair back, stood up, and put my hand out across the map.
"Then let's go save your man."