Chapter 14
Lydia's house was the right choice for exactly the reasons nobody said out loud.
It was the largest, it was the most secure, Clint had seen to that years ago without being asked, and it had a room off the main hallway that Lydia used as an office that could fit six women around a table and had no windows facing the street.
They arrived separately, ten minutes apart.
Sophia last, after she'd gotten the girls settled at Beth's with a pizza and a movie and a reason that didn't require too much explanation.
Beth hadn't asked. She'd just opened the door and taken the girls and squeezed Sophia's arm on the way back in and that was that.
Lydia had coffee ready and a whiteboard set up on the wall that was already covered in her careful block printing. Lydia was at the table with her laptop open. Rylie had her notebook out, the physical one she used when she was working on something that she didn't want on any server anywhere.
Sophia sat down and looked at the whiteboard. It was already more than she'd expected. Angie was running the briefing like it was a military operation. She probably got that from her grandfather, Pops. There was no preamble, no softening.
“The texts to Lettie came from a burner,” she said, standing at the board.
“Unregistered. Untraceable to a name. But the phone was on when it sent, which means it pinged a tower.” She pointed to a map she'd taped to the right side of the board.
There was a circle drawn on it in red marker.
“Whoever sent those texts was inside this radius. Eastlake Vistas. And it has the most rental properties.”
“Do you think that’s where they have Bree?”
“Not a chance in hell. Too exposed. But I do think it would be perfect to house operatives who are surveilling Peggy and Lettie.”
“This means they’ve been running this for a while.”
“This proto-type came into NAS last September,” Rylie spoke up.
“I’m surprised they didn’t get the specs from the manufacturer,” Lydia said.
“I’m betting they want to know all the problems that the mechanics are finding. Even when they plug the holes, there still might be vulnerabilities our enemies can exploit.”
“I highly doubt that,” Sophia said. “Mason is really impressed with Dan.”
“Sorry, there’s always vulnerabilities,” Lydia sighed.
“Ladies, focus. We have an area where we think some of the operatives are. That’s good. Now, we need to figure out where they might be holding Bree.”
“The vial?” Sophia asked, pointing to the picture on the whiteboard. “Does that tell us anything?”
Lydia leaned over her laptop and picked up a printed page from the table.
“Preliminary analysis. I won't have full confirmation until tomorrow morning, but the composition is consistent with a fast-acting benzodiazepine compound.
Not a standard pharmaceutical formulation, this was mixed, not manufactured.
Higher concentration than anything you'd find in a prescription.” She set the page down.
“In a healthy adult male it would cause significant sedation within twenty minutes of ingestion. In someone with a pre-existing cardiac condition—” She stopped. “Lettie was right not to use it.”
Sophia thought about Tom Bowman sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee his wife had brought him, trusting her completely, not knowing.
She stopped thinking about it.
“How many people are we looking at?” she asked.
Rylie answered that one. She looked down at her tablet, her eyes moving between her screen and the board.
“Minimum six. Probably more.” She turned the laptop around so they could see the diagram she'd built—names replaced with roles, lines connecting them.
“You need somebody running long-term surveillance on Lettie.
That's one person, possibly two working shifts because you can't have the same face in the same place every day without being made.
Somebody separately photographing Brady at the park.
That's not the same person as Lettie's surveillance, the timing overlaps. You have somebody who made the call to the Mathnasium. Somebody physically present when Bree walked out of that building, at minimum one, more likely two for a clean grab of a teenager who might fight back. At least one handler wherever Bree is being held right now, probably rotating, which means two. And Mary.” She paused. “And whoever is above Mary.”
Rylie closed the laptop. “Six people on the ground as a conservative estimate. Could be eight. This is not a small operation. This is organized, funded, and it has been running for months without a single mistake.”
“Until Kayla noticed Mandy,” Angie said.
“Until Kayla noticed Mandy and you noticed Lettie,” Rylie pointed out.
They worked through what they had for another hour.
Angie was going back to the Mathnasium in the morning, not as herself, as a woman whose daughter was thinking of enrolling, which gave her a natural reason to be there and to ask questions and to chat with the receptionist who had put Bree in a car with strangers.
She needed a description of the voice on that call. Accent. Any background noise. Anything.
Lydia was going to keep working the tower data and start cross-referencing property records.
Rylie made a call while they were still at the table.
She stepped to the corner of the room and spoke quietly for about four minutes, then came back and sat down.
“I have a contact,” she said. “From before.
She tracks trafficking movement in Southern California.
I've asked her to run the signature on this operation against anything she has on file.
If this network has moved girls through this region before, she'll know.”
The word trafficking hit the room the way it always did. Even though they all knew. Even though it had been sitting in the middle of the table since Lettie had repeated Mary's words that afternoon. Saying it out loud was different.
Sophia felt it move through her like cold water.
She thought about Bree at lacrosse practice. About Bree's laugh, which was loud and uninhibited and a little honking at the end, the kind of laugh that made everyone nearby start laughing too. About the fact that she was fourteen years old and somebody had looked at her and seen a commodity.
She put her pen down just for a second. Just long enough to press her fingers against the table and breathe.
Angie's hand landed on her arm. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.
Sophia picked up her pen.
“What else?” she asked.
“I want to talk about Mary,” Rylie said.
They all looked at her.
“Mary is the interface. She's the one with direct contact with Lettie and Peggy.
She's the one who handed over the vial. She's the one who made the trafficking threat.” She folded her hands on the table.
“She's also the one with the most exposure.
Every conversation she's had with those women is a liability.
She knows it. Which means at some point, when this operation reaches whatever its conclusion is supposed to be, Mary disappears.
She'll be pulled out and her identity dissolves back into nothing.”
“We only have fifty more hours.” Sophia said.
“Can we push her? Kidnap her? Force her to talk?” Sophia asked. She was angry.
Angie shook her head. “That just lets everyone in the group know there are other players. We lose our leverage. Trust me, Sophia, we want to, too.”
She nodded. “So we need to move faster than their timeline,” Sophia said.
“Yes.” Rylie looked at her. “We do.”
The room sat with that for a moment.
“There's something else,” Lydia said.
She had been at her laptop through most of this, adding things, cross-referencing, her face giving nothing away. Now she looked up.
“I've been looking at the architecture of this operation. The patience of it. The resources. The identity construction on Mary. The level of advance surveillance on two separate families in two separate geographic areas.” She paused. “You don't build this to steal helicopter schematics.”
The room went quiet.
“What do you mean?” Sophia asked.
“I mean the investment doesn't match the objective.
Schematics for a prototype helicopter—that's valuable, yes. But this much groundwork, this many people, this many months of preparation?” She shook her head.
“Someone spent serious money and serious time on this operation.
The schematics are real. The pressure on Lettie and Peggy is real.
But I think they're a means to an end, not the end itself.”
“So what's the end?” Angie asked.
“I don't know yet.” She said it flatly, without apology. “But I'm going to find out.”
Sophia looked at the whiteboard. At the careful block printing, the map with its red circle sitting squarely over Eastlake Vistas, the diagram of roles and connecting lines. All of it was real and solid and actionable. And underneath all of it was something none of them could see yet.
“Keep going,” she said.
Lydia nodded and went back to her laptop.
They wrapped up twenty minutes later. Angie to the Mathnasium in the morning. Lydia on the tower data and property records. Rylie waiting on her contact. They left separately, the same way they'd arrived.
Sophia was the last out the door.
She drove to Beth’s house and picked up her girls, the entire time thinking about what Lydia had said.
The investment doesn't match the objective.
She turned it over the same way she turned over everything she wasn't ready to say out loud yet.
She teased at the threads, pulling carefully, not forcing, letting the pieces find each other on their own.
She listened to her daughters the best she could, then hustled them to bed. But before turning out the lights, she stood in Kayla's doorway in the dark and listened to her breathe, and then Lisa's, and then she went to the kitchen and made tea she wouldn't drink and sat at the island.
She waited for Mason's window to open, needing to hear his voice. Maybe to even tell him what was going on. But he didn’t call.
She went to bed, but she didn’t sleep.
Her phone buzzed before five in the morning.
Rylie.
She answered immediately.
“My contact came back,” Rylie said with the particular tone in her voice that meant she was controlling something carefully.
“The operational signature matches a network she's been tracking for two years.
They've moved girls through San Diego before. Twice that she knows of.” A pause.
“She has a name attached to it. I don't want to say it on the phone.”
Sophia closed her hand around her mug.
“How soon can you get here?” she asked.
“Twenty minutes.”
“I'll make coffee.”
She hung up and sat very still in her quiet kitchen. Outside the window the canyon was just beginning to go gray at the edges.
She thought about Bree. About where she was right now, whether she was cold, scared. About whether she knew that a room full of women had spent last night deciding to come for her.
She thought about fifty hours.
No. Forty-two now.
She got up and made the coffee.