Chapter 28 Thomas
Thomas
Will’s side of the bed was cold. I lay there for a moment, listening to the sounds of the farmhouse coming alive.
Voices drifted up from below, low and professional.
Dishes clattered.
Someone laughed, then stifled it quickly.
We’d managed two hours of sleep. It would have to be enough.
I found everyone in the kitchen. The Baroness sat at the table, looking as though she hadn’t slept at all—or perhaps as though sleep was a luxury she’d decided to do without.
Bisch was at the stove scrambling eggs with the grim efficiency of a man who had fed soldiers in worse conditions than this.
The CIA team had claimed one side of the table, their unnamed leader studying a map while Marcus and Danny cleaned their weapons.
Will stood by the window, a cup of coffee cradled in his hands, watching the wintry landscape out the back window.
“Morning,” I said.
He turned. Something in his face softened the moment he saw me. “Hey you. Coffee’s fresh.”
“Bisch’s doing?”
“The Baroness’s, actually. Apparently she makes excellent coffee even with—” He stopped, glancing at her bandaged hands.
“Even with these,” the Baroness finished for him, though there was no self-pity in her voice. “Some skills do not require fine motor control. Others . . .” She looked down at the maps spread before her. “Others I have had to delegate.”
I poured myself coffee and took a seat across from the American woman. She looked up, studied me for a moment, then returned to her map.
“Condor,” she said. “Sleep well?”
“Like a baby. Woke up every two hours crying.”
That surprised a laugh out of her. “You’re funnier than Emu. He’s only funny because he blushes so easily.”
“Hey, I can be funny!” Will protested as he settled into the chair beside me.
“No, you really aren’t,” the woman said. “But he”—she pointed to me—“is a delicious drink of water.”
“You mentioned that last night. Right before you commented on my chest.”
“It’s a nice chest.” She didn’t look up from the map. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Which head?” I teased.
“Thom—Condor!” Will almost forgot himself.
The woman snorted but didn’t engage.
“You never gave us your name,” Will prompted.
The woman still didn’t look up. “No, I didn’t.”
One side of her lips curled as she continued her work.
Eddie was notably absent. I glanced around the kitchen, counting heads.
“Your man,” I said. “The quiet one. He’s already out?”
“He left at dawn.” The woman looked up, then checked her watch. “He should be in position by now. He’ll take his first pass at the warehouse, then he’ll work his way around the perimeter. We should have his report by midafternoon.”
“And if he doesn’t come back?”
She met my eyes. Her expression didn’t change, but something flickered behind it—an acknowledgment that the question wasn’t idle.
“Then we’ll know they’re more alert than we hoped,” she said. “And we’ll adjust accordingly.”
This woman was cold and painfully professional. I respected it, even as part of me recoiled from it.
“He’ll come back,” Marcus said quietly. He was reassembling his pistol without looking at it, his hands moving from memory. “Eddie’s the best I’ve ever worked with. If anyone can get close without being seen, it’s him.”
I thought about the men I’d known who were “the best.” Some of them were still alive. Most weren’t.
But I kept that thought to myself.
The morning passed slowly.
We reviewed the plan. Then we reviewed it again.
The Baroness walked us through the infrastructure targets.
There were three power stations, a communications hub, and two transportation chokepoints.
Six sites. Too many for eight people to cover effectively, especially when one was so badly injured she had to remain behind.
“We focus on what we can control,” the Baroness said. “The warehouse remains our primary target. If we can document the staging operation, we can prove coordination. The secondary sites are insurance.”
“And if the warehouse is a bust?” Danny asked. “If they’re not using it as a staging area?”
“Then we adapt.” The Baroness’s voice was flat. “We follow whatever vehicles leave, document whatever we can, and hope it is enough.”
Hope.
I’d built my career on better foundations than hope.
But sometimes hope was all we had.
Will spent the morning checking equipment.
He filled cameras with film, replaced batteries, and rechecked the ammunition in our weapons so many times I thought one might go off in his hands just to make him stop.
He was meticulous, making sure everything was prepared and working properly.
It was busywork, mostly, something to keep his hands occupied while his mind chewed on problems he couldn’t solve.
It was also necessary. A dead battery at the wrong moment could kill us as surely as a bullet.
At the least, it could ruin our mission’s effectiveness.
Neither was acceptable when the world order hung in the balance.
I watched him and thought about what we were walking into.
The Order had resources. They’d clearly been planning this for years, building their network piece by piece. We’d been scrambling for weeks, improvising and reacting. The odds didn’t favor us—but then, they rarely did. They wouldn’t need us for an easy job.
What we did have was surprise.
The enemy knew we were out here, working against their goals, but they didn’t know we knew. They might suspect we were coming, but couldn’t know when or where we might appear.
At least, we hoped they didn’t.
Eddie returned at half past two.
He slipped into the farmhouse so quietly that I didn’t even hear him until he was already in the kitchen doorway. One moment it stood empty; the next moment it was occupied.
“Report,” the woman said.
Eddie crossed to the table and pulled out a small notebook. His handwriting was cramped and precise, each line a compressed burst of information.
“The warehouse is active,” he said. “Three trucks in the loading bay when I arrived. Two more came in while I was watching. Men moving equipment—crates, tools, what looked like electrical components.”
“How many men?” I asked.
“Twelve that I counted. Possibly more inside.” Eddie traced a rough sketch he’d made of the facility.
“Two entrances—main loading bay here, smaller service door on the east side. Fence around the perimeter, chain-link with barbed wire on top. One guard at the main gate, another doing irregular patrols.”
“Irregular?” The woman leaned forward. “How irregular?”
“Random intervals. Five minutes, then twelve, then eight. Someone trained them well.” Eddie looked up from his notes. “These aren’t amateurs. They’re running a professional operation.”
The Baroness absorbed this in silence. I watched her face, trying to read what she was thinking.
“The trucks,” she said finally. “Did you see where they went?”
“Two left while I was watching. I followed one as far as I could without risking exposure.” Eddie flipped to another page. “It headed east toward the industrial district. I lost it near the power station on Hardstrasse.”
“One of our targets,” Will said.
“Yes.” The Baroness nodded.
The room was quiet for a moment. This was the confirmation we needed. It wasn’t the proof we needed to expose the plot, not yet, but it was confirmation that our assumptions were correct. The warehouse was a staging area. The trucks were moving men and equipment to the infrastructure targets.
“What else?” the woman asked.
Eddie hesitated.
“Out with it,” she said.
“There’s a problem,” he said.
“What kind of problem?”
“The warehouse has a clear sightline in all directions. It sits in the middle of flat ground with no cover within two hundred meters. The only viable observation point is a water tower about three hundred meters to the north.” Eddie tapped his sketch.
“But there’s a building under construction between the tower and the warehouse with scaffolding, equipment, and workers during the day. ”
“At night?”
“It was quiet before sunrise when workers showed up, but I don’t know how late they work. That building creates the only blind spot I could find. From the water tower, we can see the main loading bay and the east entrance. We cannot see the west side of the building at all.”
“So we could miss half of what’s happening,” Marcus said.
“Or worse.” Eddie’s voice was flat. “There could be a whole secondary operation on the west side that we never see.”
The woman turned to the Baroness. “Options?”
The Baroness studied the sketch for a long moment. Her ruined fingers traced the lines Eddie had drawn, hovering over the blind spot like a surgeon examining a wound.
“We split the warehouse team,” she said finally. “Two observers on the water tower covering the main approaches. One on the ground, mobile, covering the west side.”
“That’s risky,” the woman said. “A ground observer is exposed. If they’re spotted—”
“Then they withdraw and we work with what we have.” The Baroness looked up. “It is not ideal, but the alternative is accepting a blind spot that could render the entire operation useless.”
The woman considered this.
“I’ll take the ground position,” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
“I’m the best choice,” I continued. “I’ve done close reconnaissance before. I know how to move without being seen, and I know how to get out fast if things go wrong.”
“Your shoulder,” Will said quietly.
“Is fine.”
“It’s not fine. You were shot less than two weeks ago.”
“And I’ve been shot before and kept working. This isn’t my first time operating at less than full capacity.” I met his eyes. “I can do this, Emu.”
He held my gaze for a long moment. There was fear there—not for the mission, but for me. It was the same fear I felt every time he walked into danger, the same fear that had kept me awake more nights than I could count.
But he didn’t argue. He knew me well enough to know it wouldn’t help.
“The ground position is yours,” the woman said. She didn’t ask for permission and didn’t defer to the Baroness. This was her operation now, at least tactically. “But you stay in radio contact. If anything looks wrong, you pull back. No heroics.”
“I don’t do heroics,” I said. “Heroics get people killed.”
“Good.” She turned back to the map. “Then let’s figure out how we’re going to make this work.”
The planning took the rest of the afternoon. We went over Eddie’s reconnaissance in detail. We established radio protocols, fallback positions, and emergency signals. We synchronized watches and agreed on check-in intervals.
By the time we finished, I knew the warehouse layout better than I knew the floor plan of our flat back in Paris.
I could close my eyes and see it all—the loading bay, the fence, the water tower to the north, the blind spot on the west side.
I knew where the guards would be and when they would move, except for the wildcard of the random intervals.
I knew where to hide if things went wrong.
None of it guaranteed we’d succeed, but it gave us a chance.
The sun was setting when the Baroness called an end to the session. “Enough,” she said. “We have done what we can. The rest is tomorrow.”
Tomorrow was the 14th.
The night everything would happen—or wouldn’t.
The group dispersed slowly. Marcus and Danny retreated to the living room to check their equipment one last time. Eddie disappeared somewhere—probably back outside to watch the approaches, unable to fully switch off. The woman stood at the window, staring at nothing, her face unreadable.
Will caught my arm as I passed.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “Walk with me?”
We slipped out the back door into the fading light. The snow had stopped falling, but the air was bitterly cold. Our breath fogged as we walked.
“You didn’t have to volunteer,” Will said.
“Yes, I did.”
“Thomas—”
“Someone had to take the ground position. Marcus is too bulky. He’d be spotted in ten seconds. Danny’s good, but he doesn’t have my experience with close surveillance. Eddie’s already done his part. Besides, he’s better on the water tower with a long lens. That leaves me.”
“That’s . . . very logical.”
“What can I say? I’m a logical person.”
Will laughed—a short, tired sound. “You’re the least logical person I know. You operate on instinct and spite.”
“Instinct, spite, and a deep personal commitment to not dying.” I stopped walking and turned to face him. “I’ll be careful, babe. I promise.”
“You’re always careful, and you still get shot.”
“Only sometimes and never where it counts.”
He reached out and touched my face, a gentle gesture so achingly tender in the frigid evening air.
“I can’t lose you,” he said quietly. “Not now, not after everything.”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t, but I know that we’ve been doing this for years, and we’re both still here. Few spies live as long as we have. I know that we’ve walked into worse situations and walked out again. And . . . I know I have a very good reason to come back.”
“What’s that?”
I smiled. “I made you a promise, something about screwing your brains out.”
Will’s laugh was more genuine this time. “You did say that.”
“I’m a man of my word.” I leaned in and kissed him slow and deep. When I pulled back, his eyes were bright.
“Tomorrow night,” he said.
“Tomorrow night.” I took his hand. “Come on. Let’s go back inside before we freeze to death. That would be a stupid way to die.”
“It would be a very Thomas way to die,” he quipped.
I grinned at his startled squeal when I smacked his ass.