Chapter 14
Judge
At three thirty in the morning, Sisco lays it out with no excess, no hedging, just the shape of the arrangement.
He made contact with Agent Dana Carr three days ago through a channel that doesn't connect back to the club directly.
Carr is FBI, organized crime division, has been building a case on Delacroix's network for two years, and has been waiting for something actionable to drop into it. Delacroix is actionable.
"The handoff is at a truck stop outside Laplace," Sisco says. "Neutral ground. We bring Delacroix, she brings a vehicle and two agents. We transfer custody, we hand over the evidence package, we leave. Nothing connects us to the chain of custody."
"She knows where it came from," I say.
"She knows enough to know not to ask questions that would complicate her case." Sisco looks at Templar. "She wants the network above Delacroix. He gets her one thread of it. She'll take the thread and not look too hard at the hand that gave it to her."
Templar is quiet for a moment. He's been sitting behind his desk looking at the operational map: the Chalmette facility, the approach routes, the specific geometry of what tomorrow morning looks like. He looks up.
"The photographs," he says.
"Jesslyn's turning over copies of the evidentiary frames," I say. "Not everything. The ones that put Delacroix at the operation and establish the route. Carr gets what she needs to build the case. The rest stays ours."
Templar nods once. "It's done," he says. He looks back at the map. "Get ready to roll out.”
I nod once and leave his office.
The argument starts at four in the morning.
I find her in the common room with her camera bag packed and her boots on, sitting at the end of the table like she's been there a while. Like she made a decision and has been sitting with it long enough that she's done negotiating with herself about it.
"No," I say.
"I know the facility better than anyone in this club." She holds my gaze. "I built the map. I know the approach routes, the sight lines, the dock position. I've been in my head walking through it for days."
"You're not a shooter."
"I'm not asking to be a shooter. I'm asking to be in the support vehicle and document what happens."
"The support vehicle is forty feet from a facility we're about to breach, Jesslyn."
"I know where the support vehicle is, Judge.
I've looked at the layout approximately a hundred times.
" She doesn't move from the table. "I have been in situations more dangerous than this.
I have documented things that were actively trying to kill me.
I know how to stay low and stay out of the way and stay alive while things are happening around me. "
"This is different."
"You keep saying that. You said it about Lake Borgne and you were partially right and you said we'd do it together and we did. This is the same argument with different geography."
"This isn't surveillance. This is a breach of a facility with armed men in it."
"I know what it is." Her voice doesn't change. "I know exactly what it is and I know why you don't want me there and I know you're not entirely wrong. I'm asking you to weigh that against what I can do that nobody else in this club can do."
The compound is moving around us. Brothers are gearing up, the low controlled noise of men preparing to do something violent and necessary. Templar is in his office. Recon is running the equipment check. The clock on the wall reads four-twelve.
"You stay in the vehicle," I say. "You don't get out for anything."
She looks at me.
"I mean it. If it goes wrong in there, you drive. You don't wait for me, you don't wait for anyone. You drive."
"Okay," she says.
"Say it back."
"If it goes wrong, I drive. I don't wait."
I look at her for another moment. "Get in the support vehicle," I say.
She picks up her camera bag and goes.
We roll out at five in the morning.
Eight bikes and two support vehicles. The vehicles are for equipment and for moving the girls if we find them, the bikes because that's what we are and that's how we move when it matters.
The sound of eight bikes leaving Magnolia Bend in the dark is a sound that carries across flat Delta land for miles, and I have always thought there is something right about that. We don't pretend to be invisible. We announce ourselves to whatever's ahead of us.
The Chalmette facility sits at the edge of the parish, water access on the south side, a commercial road on the north that sees just enough traffic to pass for ordinary.
Recon's surveillance gave us six men inside; two on the main floor, two in the back corridor where the containers are, one on the dock, one on the mezzanine above the main floor with a sight line to both access points.
The mezzanine position is the problem. A man in elevation with a clear sight line means the first thirty seconds of the breach are the most dangerous thirty seconds of the operation.
Delta takes the mezzanine before we breach.
He goes up the east exterior ladder in the dark while the rest of us hold position on the perimeter, and there are forty-five seconds where the radio is silent and nobody breathes, and then two clicks.
Delta's voice comes across quietly. “Clear.”
We go in.
The east door goes at seven forty-seven and the west door three seconds behind it. The facility erupts into the specific violence of men who didn't see us coming and are trying to process an ambush while also trying to stay alive, which is a problem that always favors the ambush.
The first man in the main floor gets his weapon up but not level before Pawn takes him down — two shots, fast. Pawn goes to one knee immediately after because the man got a round off in the process and it catches Pawn in the thigh.
Not arterial. He tells me himself, still on one knee with his piece still up, voice completely controlled, to keep moving.
I keep moving.
The second man in the main floor goes for the dock door and Boomer cuts him off at the west entrance. The fight there is not clean. It's close and loud and ugly, the specific violence of men in a confined space who are both trying to win a fight that only one of them walks away from.
Boomer's nose breaks against the man's elbow on the second exchange. He finishes it anyway. Sisco gets the dock door. The man on the dock drops his weapon when he sees the numbers coming and goes to his knees, which is the rational choice.
I head for the corridor.
The back corridor is two men and they've had time to position since the breach started. The corridor is narrow — eight feet wide, metal shelving on both sides, a fluorescent overhead that flickers and makes the light unreliable — and the two men in it have the advantage of knowing the space.
I go in low, take cover at the first shelving unit, and I work it the way you work a tight corridor when you don't have options: methodical, patient, each position taken before the next move, no rushing because rushing gets you killed.
It takes four minutes.
That's a long time. In the Army I've done corridor work that felt longer but wasn't, and I've done work that was technically longer and felt shorter because the adrenaline compressed it. This is the longest four minutes I've spent since Kandahar.
For approximately two of those four minutes I am aware of Jesslyn in the support vehicle outside and I am aware that if something goes sideways fast there is a version of the next thirty seconds that ends very badly, and then I put that awareness somewhere it can't affect my hands and I get on with it.
The first man goes down at the end of minute two.
He tries to move position, and I'm already moving to cut off the angle.
The exchange that follows is close enough that I can see his face when it ends.
The second man holds longer — he's better, more disciplined, the kind of man who's been in rooms like this before — and we do three full exchanges of position before I find the angle, and when I find it I take it.
I catch a graze along my left forearm from the second man's last shot. Not serious. The kind of wound that bleeds impressively and hurts less than it looks. I don't stop for it.
Two men went through the dock door during the first sixty seconds of the breach.
Recon's exterior team should have caught them.
Didn't. They're in the marsh or they're in a vehicle or they're somewhere I can't account for right now, and I file that alongside everything else that doesn't get resolved tonight.
Pawn is on his feet again by the time I reach the containers, moving with a controlled expression that means he is running on adrenaline and discipline and will feel everything later. He shouldn't be on his feet. He doesn't ask my opinion about it.
Eight girls.
Not four. Eight.
The missing women from Magnolia Bend and the surrounding area, and four more from operations farther east that we didn't know to look for.
Eight girls in four containers, alive, and the silence that goes through the radio when Pawn says the number is the silence of men who have been carrying something for three weeks and are putting it down.
Maria Morata is in the third container.
I'm at the corridor entrance when Grudge reaches her.
He's been on the exterior east team the entire operation; running his position, working his assignment, holding himself together in the way a man holds himself together when the thing he's most afraid of and most hoping for is on the other side of the same door.
He worked it correctly. He didn't break.
He comes through the facility when the call comes, and he comes at a pace that parts everyone in his way without anyone needing to be told to move.
He gets to the third container and sees her.
He makes a sound.