Chapter 35
THIRTY-FIVE
The road to the tax office had turned from cracked asphalt to gravel, then to something that barely resembled a road at all.
Sun glared down on the hood of the vehicle, and dust curled in waves behind them as Lucía studied the location pin glowing on her screen.
Her fingers tapped out patterns on her thigh, nerves wound tight.
“You sure about this?” Ryan asked from behind the wheel.
Lucía threw him a side-eye. “You mean, surer than I was last time?”
He kept his face carefully impassive. “That’s not what I said.”
They pulled up in front of a squat concrete building that looked like it hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint since the early 2000s.
One security camera hung limp over the front door, its lens cracked.
A half-torn sign read OFICINA REGIONAL DE IMPUESTOS.
A stray dog lay sprawled in the shade of the entryway, too lazy or heat-stricken to react.
Ryan grunted. “Hell of a place to hide a money trail.”
Lucía tucked the laptop into her backpack and slid out of the truck. The air outside felt like a hair dryer against her face. The only sounds were the ticking engine and a cicada chorus from the dry scrubland behind them.
“How do you want to play it?” Ryan asked.
“Soft entry first. If it’s locked, I have contingencies.”
He raised a brow but said nothing. He was letting her lead, like he had with the car purchase. She couldn’t work out if it was refreshing or patronizing, and now was hardly the time to analyze it.
The front door creaked open with surprising ease.
Inside, the place was even more depressing: a patchwork of flickering fluorescents, dead ceiling fans, and dust motes in the slats of sunlight coming through the blinds.
A single receptionist desk stood empty, the chair tucked in, unused.
A fake snake plant in a plastic pot tried but failed to add some life.
“Charming,” Ryan muttered.
Lucía found a terminal behind the counter and booted it up. It wheezed to life. While she waited, she took a bottle of water from her pack and drank deeply, passing another silently to Ryan. He accepted it with a nod and glanced toward the hallway.
“Anyone here?”
“Place is on the books but barely functional,” she said. “They keep it open for paperwork that hasn’t been digitized yet. It’s basically a dead site.”
Ryan prowled the room like a caged animal while she worked. The desktop OS was a decade out of date. She inserted a USB patch loaded with custom scrapers and her fingers darted across the keys.
A few minutes later, she found the transactions she was looking for. Altamar Seafood. Her stomach flipped.
“Got something?” Ryan asked.
“Hold on.” She kept scrolling. A transaction was tagged “verified,” timestamped two days ago, but it was filed under an archive last accessed four months prior. That shouldn’t be possible.
She clicked into the metadata.
And froze.
Ryan noticed immediately. “What is it?”
Lucía swallowed hard. “These files were altered recently. But it’s hidden beneath layers that look old. Like someone scrubbed it and then put it back.”
Ryan moved closer, peering at the screen.
“That a problem?”
Lucía’s fingers moved quickly, pulling up a string of embedded markers. There. In the last line of obfuscated code, a digital signature. Not obvious. But she knew it.
Someone had known they would come. Someone had built the breadcrumb trail deliberately. The shell company, the tax filings, the child-size clothing invoice—it was too perfect. Like it had been designed to drag them to this very place at this very time.
Her heart stuttered. “Ryan, we need to go. Now.”
He blinked. “What—?”
“It’s a trap.”
The words had barely left her mouth when the first shot cracked through the window. Glass shattered. Ryan shoved her to the ground. “Down!”