CHAPTER 44
Jameson
Geneva, Switzerland
Day Twenty-Eight Off Grid
The moment we stepped inside, I knew.
Not danger. Not movement. Not an ambush waiting in the dark.
Absence was worse.
Brynn stopped beside me, her breath catching. “This isn’t right.”
This place hadn’t been abandoned. It had been erased.
The main floor was stripped bare.
No furniture. No bottles. No glasses. No sound system. The curved bar remained, but every shelf behind it was empty. No dust outlines or neglected stock. Nothing to suggest the club had ever operated here beyond the structure itself.
She walked farther into the room, her boots echoing across the floor that used to swallow sound.
“This isn’t what it looked like.” Her gaze moved over the bare walls. “Not even close.”
“It’s not supposed to.”
She turned toward me. “What does that mean?”
“It means whoever cleared it didn’t want anyone recognizing what had been here.”
Her jaw tightened. “I feel like I’m being gaslit.”
“You’re not.”
Her eyes cut to mine.
I kept my voice level. “You know what you saw.”
For a second, she only stared at me.
Then she looked back at the empty club and nodded once.
We moved deeper into the building.
The back office had been gutted. Drawers, cabinets, furniture, equipment.
All gone. Wiring had been pulled from the walls, leaving exposed channels and the faint copper smell of torn metal.
The main security panel had been removed cleanly enough that whoever handled it had known exactly what they were doing.
This wasn’t a shutdown. It was a cleanup.
She watched from the doorway while I checked the remaining wall plates and cable runs.
“Anything?” she asked.
“No.”
We found the concealed hallway beyond the empty space where the velvet curtains had been. The narrow door remained, but the black card reader beside it was gone. Only mounting holes and cut wire marked where it had been.
She touched the bare wall with two fingers.
“This is it,” she said. “The reader was here. Someone opened the door from the other side.”
I studied the frame. No lock assembly. No access hardware. Nothing left to recover.
She stepped through first.
The hallway was still painted black, but the low lighting had been removed. Our flashlights caught empty sockets along the walls as we reached the landing above the basement stairs.
She stopped.
Her hand tightened around the railing before she started down.
The basement had been stripped more thoroughly than the club above it.
Bare concrete. Empty rooms. Frosted-glass panels removed from their frames. Every terminal, monitor, desk, and cable gone.
She stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking across the blank space.
“The monitors were there.” She pointed toward an empty section of wall. “Behind the glass.”
I followed the direction of her hand.
“They showed the cameras upstairs. The entrance, the bar, the hallway.” She moved farther into the room. “And they were scanning IDs over there.”
Nothing remained except faint discolorations on the floor where equipment had once stood.
She turned toward a smaller room to our left. “That was the office.”
The door was gone. So was everything inside it.
She stepped through the empty frame. “The terminal was against that wall. It had profiles, passport scans, travel records. My face came up on the screen.”
I checked the walls, floor seams, electrical housings, and exposed cable channels.
Nothing.
“She stood there,” she said.
I looked toward the doorway.
“The woman who caught me at the terminal.” Her gaze stayed on the empty opening.
I searched the room again.
No discarded drives. No hidden panels. No loose hardware. No paper left beneath the removed furniture. Whoever had cleared the building had taken anything capable of identifying the operation or the people behind it.
She drew in a shallow breath and held it. Her shoulders stayed unnaturally still.
“Brynn.”
She shook her head once. “It’s like they did to this place what they do to people.”
I waited.
“Made something real look like it never existed,” she said quietly.
I checked the final room, then returned to the main basement space.
“There’s nothing here.”
She gave a slight nod, but her eyes stayed on the wall where the monitors had been.
“Whoever ran this operation knew they had to leave,” I said. “They removed the infrastructure, the records, and anything that could connect the building to them.”
“They dipped,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Because of me?” she asked.
The question came out flatter than the fear beneath it.
“Possibly. Or something else compromised the site after you left.”
Neither option eased the tension in her face.
I turned toward the stairs. “Let’s go.”
We searched the main floor once more on the way out. The bar. The office. The concealed hallway. Every space that might have held something overlooked in the initial removal.
Nothing.
She reached for the exit.
I looked up.
A cut wire hung from the ceiling above the door where a camera had once been mounted.
I stopped.
“Jameson?” She turned back.
They had removed the servers, the security panel, and most of the cameras.
Most.
I turned and scanned the ceiling corners.
One mount above the bar had been cleared. Another near the office had been ripped out, leaving damaged plaster around the screws.
Then I saw it.
High in the far corner, half-hidden above the hallway entrance, a small dome camera remained mounted to the wall.
She followed my line of sight. “They missed one.”
“Or believed it was no longer useful.”
The housing was cracked. One side had partially separated from the mount, and the cable had been cut close to the wall.
But the lens faced the basement door.
Anyone entering or leaving would have crossed its field of view.
I dragged an abandoned crate beneath it and climbed up.
“The wire is cut,” she said.
“That killed the live feed.”
“But?” she asked.
I worked my knife beneath the damaged housing.
“This model can store footage locally.”
Her focus snapped to him. “Inside the camera?”
“Yes.”
The casing came loose with a scrape of plastic against metal. I lowered it enough to inspect the internal board.
It was damaged, but intact.
A recessed service port sat along one edge beside the onboard storage module.
She moved closer. “Can you get anything off it?”
“Possibly.”
“With what?” she asked.
I freed the camera from the remaining bracket. “The adapter in your camera kit should connect to the service port.”
“My camera kit?” Her brows pulled together.
“You have a multiport reader.”
“I do,” she said.
“If the storage controller still functions, I can mount the camera as an external device and access whatever wasn’t overwritten.”
She stared at the cracked unit in my hand.
“So there could be recordings,” she said.
“There could be fragments. Stills. Corrupted footage. Or nothing.”
“But maybe something,” she said.
“Maybe.”
Her gaze moved from the camera to the basement hallway.
Then she nodded, looking at the damaged unit as if it were already proof.
I stepped down from the crate and wrapped it in a cloth from my bag.
“Let’s get back to the hotel and find out.”