Chapter 28
Sera
Two days. That was all it had taken.
Two days of reconnaissance confirmed what my model had predicted. The property in the gap zone was Kindt’s hub. Satellite imagery showed vehicle activity inconsistent with agriculture. Long-range observation revealed armed men and a security rotation that ran around the clock.
Hunter had looked at the recon data, looked at Travis, and said three words: “We go tonight.”
Travis had immediately agreed. We were running out of time.
So now I was alone in a derelict equipment shed a mile from the property, and the operation I’d helped build was unfolding in my ear.
“East corridor clear. Moving to second floor.” Hunter.
“Copy. Holding south entrance.” Coop.
“West side has a locked interior door. Breaching.” Beckett.
And Travis. His voice came through less often than the others, but when it did, the calm in it was so absolute that it scared me more than the gunfire. Every word stripped to its function, nothing wasted, nothing offered that the moment didn’t require.
“Primary target room is ahead. Two contacts visible. Hold positions until I call it.”
I’m glad I wasn’t there, but at the same time I wished I could see what was going on. Travis had chosen this location for me during the planning phase because it had a clear line to the team’s encrypted frequency but was far enough from the operational zone to keep me out of the fight.
My laptop was open on a sagging workbench, connected to Maude’s network through a secure relay. One screen showed Maude’s tactical overlay of the property with the team’s last known positions marked in blue. The other ran the communication feeds I was monitoring.
Lachlan, Lucas, Daniel, and Liam were positioned along the property’s outer perimeter, holding the boundary and watching for anyone trying to leave or arrive. The strike team inside. The perimeter team outside. And me, a mile back, listening.
I could listen. I could not transmit. Not from this distance. The encrypted channel required proximity to the relay node the team carried, and a mile was too far.
One-way glass. I could see in. They couldn’t hear me.
A burst of gunfire came through the channel. Three rounds, then two more. Then silence that stretched for four seconds before Coop’s voice cut back in.
“Contact down. South entrance secure.”
I exhaled. My fingers were on the edge of the workbench, pressing hard enough that the metal lip dug into my skin. I released them and made myself sit back.
Four blue markers on the screen. Four men inside a building where people had guns, and I was sitting in a shed staring at dots.
I’d known this was what the role would be. Travis and I had discussed it, and I’d agreed because I understood the logic. My value was analytical. I wasn’t trained for entry operations. Putting me inside would make me a liability and split Travis’s focus between the mission and keeping me alive.
All of that was true. All of it was rational. None of it mattered when the channel went quiet, and I couldn’t tell whether quiet meant progress or something I’d never recover from.
After all the times Travis had done this by himself, he couldn’t get hurt now. He just couldn’t. I wouldn’t be able to stand it.
More voices. Movement through rooms. Hunter directing Beckett to a stairwell. Travis reporting a hallway with three doors. Lachlan checking in from the north perimeter, all quiet.
Then Travis again, and his voice had changed. Still controlled. But underneath it, something had shifted.
“We have minors on site. Repeat, children confirmed. Multiple. Room at the end of the second-floor hallway.”
My chest locked.
Kids. In that building. Right now, while bullets were flying and men were fighting in the corridors below them.
“How many?” Hunter asked.
“I can see at least four. There may be more in adjacent rooms. They’re behind a locked door. I need Beckett up here.”
“On my way.” Beckett’s breathing was elevated. He was moving fast.
I pressed my hand flat against the workbench. This changed everything. This wasn’t what we’d been expecting.
Beckett reached the second floor. I heard him and Travis coordinating at the door. A lock being forced. Then Beckett’s voice, stripped of every joke and every deflection I’d ever heard from him.
“Jesus Christ. Travis. They’re tiny. The youngest one can’t be more than four.”
Travis didn’t respond on the channel. I closed my eyes and breathed through the pressure building behind my sternum because I could not afford to feel this right now. Not the full weight of it. Not yet.
I forced myself to refocus. Checked the tactical overlay. Checked the time. Reached for my phone out of habit, the way I’d been doing every hour for the past five days to see how many times Pratt had called since the last time I looked. The biggest part of my job had been keeping him off track.
But the screen was empty. No missed calls. No texts. No emails since yesterday’s data request, which I’d answered at eleven p.m.
I stared at the phone.
The last three days he’d been calling five, six times a day.
Demanding updates on the Ghost analysis.
Pressuring me for the profile I was supposedly building.
Yesterday he’d called at seven in the morning and again at noon and again at four and once more at nine p.m., each call shorter and more agitated than the last.
Then today… nothing.
The calls didn’t stop because Pratt lost interest, I knew that for damned sure. That meant the calls stopped because someone told him to stop making them.
I knew how this worked. I’d been on the outside of it enough times.
When a case went operational, the first thing leadership did was shut down every conversation that wasn’t essential.
Outside consultants stopped getting updates.
Supervisors who’d been pushing for information got told to stand down.
Pratt wasn’t silent because he’d forgotten about me. He was silent because someone above him had said stop talking to your analyst; we don’t need her anymore.
They’d found this place themselves.
I sat very still for about ten seconds. Then I opened a browser on the laptop and logged into the FBI’s internal system with my contractor credentials. My access level covered case files, analytical databases, interdepartmental communications.
It did not cover active operational status. Active operations were restricted to personnel assigned to the case, and I had never been assigned to anything beyond my own analysis.
I knew exactly where the operational dashboard was. I knew what my credentials would show in the access logs. I went there anyway.
It took me forty-five seconds to find what I was looking for. An active operation flagged as priority, targeting a location in rural Montana. The coordinates matched the property the team was inside right now. The operational status read STAGING IMMINENT.
I stared at the words and felt the ground shift beneath me.
My model had done this. The pipeline analysis I’d built and handed over months ago.
Someone above Pratt had taken it and kept building, and now the FBI had found the same hub that I had found, and they were about to raid it with a tactical team while Travis and his team were inside with weapons drawn and children at their feet.
“Maude, I need you to monitor law enforcement tactical frequencies within a twenty-mile radius of the target property.”
“I’m picking up encrypted tactical radio traffic on a law enforcement frequency,” Maude said. “Approximately eight miles southeast of the target property. Multiple units. The communication pattern is consistent with a staging operation.”
Eight miles. Multiple units.
“How long from staging to execution on a standard FBI tactical operation?”
“Typically thirty to sixty minutes, depending on final briefing and approach logistics. Given their current distance and the terrain, I’d estimate closer to thirty minutes.”
The federal agents coming wouldn’t know who was who. They’d breach that building and see armed men who weren’t law enforcement, and the rules of engagement in that situation were brutally simple.
Take them all down.
I closed the browser. The access logs would show my credentials, the timestamp, the exact pages I’d viewed. But none of that mattered.
Travis was in that building. His friends. And the FBI was maybe thirty minutes from turning all of them into targets.
That was the math. The only math that mattered. What happened to me afterward didn’t.
I had to warn them. But the encrypted channel was one-way from this distance. I could hear the team. They couldn’t hear me.
I could use an unencrypted backup channel to reach them from here. But if the FBI was staging eight miles away, their communications team would be scanning every frequency in the area. An unencrypted transmission would light up their intercept equipment.
They’d hear everything. Location of armed non-law-enforcement personnel inside the target building. The only thing me attempting to warn Travis about the upcoming raid would do was make it happen faster.
I couldn’t call. I couldn’t radio.
The only way to reach the encrypted channel was to get close enough to the relay node to transmit. A mile. On foot. Through terrain I could barely see in the dark.
The perimeter guys were closer, but they were spread across dozens of acres, and I had no idea where any of them were positioned in the dark. The building was the one thing I could find. If I could get close to it, my comms should work.
I hoped.
I looked at my inhaler on the workbench beside the laptop. My lungs were already tight from the stress and the cold air and the adrenaline that had been sitting on my nervous system for the past hour.
I picked up the inhaler. Two puffs. Held each one and let the medicine open what it could and stuffed the inhaler in my jacket pocket.
And then I ran.
The ground was uneven. Packed dirt and scrub grass and rocks materialized under my feet without warning. I set my pace the way Travis had taught me during our training sessions. Not fast. Sustainable. A pace my lungs could hold. Having a full-on asthma attack right now would cripple me.
The encrypted channel was still live in my earpiece.
I could hear the operation continuing. Hunter giving all-clear signals as he moved through the first floor.
Coop updating positions. Travis and Beckett on the second floor, their voices low and careful in the way people spoke around frightened children.
I kept going.
Two minutes in, my breathing was already ragged. My lungs didn’t care about the thirty-minute countdown that was ticking in my head. They cared about cold air and exertion and the fact that I was asking them to do something they had never been built to do.
I managed them anyway. Short exhales. Controlled pace. Travis and I had been working on this during our training session. My lungs were always going to be a factor, and he refused to ignore that. It helped me now.
Don’t panic when the tightness comes. I could feel the constriction starting in my upper chest, the familiar band that meant my airways were narrowing, and I breathed around it instead of against it and kept my legs moving.
My right foot caught a rut in the ground and I stumbled hard, caught myself with one hand in the dirt, and pushed back up without stopping. My jacket snagged on something and I ripped it free. The terrain sloped upward and my thighs burned and the band around my chest tightened another notch.
Travis’s voice in my ear. “Second floor is secured. Six minors confirmed. We need extraction for all of them.”
I ran harder, and my lungs punished me for it.
The wheeze was audible now, a high thin whistle on every exhale that meant the medicine was losing its hold.
My vision narrowed at the edges. The ground blurred under me, and I couldn’t tell if that was tears or oxygen deprivation, and it didn’t matter because neither one was going to stop me.
I pulled the inhaler out of my pocket without breaking stride.
Two more puffs, inhaled between ragged breaths that were already too fast to hold the medicine properly.
It was a bad dose. Some of it would reach my airways and some of it would be wasted, and there was nothing I could do about that except keep going and hope it was enough.
The building had to be close. I’d been tracking the distance in my head, counting approximate time against my pace, and the perimeter should be ahead.
The tree line broke, and I could see the building. Dark. No exterior lights. The operation was still happening inside, invisible from here except through the voices in my ear.
I keyed the encrypted channel. My hands were shaking badly enough that I missed the button on the first try.
“Travis. Anyone. This is Sera. The FBI has located the hub. They are staging a tactical operation eight miles southeast. You have less than thirty minutes before they—”
A hand clamped over my mouth from behind me and an arm locked around my waist and I was hauled backward off my feet. My earpiece tore loose. My finger left the transmit button.
I fought. I bit down on the hand and tasted salt and skin and heard the man curse. I drove my elbow backward the way Travis had taught me and connected with something solid. The grip loosened for half a second, and I dove for the comms unit. I didn’t know how much of my message had gotten through.
“Travis, did you hear me? The FBI is on their way. You have to—”
Something hit the side of my head. Hard. The world went white.
Then nothing.