4. Chapter 4
The affidavit took him forty minutes to draft. A judge would need maybe five to read it. Neither number worried him half as much as the hands it had to pass through first, between his desk and a judge's, and how many of those he suddenly couldn't fully trust.
Captain Reyes picked up on the second ring.
He could hear the faint hum of her office in the background, the murmur of other conversations, the rhythmic tap of a keyboard.
She let him talk for exactly ninety seconds, the silence on her end punctuated only by the soft click of a pen.
Then her voice cut through, calm and precise as a calculator.
She laid out the equation he’ d already solved before he’d even dialed: maritime interdiction meant Coast Guard jurisdiction, Coast Guard meant a formal liaison request through channels, and the last request her unit filed had taken six days just to get a signature.
Six days. He could almost feel them slipping through his fingers like sand.
"Seventy-two hours," Andre said, feeling the ticking of time in his chest like his own internal clock of doom. "That's the window."
"Then you'd better hope somebody's fast and decides to give a shit," Reyes said, not unkindly, and hung up to go find out.
She'd called him "kid" exactly once, years ago, the week he made detective, and never again since, but something in how she'd said six days just now had carried an echo of it anyway, the closest thing to gentleness her voice ever let itself do on a work line.
He made the next calls on his feet, phone pressed hard enough against his ear to leave a mark, because sitting down felt like giving up ground he hadn't lost yet.
The DEA liaison answered from what sounded like a moving car, wind cutting in and out over the line, and made him repeat the coordinates twice before admitting there wasn't a fast-track process for this.
Not one that survived contact with an actual judge.
Homeland's cross-border liaison put him on hold for four minutes to a jazz loop clearly chosen by someone who'd never once been on the other end of an emergency, then came back only to confirm what he already suspected: nothing moved through that office without paperwork that hadn't been invented yet for a window this tight.
Somewhere between the second call and the third, Marcus's hands came back to him uninvited, flat on the steel table, still, patient, never once needing to move faster than the room required.
Andre wanted that stillness so badly for a second it made him furious.
At Marcus, for having it. At himself, for wanting it.
At the whole apparatus he'd spent his adult life trusting, currently failing him in real time.
Every call ended the same way, dressed up in different professional language: not today, maybe tomorrow, definitely not fast enough. He hung up each one a little more certain that the machinery built to keep people from making reckless decisions was, this time, going to be the reason people died.
Underneath every call sat the thing he couldn't say out loud to any of them: somewhere in this exact chain of people he was now begging to move fast, Drakov likely already had a man reading manifests before they ever cleared customs. Trip's warning about the harbor master's office had lodged behind Andre's sternum like a swallowed stone, present with every breath, impossible to cough up or force down.
Every hand this paperwork passed through was a hand that might already belong to the other side.
No emergency warrant came with a background check on whoever ended up signing it.
By the third call, Marcus's voice found its way back to him anyway…
low, even, exactly as it had sounded across that steel table less than an hour ago.
This isn't cargo. You understand that. Every number on this screen is a person.
It ran underneath the hold music like a second conversation happening at the same volume as the first. Andre didn't let it slow him down.
If anything it sharpened him, made his follow-up questions harder to brush off, made him less willing to accept the first polite no he was handed.
He hung up the last call and didn't move for a while, the phone still warm against his palm. Twenty years he'd believed in this job, in the slow machinery of it, and some part of that belief had just quietly died somewhere between the second ring and the last no.
Andre didn't sit for this call either. He stood at the window, looking down at a parking lot he wasn't actually seeing, and dialed the one number in his phone he'd never needed to memorize because he'd never once let himself forget it.
Marcus picked up before the first ring finished. "Andre."
"I tried everything I had." Andre kept his voice flat, the same register he used to deliver bad news to families who'd been waiting years to hear it.
"Coast Guard, DEA, Homeland. Nobody can move a legitimate warrant through the right channels in seventy-two hours. Not one that would hold up afterward."
Silence on the line, but not an empty one, low voices somewhere behind Marcus, the hush of people trying not to listen and failing at it.
Andre didn't need to see his face to know what it was doing right now.
Six years hadn't erased that either: the exact quality of quiet that meant Marcus was already three moves ahead, already rebuilding the plan around what Andre had just handed him.
"I'm not telling you what to do with that," Andre said, before Marcus could ask him to say the part he was very deliberately not saying out loud. "I'm telling you what's true. What you do with that is up to you."
A shorter silence this time. "Understood," Marcus said, and something in that one word told Andre he'd heard exactly what wasn't in it as clearly as what was.
Andre hung up without saying goodbye, because there wasn't a version of goodbye that wouldn't have meant something neither of them was ready for it to mean yet.
He stood at the window a long time after, phone still warm in his hand, and understood with a clean, terrible clarity that he'd just crossed a line he couldn't walk back, using words chosen carefully enough to look like he hadn't crossed anything at all.
He'd broken himself over exactly this, broken them.
Walked away because he couldn't follow where Marcus had needed to walk.
Yet, here he was… handing the same man permission without actually speaking it aloud.
Both of them knew what Marcus and his team would do…
that none of it was actually legal. And yet… and yet.
The slow slide into the darkness of lawlessness didn't feel so slow right now, but the blinking tally of lives on the line recused him from drowning in both his guilt and his anger.
None of them had time for feeling feelings at the moment.
Not him, and not those people who were just days away from vanising into a trafficing pipeline from which they would never return.