Chapter Two #2
Viper appeared from around the corner at almost the same moment, carrying the yogurt he had apparently defended so fiercely the day before. Jackal pointed at him with the cereal box as if the timing proved something.
“There. See? They travel in pairs.”
Viper looked at Hawk, then at Jackal. “We came from different rooms.”
“That’s what you want us to think.”
Hawk leaned one hip against the counter. “You’ve known us for a long time now.”
“And I’ve remained vigilant the entire time.”
I laughed and looked between the brothers. “Do you ever get tired of him doing this?”
“Yes,” Viper said.
Hawk took another bite of the apple. “He doesn’t care.”
Jackal looked pleased with himself. “Correct.”
I glanced around the table. “Does everyone here have siblings, or is it just the two of you?”
Jackal’s expression changed first. It was small enough that I might have missed it if I hadn’t been looking directly at him. The cereal box lowered a few inches before he answered.
“Yeah. A sister.”
The way he said it made every obvious follow-up question feel like the wrong one, so I didn’t ask. Jackal reached back into the cereal box a second later and the easy expression returned, but not quite quickly enough to make me believe I had imagined the shift.
Bear turned the eggs in the pan. “Only child, as far as I know.”
I looked over. “As far as you know?”
He shrugged. “Foster care. I was young enough when I went into the system in Texas that I don’t know much about the biological side. Could have a whole football team somewhere. Could not.”
He said it without self-pity and went back to the stove before the conversation could settle too much around him. Raven took a drink of coffee and nodded toward himself.
“One older sister.”
Jackal’s mood recovered enough for him to point across the table. “Terrifying woman.”
Raven looked at him. “You met her once.”
“Once was sufficient.”
“She was perfectly nice to you.”
“She asked why you worked with me.”
“That was a perfectly reasonable question.”
Even Viper smiled at that. I looked around the table and realized I had somehow managed to turn breakfast into a tour of everyone’s family history before seven in the morning.
“Sorry for being the only normal person here guys,” I said. “My mom and stepdad in Connecticut have been together for twenty-six years and my brother Nick goes to NYU. That’s about as dramatic as it gets.”
Jackal looked at me over the top of the cereal box. “Give it time.”
“That sounded threatening.”
“Encouraging.”
“Somehow worse.”
Raven shook his head while Bear laughed quietly and went back to the stove.
I guess there was nothing interesting about my life that warranted follow-up questions when the people sitting around me had spent their lives in foster care, military services and whatever history Jackal had just decided not to explain.
I glanced toward the operations floor. “Where’s Wolf?”
“Brooding,” Jackal chimed in with a mouth full.
Bear gave him a tired look. “He’s outside.”
I followed the direction of his glance toward the side window and found Wolf standing near the edge of the building where the concrete ended and the grass began.
Morning fog still hung low over the trees beyond the perimeter, soft enough that sections of the fence disappeared into it.
He stood facing away from the building with one hand in his pocket and a cigarette held loosely in the other.
He wasn’t wearing the full balaclava from the day before. For a second, that made him almost difficult to recognize.
His dark brown hair was much longer than I had expected from the photograph, thick and wavy enough that the damp morning air had already started working pieces loose around a thin zig-zag headband pulling it away from his face.
A plain black covering still hid everything below his eyes, but seeing his hair made him look considerably more human than he had yesterday.
It also made him more interesting, which was irritating.
His sleeves were pushed to the elbows, exposing the tattoo I had only partially seen in the hallway.
A black-and-gray snake wrapped around his forearm in slow coils, disappearing around the inside of his arm and reappearing along the outside as though it had been wound directly around the muscle.
Its head sat lower near his wrist, detailed enough that the scales seemed to shift whenever he moved.
Wolf lifted the cigarette and pulled the lower edge of his mask up just enough to take a drag.
I caught only the briefest impression of a chin before his hand blocked the rest. Smoke left his mouth slowly when he exhaled toward the trees, then the covering was back in place and whatever I’d almost seen disappeared with it.
Raven said something beside me that I missed completely.
“What?”
He followed my attention toward the window, and one corner of his mouth moved.
“Careful.”
“About what?”
“Observing wildlife.”
Jackal started laughing before I could answer.
Bear looked across the table at him with the kind of patience that suggested this happened frequently. Jackal only shrugged and said, “What? Maybe Wolf chose the callsigns. He likes animals.”
“You know he didn’t,” Raven said.
“Probably didn’t.”
Bear continued staring at him.
Jackal noticed and lifted one shoulder. “Fine. Definitely didn’t. So a bear, raven and jackal walk into a bar-”
The side door opened before the conversation could deteriorate any further, and Wolf came inside carrying enough cold air with him that I felt it from the table.
The cigarette was gone, but the smell remained in his clothes, mixed with the clean soap scent I’d noticed yesterday and something dry and woody underneath it that I assumed was cologne.
His eyes landed on me. “You’re late.”
I looked at the clock.
6:32.
“For what?”
“Work.”
“You didn’t give me a start time.”
“No.”
“Then I would argue that I’m impressively early.”
Jackal lowered the box onto the table and watched us with open interest as if the cereal was popcorn. Bear went back to eating as though he’d learned not to participate.
Wolf’s gaze dropped briefly to my unfinished plate before returning to me. “Ten minutes.”
Then he continued his heavy, rhythmic walk toward the operations floor without another word.
I stared after him. “Was that an invitation?”
Raven picked up his coffee.
“From him? Practically a handwritten card.”
◆
Ten minutes later, I joined Raven at the operations table and discovered that he had already claimed three screens and most of one side of the workspace.
My files from the flight were spread between us, but Raven had access to material I’d never been given.
Full surveillance logs sat beside source reporting and photographs from partner agencies, some of which had apparently been passed through several governments before reaching ARC.
Wolf had told me I could access whatever Raven cleared, and Raven seemed to interpret that restriction generously as long as he remained close enough to know what I was opening.
“This is the full lead-up to Romania,” Raven said, expanding a timeline across the center monitor.
“Local intelligence flagged the warehouse here. They watched it for nine days, then requested outside support after two vehicles were tied to earlier Cerberus movements. ARC isn’t brought in until… here.”
I compared the screen with the notes I’d made on the plane. The summary had reduced more than a week of surveillance into a paragraph, which was exactly the sort of compression that made analysts accidentally treat an official decision as the beginning of an event.
“When does the warehouse start clearing?”
Raven pointed several spaces earlier. The difference looked worse on the complete timeline.
Partial vehicle movement began late Tuesday and personnel inside the warehouse changed Wednesday afternoon, with two men leaving and never returning.
The request for ARC support was approved early Thursday morning.
By the time Wolf received the operation, Cerberus had already been reducing whatever presence it had there for more than a day.
I leaned closer to the screen. “Who knew they were being watched Tuesday?”
“Romanian service, obviously. Local surveillance team. A liaison in Bucharest. Depending on which report you believe, somebody in border intelligence had part of it.”
“How many people?”
“More than Wolf would like.”
“That’s not difficult.”
Raven smiled. “Fair.”
I went through the source chain again. “Was anyone from ARC included?”
“No.”
“Nobody?”
“Nobody.”
“And Wolf sees the target for the first time Thursday?”
“Yes.”
I circled Tuesday on the printed timeline. “Then Romania can’t be evidence that the warning originated here.”
“It can still be part of the same problem.”
“Sure, but that’s different.”
Raven looked toward me.
I turned the page.
“If someone inside ARC is leaking operations, that would explain Cerberus knowing where you’re going after ARC has the target. But Romania started moving before ARC was even involved. That’s a different problem, and we shouldn’t assume they’re connected until we can prove it.”
Raven nodded slowly, then brought Prague onto the next screen.
“Go on.”
Prague took longer.
The reporting had come through different services whose officers appeared to have a personal disagreement with standardized time zones. Raven and I spent nearly twenty minutes converting entries and rebuilding the sequence before the pattern became visible.
The target was a courier who had been staying at the same hotel for almost two weeks.
An allied service identified him, surveillance went up, and ARC became involved later when investigators connected the man to one of Kade’s suspected financial channels.
The only problem was that the courier changed hotels before ARC was ever tasked with going there.
I tapped the screen. “Earlier again.”
“By about fourteen hours.”
“Who knew ARC was coming fourteen hours before ARC knew ARC was coming?”