Chapter Three #4
Bear moved to a reinforced door on the east side and inspected the frame while Wolf waited rather than rushing him.
Bear chose the breaching shotgun this time, fired into the locking point and stepped aside as Viper took over the opening.
A training smoke canister went off farther down the exterior lane, white smoke spreading across the exposed crossing between the two structures.
“Why smoke there?”
Raven pointed toward Hawk’s angle. “The team has to cross open ground. Hawk can cover one side, but the smoke denies the other angle.”
“Even in training?”
“Especially in training.”
Wolf waited for Bear’s signal, sent Viper through and rerouted Jackal before the smoke fully covered the lane. Raven fed him information through the comms, Hawk called a movement from the ridge and Bear changed positions as soon as the entry job was finished.
I watched Wolf more than I meant to.
He did not look like the best sniper on the field because he wasn’t.
He did not touch Bear’s breaching equipment unless Bear handed him something, and when Raven corrected an interior position based on a camera feed, Wolf changed the plan without arguing about who had authority over the information.
His job seemed less visible than everyone else’s until I understood what I was looking at.
He was tracking all of them at once: Hawk’s line of sight, Bear’s progress at the door, Viper inside the structure, Jackal moving around the exterior, and Raven feeding information from beside me. Wolf carried the entire map in his head while still moving through it himself.
I was irritated.
I had wanted him to be an arrogant man who happened to have authority. That would have been easier. But the man was clearly very fucking good at this.
Wolf came out of the structure after the final call, lowered his weapon and looked toward Bear.
“Door?”
“Frame warped on the second hit,” Bear said. “Wouldn’t trust it for another run.”
“Replace it. Use the south room until then.”
Bear nodded.
Viper cleared his weapon and moved toward the equipment table. Jackal pulled his protective glasses up and almost instantly regained the loose expression he’d had at breakfast.
“Did she see me catch him?” he asked Raven, out of breath.
“Unfortunately.”
Jackal looked at me. “You’re welcome.”
“For what?”
“The demonstration.”
“You were doing training whether I stood here or not.”
“You don’t know that.”
Viper passed behind him. “He does this every week.”
Jackal looked offended. “Why are you committed to ruining my mystique today?”
“You don’t have mystique.”
“That’s vicious.”
Hawk’s voice came through Raven’s headset.
“Can someone tell Jackal I can hear him from six hundred meters?”
Raven pressed the transmit button. “He says you don’t have mystique either.”
Jackal looked toward the ridge and raised both hands in betrayal.
The team laughed, but the shift back into normal conversation only happened after Wolf called the exercise complete and everyone began clearing equipment.
Nobody joked over him during the scenario.
Nobody second-guessed a call for entertainment.
The difference between the men this morning and the men I’d just watched move through the building was sharp enough that I finally understood why Wolf tolerated as much nonsense as he did off the clock. They knew exactly when to stop.
Wolf came toward the observation line last.
Sweat had darkened the fabric at the base of his mask and along the collar beneath his plate carrier. A loose strand of hair had escaped near his temple despite everything covering his head. He stopped in front of me.
“Happy?”
“Marginally.”
“Good. Go work.”
I folded my arms. “That almost sounded like you cared whether I understood it.”
“I care whether you stop asking Raven stupid questions during training.”
I smiled without any warmth as Wolf began removing his gloves.
“You saw what you needed,” he continued.
“I did.”
I looked toward Hawk’s distant position, then at Bear discussing the ruined door with Viper.
“Your reports make all of that sound boring.”
“They’re reports.”
“Maybe that’s part of the problem.”
Wolf’s attention returned to me.
I lifted one hand before he could start. “Not saying it is. Just saying context matters.”
“Then use the context.”
“That’s the plan.”
He nodded once and walked past me. The metal hardware on his belt clicked again when he loosened the retention webbing and folded it back into place and for some reason, I kept noticing the sound. Raven nudged my shoulder and the moment passed.
“Come on, Magpie.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Worth trying.”
“One more time and I tell Wolf you let me into the armory.”
Raven stopped walking.
“You did not enter the armory.”
“I know. Then behave.”
He stared at me for several seconds.
“You’re learning from Jackal.”
“That’s insulting.”
“It was meant to be.”
◆
By 10:30, I had returned to the operations floor with mud drying along the edges of my shoes, hair beginning to frizz where the morning air had pulled loose pieces from my ponytail and a considerably better understanding of why half the reports on my desk were written the way they were.
I also understood why Wolf had been so quick to dismiss me from the field, which irritated me enough to keep working.
Raven dropped into the chair beside mine and opened the border camera results from the night before. Most were useless with duplicate reads and partial matches, so we spent an hour eliminating false positives.
The possible Vienna sighting remained uncertain. A camera had caught only the last four characters of the registration, and the vehicle shape didn’t match any of the three confirmed cars. Raven left it in a separate folder rather than throwing it away.
“What now?” he asked.
I looked across the map, from Prague to Budapest and down toward Constan?a. Every confirmed point showed the same problem: Cerberus targets were being watched before ARC became involved.
The vehicles themselves had given us a pattern but very little else. We needed to stop asking only where the cars went and start asking what the people around them had in common before the investigations began.
“Go back to expenses.”
Raven looked at me. “Whose?”
“Everybody. Companies too. Anything that touches the targets in the month before surveillance starts.”
“That’s broad.”
“You wanted work,” I said.
“Wolf wanted work. I wanted lunch.”
“It’s 10:30.”
“Early lunch.”
I ignored him.
Romania produced the first useful oddity.
One of the shell entities already sitting in the Cerberus ledger had paid a company called Aster Private Events GmbH four times over six months.
The payments were not large enough to stand out among the transportation invoices and consulting fees around them, and nothing about the company itself looked criminal.
Aster organized private dinners, weddings, parties and luxury events across Central Europe, with occasional contracts stretching into France and northern Italy.
I opened its public site. Beautiful people stood beside pools drinking champagne under strings of lights.
“This doesn’t look very Cerberus.”
Raven leaned closer. “That’s usually the point.”
“Four payments.”
“Could be parties. Criminals celebrate birthdays too.”
“Do they expense them through shell companies?”
“The boring ones do.”
I opened the dates.
The first payment came three days before a known Cerberus intermediary appeared in Salzburg.
The second came the week of a private event outside Lyon where another name from the financial network had surfaced in local reporting.
The third didn’t connect to anything obvious but the fourth had been made eleven days ago.
I looked at Raven.
He had stopped joking.
“Upcoming contract?”
His fingers moved over the keyboard.
Aster’s public calendar showed nothing, which made sense for a company selling privacy to wealthy clients. Raven moved through corporate records, invoice metadata, receipts and a procurement portal until a subcontract finally gave us something useful.
Temporary staff and catering had been booked through separate vendors, with private security sitting under its own subcontract. All of it landed on the same date. Three days from now, and the location was an estate outside Stuttgart.
I leaned closer to the screen.
“That’s local.”
“Forty-two minutes from here.”
Raven opened satellite imagery.
The property sat behind high stone walls on several acres of landscaped grounds. The main house curved around a large rear terrace, with a swimming pool stretching toward a line of trees and smaller structures positioned farther down the property.
“Pool party,” I said.
“Looks like it.”
“Guest list?”
“Private.”
“That sounded like a challenge.”
Raven smiled.
It took him longer than I expected but anything he could break into within thirty seconds probably wasn’t protecting useful information.
I used the time to pull every name associated with Aster’s previous Cerberus-linked invoices. Most went nowhere. Wealthy Europeans attended the same events as other wealthy Europeans, and proximity was not evidence no matter how much Wolf would enjoy hearing me say it.
Raven finally sat back.
“Got a partial.”
Names filled the screen and most meant nothing, until one name stopped me.
Luca Bellandi.
I had seen him in a financial report the night before because his investment firm had moved money through two companies that later appeared in Cerberus transactions. Nobody had labeled him a Cerberus member.
“Bellandi.”
Raven nodded. “Italian. Thirty-one. Finance, private equity, investments, property holdings. No criminal record. Likes expensive watches and appearing in photographs beside people who later become interesting.”
“That’s a skill.”
“Apparently.”
I pulled his file closer.
“How close to Kade?”
“No direct link.”
“Indirect?”
“Two degrees at best. He knows people who know people.”
“That’s still more than we had yesterday.”