Chapter Seven #4
A woman had surfaced at a hospital under a false identity with two fractured ribs and a broken wrist. She told staff she had fallen down the stairs.
Before police arrived, she was gone and less than forty-eight hours later, every system we could access had lost her again.
A Cerberus ledger seized months afterward listed a charge for “behavior correction” during the same week.
I stared at the phrase until it blurred.
“Behavior correction,” I repeated. “They billed somebody for beating her.”
Raven’s jaw tightened. “Looks that way.”
Another internal Cerberus message described a victim who repeatedly tried to contact home as “inventory creating noise.”
The word inventory finally broke through whatever professional distance I had managed to keep. “Inventory,” I said. “They call women inventory, then charge each other when the inventory screams too much.”
Bear had returned from the garage and stood behind us.
Hawk was cleaning mud from his gear near the equipment room.
Viper came closer once he saw the photographs, while Jackal stopped beside the edge of the table with his hair still damp from his shower.
The easy parts of him disappeared again when he read the hospital record.
Raven kept building the case while the rest of us absorbed the wording.
Morgenstern had billed security at Haus Eberhardt the previous night.
Südweg’s toll records placed one of its vehicles less than forty kilometers away that morning.
The inward-facing cameras covered the rear courtyard and service doors.
Public property records showed a second structure behind the farmhouse listed as storage, though satellite imagery suggested regular vehicle traffic around it.
Three missing women’s phones had touched the area after they vanished.
Twenty-eight women now sat on the broader overlap list once Raven included cases with forged travel records tied to the same document network.
Some connections were strong enough to act on, others remained circumstantial, but the scale had become impossible to mistake.
Wolf came downstairs with wet hair himself and a fresh black shirt while Raven was placing Haus Eberhardt on the main screen.
For half a second my mind supplied the blurred outline from the shower curtain instead of the man walking toward the table, and I forced the image aside before it could follow him into the work.
Raven brought him through the evidence while I opened the forged document chain beside the property image.
Wolf studied the farmhouse for several seconds.
“Current security?”
“Billed last night,” Raven said. “Same pattern as the previous three weeks.”
“Vehicles?”
Viper answered from the other side of the table. “One Südweg van east of Ulm this morning. Another registered to the same fleet has visited the property seven times since June.”
Wolf looked toward Hawk. “Can you get eyes without touching the perimeter?”
“West tree line should give me the farmhouse and yard. I need to check the elevation before dark.”
“Do it.”
Wolf’s gaze moved to Jackal.
“Road pattern with Viper. Separate vehicles.”
Jackal nodded and turned away as soon as he had the assignment, leaving none of his usual commentary behind.
Wolf turned to Bear. “Public records only for entry until we know who is inside.”
“Already pulling them.”
Then Wolf looked at me and Raven.
“Build the people around the address. Staff, owners, contractors, every fake name that touches it.”
I nodded and returned to the screen.
No one had anything left to argue about once the property filled the main screen.
Whatever had cracked between Wolf and Jackal remained there, and whatever existed between Wolf and me had become more confusing than I wanted to examine while twenty-eight missing women stared back from the side monitor.
ARC could deal with our damage later.
Cerberus had turned human disappearances into admin work.
They created job offers that led nowhere and replaced names with forged identities.
Then they moved women across borders beneath paperwork designed to make every checkpoint boring, while money passed through companies legitimate enough to keep the machinery running.
When resistance became inconvenient, somebody billed for violence as if broken ribs belonged beside fuel costs.
When a woman tried to call home, she became inventory creating noise.
Haus Eberhardt sat in the center of enough of that machinery to justify knocking on its door.
The farmhouse looked peaceful in the satellite image, surrounded by trees and open land that would have been beautiful under different circumstances.
Tonight, armed guards would watch the courtyard from the inside and a transport company tied to missing women continued moving vehicles through the region.
The number of people inside remained unknown, but the evidence had reached the point where uncertainty could no longer justify waiting.
“We’re ahead of this one,” Wolf said, looking around the table. “Nobody gives them a reason to change that.”
ARC had a target.