Chapter Ten
MIA
Jackal returned to the compound two days after being stabbed and immediately proved that hospital discharge paperwork had very little power over him.
I was sitting beside Raven at the operations table when the side door opened.
We had spent most of the morning working through the copy of Emil Varga’s phone that German investigators had released to ARC, and I had reached the point where strings of unfamiliar numbers were beginning to look more like hieroglyphics than evidence.
Bear came through first carrying a black pack over one shoulder and a white pharmacy bag in his other hand. Viper followed close enough behind him that I knew who had spent the drive making sure Jackal did not do anything stupid.
Jackal came in last, wearing dark sweatpants and a loose black t-shirt instead of his usual fitted clothes, probably because anything tighter would have rubbed against the bandage along his left side.
He moved more carefully than he wanted anyone to notice, and although his skin had some color back, he still looked like the last forty-eight hours had taken something out of him.
The grin, unfortunately, had survived intact.
“Miss me?”
I was out of my chair before I decided whether I intended to answer. Jackal opened his arms with an exaggerated look of concern when I reached him.
“Easy, Mercer. Bear says my insides are delicate now.”
“Bear says your insides are where they belong because somebody competent fixed them.”
I hugged him anyway, keeping my arms high around his shoulders and careful not to put pressure against his side. Jackal made a quiet sound near my ear that could have been discomfort or an attempt to convince me he was suffering for dramatic effect.
“You’re going to reopen me.”
“Then stop talking and conserve blood.”
His hand settled briefly between my shoulder blades. “You got meaner while I was gone.”
“You were gone two days.”
He sighed. “Trauma changes people.”
Bear passed us without slowing. “If you use the word trauma to get sympathy after spending all morning arguing with a nurse about whether you could drive yourself home, I’m taking your pain medication.”
Jackal pulled away from me. “She was being unreasonable.”
Viper shut the door behind them. “She asked you to sit in a wheelchair.”
“Exactly. Humiliating.”
Bear stopped at the end of the hall and looked back. “You also asked her if the injury was going to affect your dick.”
Jackal’s expression hardened. “That was a medically relevant question.”
Viper nodded once. “Asked three times.”
“I wanted a clear answer.”
Bear kept walking. “She gave you one the first time.”
Hawk looked down from the loft railing, with his usual backwards hat on. “How long before you try to train?”
Jackal’s head tipped back. “Today feels aggressive. Tomorrow?”
“No,” Bear said from the kitchen.
“I wasn’t asking you.”
“Still no.”
The room had sounded wrong without Jackal in it.
I had noticed that the first morning and then resented noticing it every hour after.
Hawk and Viper could fill a conversation when they wanted to, while Raven had complained enough about hospital coffee to keep me entertained, but there had been spaces where Jackal usually inserted himself simply because silence had offended him.
Now he had been back for less than a minute and was already arguing with Bear, which sounded much closer to the compound I had gotten used to. Bear lowered Jackal’s pack beside the couch, and a strip of red caught against the black fabric before the bag settled against the floor.
I recognized the same narrow ribbon I had seen in Jackal’s hand that night, now tied through one of the pack’s zipper pulls.
Up close, the edges looked even softer from wear.
A small section near the knot had faded lighter than the rest, and the fabric had frayed enough that somebody had reinforced it instead of replacing it.
I realized he didn’t tuck the ribbon into a drawer or leave it somewhere private in his room.
He carried it on the bag he takes into the field.
I kept my eyes on him rather than the ribbon. Whatever it meant, he had already given me his answer when I found him by the window.
“You standing there all day?” Raven asked.
I turned back toward the table. “I’m appreciating that our household nuisance survived.”
Jackal pointed toward me. “See? Affection.”
“Don’t make me regret it.”
“Too late. I already have.”
He started toward the couch and reached down for his pack on the way.
Bear’s voice came from behind him. “Leave it.”
Jackal kept reaching.
Viper caught the top handle before his fingers did and lifted the bag out of reach with no visible effort. Jackal straightened too quickly, then tried to disguise the grimace that followed by glaring at him.
“Give me my shit.”
“No.”
“You’re not my father.”
Viper carried the pack toward the couch. “Good. You’d be exhausting.”
Jackal looked around for support and found none. Even Hawk had come downstairs and taken a seat near the end of the table with the expression of someone prepared to watch the argument for as long as it lasted.
Bear came out of the kitchen with a glass of water. “Sit down before you pull something and make me take you back.”
“You people became incredibly controlling after I got stabbed.”
“You got stabbed because you grabbed a man with a knife,” Raven said.
Jackal accepted the water from Bear. “I grabbed a man before I knew he had a knife. Very different professional decision, computer boy.”
Raven rolled his eyes and Jackal lowered himself onto the couch with one hand pressed briefly against his side. The movement was careful enough to end the argument without Bear needing to say anything else.
Wolf came in from the garage while Jackal was still settling against the cushions. He stopped when he saw him.
Jackal lifted the water in greeting. “Your favorite employee has returned, boss.”
Wolf gave him a quick once-over, taking in the loose shirt and the way he kept his left elbow away from his body. “You cleared to be here?”
“Define cleared.”
Bear answered from the kitchen. “Discharged with restrictions.”
“Then follow them,” Wolf said.
Jackal leaned his head back against the couch. “I was hoping getting stabbed would make you nicer.”
“Didn’t work.”
“Waste of a perfectly good scar.”
Wolf’s attention stayed on him for another moment before he looked toward Raven.
“Varga.”
Wolf’s contribution to the welcome-home ceremony ended there, although I noticed that his first question had been whether Jackal was medically cleared.
Raven rotated the laptop so Wolf could see the work we had done while Bear started making something in the kitchen that smelled much better than anything the hospital had served.
“German investigators interviewed him again this morning. He still claims he handled paperwork and transport coordination, nothing else. They showed him the Stuttgart photograph.”
Wolf came closer to the table. “Kade?”
“He recognized him.”
Jackal’s posture changed on the couch while Raven opened the interview summary. Varga claimed he did not know a real name, corroborating the answer Luca Bellandi had given me at the pool party. That’s because he doesn’t ‘actually formally’ do names.
According to Varga, the man in the photograph was someone couriers went through when a normal movement changed.
If a holding site was burned or a route had to move quickly, requests climbed until they reached him.
Varga could not tell investigators where Kade worked from or who sat above him, but he had identified two numbers in his phone as contacts used when a transfer needed approval outside the usual chain.
Raven opened the first thread.
The messages themselves were short enough to be almost useless without Varga explaining them.
Most of the thread was stripped down to addresses or vehicle plates, with messages deleted soon after they were read.
An exchange from three weeks earlier included the photograph of the woman whose false identity we had found in Varga’s bag after she disappeared from Haus Eberhardt.
I read the translated message again.
MOVE HER. NEW NAME FOLLOWS.
Under it was the same temporary identity Varga had been carrying when Jackal caught him.
“Varga says this contact belongs to Kade?” Wolf asked.
“He says Kade controls it,” Raven replied. “Could be Kade personally. Could be somebody answering for him. Varga can’t prove which.”
“What can we prove?” He followed.
I pulled the route map onto the larger screen. “That the same contact appears before four transfers in Varga’s records. Two start at addresses already tied to Cerberus holding sites. The other pair end at distribution addresses we didn’t have before.”
Wolf looked toward the map.
I continued before the details could become more complicated than they needed to be.
“Varga says routine pickups never went that high. These were exceptions, usually after someone ran or a location became unsafe enough that the original plan had to change. When that happened, this was one of the contacts he waited on.”
Raven opened another record. “One of the four is the woman from Haus Eberhardt. Another is a nineteen-year-old from Slovenia who disappeared after leaving a hotel job. We have no recovery record for her.”
Jackal’s face had gone still. “Where’d they send her?”
“Lyon first,” I said. “After that we lose her.”
Wolf studied the map for long enough that I could tell he was sorting what we knew from what Varga wanted us to believe. “So Kade isn’t processing every move. He gets involved when somebody needs authority to change one.”
“That’s Varga’s version,” I said. “The phone supports part of it.”