Chapter Thirteen #2
I stayed there for another few seconds, staring at the place he had stood, trying to decide when exactly my life had reached the point where a masked man calling me prey before sunrise qualified as sexual tension.
I did not arrive at a flattering answer.
Raven came down the stairs while I was still recovering, dressed in dark sweatpants and a navy sweatshirt with his hair flattened on one side from sleep.
He walked into the kitchen and slowed when he saw me. His attention shifted toward Wolf at the operations table.
“Why do I feel like I’ve interrupted something?”
“You haven’t,” I said.
Wolf opened a file.
Raven looked back at me. “You answered quite quickly.”
“Coffee.”
“Right.”
He reached for a mug and wisely decided not to continue as I picked mine up and headed toward the stairs.
Behind me, Wolf called out, “Mercer.”
I stopped with one foot on the first step and turned around.
Wolf had not lifted his head from the file. “Get dressed. We have work.”
Hearing Mercer again should have put everything back where it belonged, but I went upstairs with Rabbit following me all the way to my room.
◆
Twenty minutes later, I came back down wearing actual clothes and significantly more armor against Wolf’s eyesight.
I had traded the sleep shorts for black high-waisted cargo pants and pulled on a fitted dark green long-sleeved top with a black bra underneath it.
My hair was down again because the knot had started pulling at my scalp, leaving the dark waves slightly unruly from sleep.
Boots finished the transformation from woman caught half-dressed in the kitchen to intelligence officer who could theoretically be trusted around classified material.
Raven was already fully awake at his screens, which meant something had come in while I was upstairs.
Wolf stood beside him with a fresh mug of coffee, while Bear had joined them wearing a charcoal thermal shirt and dark pants.
Jackal was nowhere in sight, meaning Bear had managed to keep him in bed for another hour.
I walked over and set my notebook beside Raven. “What happened?”
Raven pulled a document onto the center monitor. “Moreau’s records gave us something clean.”
The update pushed Rabbit out of the front of my mind, at least enough for me to focus on the screen.
“What?”
“The warehouse outside Strasbourg had one person approving several of the driver expenses. Name on the paperwork is fake, but the phone number isn’t.”
Wolf nodded toward the screen. “It’s the same number Varga identified.”
“The one used when a transfer needed higher approval?”
“Yes.”
Kade.
Raven enlarged the contact history. “Varga told investigators that when a route changed unexpectedly, this was one of the numbers couriers waited on before they moved. The Strasbourg records show the same number approving overnight drivers for the warehouse.”
I read through the dates. They overlapped with two of the transfers we already knew about, including the woman from Haus Eberhardt who had been given a new identity after trying to escape.
“So the warehouse wasn’t just random storage.”
“Doesn’t look like it,” Raven said. “Whatever they were using it for, someone tied to Kade’s approval chain was paying to keep drivers available overnight.”
We still did not know whether Kade personally answered that phone or whether somebody worked beneath him, and Varga had been clear about the distinction when German investigators pressed him.
But what we had now was another place where the same contact appeared when Cerberus needed to change a movement quickly.
Wolf looked at the dates on the screen. “Any activity now?”
“Too little to call it active,” Raven said. “French police checked the outside overnight. No vehicles entered. One left around 0400, but the plate belongs to a local maintenance company and they’ve used the property before.”
“Then we don’t touch it.”
Raven nodded. “Already told them.”
I leaned closer to the screen and read the approval notes again. “Can we identify whoever paid the drivers?”
“Working on it.”
“Cash?”
“Mostly reimbursements through a small transport account. I’m tracing the account holder now.”
Bear pulled out the chair beside us. “What does this give us if the warehouse is empty?”
“A route,” I said. “It may be old, but if the same approval contact shows up there and in Varga’s transfers, we can start looking for the other places that number touched.”
Wolf looked toward me.
I kept my attention on the screen. “We don’t have to know who owns the phone yet. We follow what it approved.”
“Exactly,” Raven said.
Wolf nodded once. “Do it.”
Surprisingly, there was no argument and no reminder that I had only been with ARC for a short time. He accepted the answer and built the plan around it without arguing.
I wanted to enjoy the professional victory for at least a few seconds, but as Wolf turned away, he said quietly enough that only I heard him, “Good work, Rabbit.”
My pen stopped against the page.
I looked up.
He kept walking.
Raven was too busy with the transport account to notice, and Bear had already turned toward the coffee pot.
I sat there with my notebook open in front of me and tried to hold onto the annoyance, which would have been easier if I had not caught myself smiling.
That part was fucking unacceptable.