Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
VOODOO
The moment Alphabet confirmed the guy by the chain-link fence, the air around us tightened—subtle, just enough that anyone watching would chalk it up to the cold wind coming off the water. But I felt it. All of us did.
I lowered my camera, let the strap slide across my chest, and breathed out slow. “Spotter,” I murmured, barely moving my lips.
Bones shifted a half-step closer to Grace, shielding her from the angle of the man’s line of sight without making it look like shielding. Lunchbox drifted outward, lazy-like, the way he always did before he decided whether someone needed to be punched, followed, or quietly moved off the map.
The guy tried to look casual—leaning a shoulder into the chain-link, fumbling with a cigarette he didn’t bother to light. He wasn’t good at pretending. That was useful. The ones who were good at pretending were harder to flush out.
Sandwiched somewhere between Bones’ protective gravity and Lunchbox’s quiet violence, Grace kept her sunglasses angled toward the container field. But I saw her jaw tighten beneath the brim of that ridiculous crab hat.
“Okay,” Alphabet said in our ears, voice tight with the static of distance and adrenaline. “We can use this. He clocked you, but he’s unsure. I expect he’ll follow a usual pattern before he escalates.”
Pattern. Right. These spotters were creatures of habit. Small ranges. Predictable loops. They stuck to whatever corner they were assigned and phoned home when something felt wrong.
Which meant if we tugged the wrong thread, he’d alert Sarmiento’s people before we got anywhere close to them.
We needed to isolate him. Quietly. And we needed access.
I scanned the pier again, camera raised like I was framing a shot of the cranes.
“Control room’s on the upper deck of the admin building,” I murmured. “North side. Restricted but nothing we can’t walk through with the right stride.”
Lunchbox hummed under his breath, the sound of a man who’d already mapped three ways in and four ways out. “We splitting?”
Maybe. Probably. I didn’t love it, but Alphabet’s flash drive wasn’t a suggestion—it was our best chance at seeing what containers were incoming, outgoing, mislabeled, hidden, or straight-up ghost entries.
The port tracked everything. Or at least pretended to.
It had to in order to hide the ones they wanted hidden in the first place.
If Sarmiento was using a pipeline through here, there’d be digital scars. We just needed a vein to tap.
Bones didn’t look my way, but I felt him thinking, weighing, grinding through the risk factors like teeth on stone.
Grace glanced at him first then at me, barely a tilt of her chin. “What’s the play?”
I bumped the camera bag higher against my shoulder. “Two options,” I said quietly, locking gazes with Bones briefly. “Option A, we keep moving as a group and hope Spotter Man gets bored. Downside? We lose the window to slip into admin before security rotation resets.”
Lunchbox snorted softly. “And Option B?”
“Option B,” I said, “I peel off, hook into the control room, run AB’s drive, and walk out before anyone realizes the system hiccuped.”
Grace stared. “Alone?”
“Not alone,” Bones said, nodding once before he turned and scanned the area like he was trying to decide what to do. “Shadowed.”
In other words, he’d trail at a distance, invisible backup. Good. Necessary. But Grace didn’t look convinced.
I kept my voice low. “The control room’s small. One or two operators. If I walk in looking like a bored photographer who got lost, I can plant Alphabet’s drive in under ninety seconds.”
“And if the wrong person is in there?” Grace asked. Honestly, there was a fist of pride in my chest for how swiftly she had taken to analyzing even the most moderate of action plans.
“Then I’ll improvise something humiliating,” I said. “Nothing gets you out of a tight spot like embarrassing yourself convincingly.”
Lunchbox coughed a laugh. Bones didn’t.
Alphabet piped up, “Timing is ideal now. You’ve got a four-minute window before the next guard runs his dock loop. There’s a back stairwell they don’t monitor. If Voodoo moves, he should move now.”
Wind rattled the boardwalk railing. The spotter was still watching us from behind the fake cigarette, pretending he wasn’t.
Bones’ jaw flexed. “Lunchbox, keep Grace in the crowd. Don’t let her out of sight.”
Lunchbox gave a lazy salute with his iced coffee. “Babysitting mode engaged.”
Grace rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses, but I saw the tension in her throat, the tight hold she had on Goblin’s vest strap. Not even a murmur of protest that she didn’t need a guard or that she would buck the plans. Still…
I leaned in just enough for her to hear me. “He’s a spotter, not a hitter. If he makes a move, Bones will be on him before he takes a second breath.”
She didn’t smile, but some of the fear shifted, compressed into something sharper.
Resolve.
“Go,” she whispered. Her confidence stormed through me and bolstered my own. The lady had given me the order so… I went.
I pivoted away from the group, camera swinging, posture loose. Tourist on a day trip. Took a few meaningless photos of cranes, water, the sky. Then I drifted toward the north side of the promenade, slipping between two families arguing about clam chowder.
Bones split off behind me, far enough to look like we weren’t together anymore. Close enough that if I vanished behind a cargo hauler he’d rip the world in half to find me.
Alphabet’s voice guided me. “Straight ahead, Voodoo. Past the blue information kiosk. The stairwell door is tucked behind the vending machine. No camera on the hinge side.”
Perfect.
I crossed the boardwalk, the wind slicing at my jacket. The admin building rose just ahead—gray concrete, tinted windows, the kind of architecture designed by someone deeply committed to misery.
The spotter didn’t follow.
Not yet.
Good. One problem at a time.
“Opening the stairwell,” I murmured.
“Copy,” Alphabet said.
I tugged the door. It gave.
Empty.
I slipped inside and let it close behind me, the sound swallowed by concrete walls and humming fluorescent lights.
Showtime.
And if the spotter had friends? If this place wasn’t as ordinary as it pretended to be?
Then this was the moment everything cracked open.
The stairwell smelled like dust and rusted metal—the kind of place janitors avoided and security forgot existed. Perfect. I took the steps two at a time, listening for footsteps above or below. Nothing. Just the thrum of HVAC and the distant bellow of cargo haulers outside.
Alphabet guided me soft in my ear. “Top of the stairs. Door opens into the west end of the control room. Two workstations, one break table. No heat signatures on the thermal ping from twenty seconds ago.”
“Copy.”
Thermal ping, my ass—he was probably using a hacked port building blueprint from 2004 and vibes. But Alphabet’s vibes were usually terrifyingly accurate.
At the top landing, I cracked the metal door open an inch.
Voices.
Two of them.
Close.
My pulse ticked once, not out of fear—just calibrating.
Alphabet hissed, “That’s new. Hold.”
The voices came clearer through the crack. One male. One female. Both bored. Both complaining about the morning cold and whose turn it was to refill the sugar packets.
Civilian port workers. Not cartel. Not security.
I could work with bored.
I pushed the door open like a man who absolutely belonged there.
The woman glanced up from her coffee. The man was elbow-deep in a vending machine, trying to shake loose a stuck bag of chips. Neither looked alarmed. Good.
“Oh—hey,” the woman said. “Can we help you?”
I plastered on my best sheepish grin. “Uh… yeah. I’m supposed to drop off disks from the visitor center. Some… PR thing.” I patted my camera bag. “They told me someone up here handles the media archive?”
Total bullshit. Delivered with confidence.
Her eyes softened with the weariness of someone underpaid and overworked. She pointed to a dusty corner desk with a half-dead desktop tower humming beside it. “That’s Thompson’s workstation. He’s out sick. You can probably just leave the files there.”
“Perfect,” I said, walking like a man who had absolutely no intention of doing such a thing.
As soon as their attention drifted back to their own misery, I slipped into Thompson’s chair and pulled the flash drive from my pocket.
The USB ports looked like they hadn’t been cleaned since the Bush administration. I shoved the drive in anyway.
Alphabet chimed immediately, sounding like a kid on Christmas morning. “I’m in.”
I watched the screen as windows blinked open—system maps, container logs, assignment rotations. All the port’s digital veins laid bare.
“Good news,” Alphabet murmured. “One of the inbound manifests for today include a flagged container ID we got from Ignacio. There’s definitely a trail here.”
My stomach tightened. “Where?”
“Pier C.”
Of course.
I flicked my eyes to the glass wall. Through it, I could see across the yard—cranes, trucks, and the layered steel labyrinth of containers. Somewhere in that grid was a path Sarmiento had walked.
The woman refilling her coffee glanced over. “Everything alright?”
I needed to redirect attention. Fast.
So I did the only thing that came naturally to me when under pressure—
I opened one of Thompson’s media folders and double-clicked the first file I saw.
And immediately regretted it.
An audio file blasted from the speakers—obnoxiously loud, tinny, and unmistakably…
“Oh my god,” the female operator choked.
The male operator turned around so fast he hit the vending machine.
Alphabet sputtered in my ear. “Voodoo—what the—what is that?”
What that was…
Was a heavily auto-tuned, off-key recording of someone screaming the lyrics to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in a falsetto that could legally be classified as a weapon.
I slapped the volume down, but the damage was done.
Both operators were staring at me like I’d just confessed to murder.