38. Sergei
SERGEI
The refrigerator hum of the van's electronics was the only sound until I put my headset on, and then Elena's breathing filled the space where the hum had been.
I sat in a folding chair bolted to the floor of a vehicle that smelled like solder and cold coffee, two blocks from a marina I could not see, running the only part of tonight's plan that lived entirely inside my own two hands.
Tank was somewhere closer to the water with a rifle he'd sworn he wouldn't need.
Jaz sat at the console beside me with her own headset, calling positions for Tank's team so my channel could stay on Elena alone. She had not made a single joke since we parked.
Ash was monitoring the wider network from a safer distance, watching for anything that moved through Halcyon's systems instead of the warehouse's. Renner was parked where a federal badge needed to be parked, close enough to move and far enough to still be legal when he did.
None of this was the plan we had drawn on the whiteboard.
That morning Ash's listener had caught Wren's people pulling the handoff offline, the evidence moved onto an air-gapped drive in a lockbox in the supply closet beside the office, where nothing Ash had built could ever see it.
If that drive was going to reach a courtroom, someone had to walk in and take it, and Elena had claimed the job before I finished saying the words.
None of that mattered to me right now. Only the three screens in front of me mattered, and the voice in my left ear.
"Talk to me," she said, low. "You went quiet."
"Working." I had three screens up. The left one showed the marina's exterior camera feed, raw, unlooped, a static grey shot of pier pilings and black water.
The center screen was my access into the warehouse's own network, a door I'd been picking apart since the night before through a service contractor's forgotten credentials. The right screen was still black. "Give me ninety seconds before you cross the access road. I want the cameras dead first."
"You said dead. You mean looped."
"I mean they'll show an empty dock for as long as I need them to." I found the camera controller, a cheap embedded system nobody had patched since it left the factory, and pulled twelve seconds of clean footage from an hour ago.
I stitched the ends together so the loop wouldn't jump. "Recording now. Confirm on your end, camera one, camera two."
A pause, wind moving across her mic. "Both mounted on the water side like Tank said. Neither one's moved."
"They won't." I pushed the loop live and watched the timestamp on my monitor freeze mid-second, then start again from the same frame. "You're a ghost to anyone watching a screen. You are not a ghost to anyone standing on that dock, so don't get comfortable."
"Wasn't planning on it."
The gate was next. I found the chain lock's electronic backup, a keypad override wired in sometime after the original installation, and queued it to cycle on my command instead of forcing it now.
No sense opening a door before she was standing in front of it. Then I pulled up the schematic I'd built from the building's old permit filings and Tank's notes and laid a thermal overlay on top of it, and for a second I just stared at it, because the math wasn't matching what I expected.
"Sergei."
"One second."
The overlay showed three shapes, not two. Three heat signatures moved inside a floor plan we'd expected to hold exactly two men on a slow rotation, one by the boat storage, one somewhere near the office.
I ran the scan again, thinking it was a reflection off the water throwing a ghost signature, some artifact of the sensor angle.
It came back the same, three bodies, three distinct temperatures, one of them stationary near the back corner and two of them moving in a pattern that put them nowhere the plan had accounted for.
"Talk to me," Elena said again, and there was an edge under it now that hadn't been there thirty seconds ago.
"There's a third guard." I kept my voice flat because flat was the only thing that would do either of us any good.
"We planned for two. I'm reading three live bodies inside right now.
One's holding position near the office. Two are moving, and they're moving in a pattern, not standing still, which means it's a patrol, not a static post."
"Wren bring backup?"
"I don't know yet. It doesn't change your route, it changes your timing.
" I traced the moving signatures against the schematic with my finger on the glass, not that it did anything, just gave my hands something to do while my head worked.
"The two on patrol cross paths near the east wall shelving every few minutes and split off in opposite directions.
When they split, there's a window on the west side, near the boat racks, where nobody's looking at the water. "
"How wide a window?"
"I'll tell you when I see it start." I watched the shapes drift, watched the gap open. "Now. Go. Straight line along the fence to the second piling, then stop and hold."
I heard her move, the small controlled sound of someone crossing open ground without running, footsteps deliberate on gravel and then softer where the gravel gave way to dock planking.
I watched the water-side feed I'd looped, watched nothing happen on it, which was exactly what I wanted it to show.
"At the piling," she said.
"Good. Hold there ten seconds." On the thermal overlay, the two patrol shapes had drifted apart again, one toward the office corner, one back along the east wall where the shelving was.
The third shape hadn't moved at all since I'd first picked it up, a steady stationary heat source that I was starting to think was a man sitting down, maybe with his back to a wall, maybe with a gun across his lap.
I didn't say that part out loud. "Gate's next. I'm cycling the lock now."
I sent the signal. On the center screen, a status light flipped from red to green, the electronic override doing its quiet work on a chain lock that thought it was still doing its job. "It's open. Push, don't lift, the chain will look like it's still holding from a distance."
"Copy."
"After the gate, there's a side door on the west face of the building, standard entry, not the roll door the boats use. That's yours. I've got it flagged on the schematic as your way in, no camera on that side, no guard within thirty feet of it as of right now."
"I see it."
I watched her signature, small and warm, cross the last open stretch toward the building's west wall, and for a moment everything lined up the way I had built it to line up in a day and a half of planning, the cameras blind, the gate open, the guards drifting the wrong direction, and I let myself believe for exactly that moment that the hard part was behind us.
"Sergei." Her voice had changed.
Not fear, not yet, but something close enough to it that my stomach dropped before she finished the sentence. "The door's not opening."
"It's unlocked. I pulled the schematic straight off the building's own security system, there's no electronic lock on that entry point at all."
"I'm not saying it's locked. I'm saying it's not opening." A scrape, metal on metal, low and dragging. "There's a weld bead running the whole seam. Someone sealed this door shut from the inside. It's not coming open for anyone, digital or otherwise."
For one full second I had nothing. That was the truth of it, one full second where the schematic on my screen and the reality on the other end of the comm simply refused to agree with each other, because a welded door doesn't show up in a permit file or a network log, a welded door is a fact about steel that no amount of access I had bought or stolen could have told me.
My careful map of that building had a hole in it shaped exactly like the one thing I hadn't been able to see coming.
I had spent every one of those hours building a version of that warehouse I could hold in my head and move through blind, every camera, every lock, every likely guard position accounted for and weighed against every other, and none of it had prepared me for a door that some contractor had sealed shut years before any of us had ever heard the word Halcyon, for reasons that had nothing to do with Wren or Vasiliev or any plan I could have run against.
"Sergei, talk to me." Her voice had dropped lower, controlled the way mine usually was, and hearing that same flatness come back at me through the earpiece was worse than if she'd let herself sound afraid.
"Sergei, I need a door."
I ran through it fast, faster than I liked, because the two patrol signatures on my thermal screen were already drifting back toward each other, toward that same intersection near the east shelving where her gap had opened and would close again in under a minute.
Three ways out presented themselves at once.
The roll door the boats used, wide enough to walk a car through and loud enough to wake the whole marina, its electronic control something I could probably override but not silently, not with a patrol thirty feet from it who'd hear the motor start.
The water side, where the two cameras I'd looped were still faithfully showing an empty dock, except cutting across open water meant losing the fence line for cover and putting herself in plain sight of anyone glancing out that back office window, the one with a clear line to the water.
Or the office windows themselves, small, high, unlocked as far as my data showed, but directly under the eye of whoever was sitting still in that back corner, the one signature that hadn't moved once since I started watching.
None of them were good. The roll door was loud, the water side was exposed, the office window put her closest to the one guard I understood least. I ran each one forward in my head the way I'd run a bad quarter against a board that wanted certainty I didn't have, looking for the version that killed the fewest futures.
The roll door failed first, because a startled guard thirty feet away with a gun was not a risk I would ever choose to hand her on purpose.
The water side lasted a little longer in my head, until I pictured the back office window and the man who might or might not be sitting behind it with a clear line to open water and nothing else to look at. That left the window.
The window put her close to the one guard I understood least, but that guard hadn't moved in four minutes, which told me something about him even if I didn't know what.
I picked the window, because a man who doesn't move is a man who might not be watching, and because the other two options put her in a guard's path inside a minute I didn't have.
"West side's dead," I said. "Forget the door.
There's a window on the office, north face, reachable from the fence line behind the boat racks without ever crossing open water.
It's high, you'll need the crate stack under it, and the one guard near there hasn't moved in four minutes, which might mean he's not watching that wall at all. Might."
"Might isn't a lot."
"It's what I've got." My hands were already moving on the keyboard, checking the loop was holding, checking the patrol shapes, watching the gap I needed her to slip through start to narrow again.
"The patrol's closing back toward the east wall.
You've got maybe thirty seconds before they're both looking the wrong direction for you to use, so you need to move now, not after we talk this through. "
"Moving."
I heard the gravel again, faster now, and under it her breath had changed too, shorter, working harder, and I hated that I could hear it and couldn't see her face to read what was actually happening behind it.
"Go around the fence line, stay low past the boat racks, there's a stack of crates against the north wall you can use to reach the window.
" My eyes were on the thermal screen, on the third signature that still hadn't moved, on the two that were drifting apart again just enough to give her the seam she needed. "Go around, I'll find you a door..."
The center screen went black, not the camera feed, not the schematic, but the whole connection, my link into the building's network and with it her earpiece, which we had piggybacked on the warehouse's own wireless so no scanner outside would catch a stray signal, gone in the space between one word and the next, no warning light, no error, just silence where her breathing had been a half second before.
I said her name into a comm that wasn't sending anything anywhere anymore, and nothing answered.
The last thing she had heard from me was an order I could no longer help her keep, to go around while I found her a door.