21. Caleb
TWENTY-ONE
Caleb
When Novak left, I turned back to the screens, collating everything Lyric had sent, everything we’d scraped from the perimeter cams, every fragment of data that might give us an edge.
I replayed the audio we’d lifted from previous guard rotation twice, then a third time, isolating voices, mapping cadence, identifying patterns buried in the noise.
There was something wrong with the signal for the collar that Noah was wearing, a frequency that didn’t fit the pattern.
I leaned closer, scrubbing back five seconds, then ten. Then I split the feed across three monitors, running waveform comparisons and frequency overlays, and building a model of what I was seeing versus what should be there. The collar wasn’t only proximity-triggered. Not entirely.
Someone was able to tell it when to fire, which meant there was a control somewhere, and not some computer controlling when the collar fired.
I ran another search, dug deeper, and linked surveillance of every single person we’d ID’d.
We didn’t have names, but we had numbers, and, as at the house where we found Ezra and Seth, there were two men who didn’t fit, and one of them had to be the user SaintMichae l.
I cleaned up the footage and ran it through Lyric’s AI until the blur became usable. Michael never carried a weapon that I could see, but he was always surrounded by guards, and sometimes by another man who didn’t fit with the hired muscle.
I tracked their movements against the strange pulses in the collar signal.
The guards were easy to read. Routes, breaks, handovers. Predictable.
The other two weren’t. They moved where they wanted, stopped where no one else could, and guards shifted around them.
Authority.
I reran the data. Every time the collar signal changed, one of those two men was close. I removed the second man, and the pattern fell apart. I put Michael back in, and everything locked into place.
I studied the image Lyric had rebuilt. Expensive coat. Calm posture. Empty hands.
He didn’t need a gun.
Men like Michael let other people do the violence for them.
I leaned back.
If we wanted Noah alive, we needed what Michael was carrying.
I keyed in on Novak’s body-cam feed and routed it to the side monitor.
For now, it was nothing but darkness and shifting shapes—branches, ground, the occasional smear of grey as he moved—but I could track his pace, his direction, the subtle dips and rises of the terrain as he closed on the outer perimeter.
Then voices.
I tensed at the edge in Novak’s voice. I couldn’t make out much on the feed, but I listened to the way he handled it. Calm. Controlled. Giving the kid just enough truth to keep him talking.
It worked fast.
The answers came sharp and desperate. Guard numbers. A second team. Where they came in.
Then—
“...People are coming in two days...”
Everything else dropped away.
When Novak headed back, I replayed the audio and cleaned it until the words came through clear.
Two days.
I looked at the map on my screen, at the collar control point, at the man tied to it.
Michael.
If Eden was moved, we could lose her and the baby.
If the collar stayed active, we couldn’t get Noah out.
If we waited, we lost both.
This had turned into a hit fast and get out before the whole place vanished.
I barely noticed time passing until the back door opened and Novak came in, locking it behind him before crossing to me.
I finished the line of code I was running, checked the result, then leaned back and looked at him.
“We need to know what soon means,” I said.
Then the next set of data flashed onto the screen.
“Fuck.”
I opened a channel to Lyric and sent everything over, already searching for a way in.
“Caleb?” Lyric asked instead of saying hello.
“They’re moving victims in two days. How long until we can get backup here?” I said.
“Okay,” Lyric murmured, and I heard him typing. “We can’t get anyone to you fast enough for forty-eight hours. I could pull private contractors, we have Shadow Team in Maine that owes us a favor, but even if they have anyone, you’re looking at?—”
“We have less than forty-eight hours.”
“The law enforcement situation’s blown wide, and our people are tied up here, we’ll have to monitor and track?—”
“I’m going in.”
“No. Listen to me. That compound sits on the edge of three counties and two federal jurisdictions. The second anything kicks off—alarms, gunfire—you’ll have 911 calls, fire response, deputies, maybe state.
You insert now; you collide with law enforcement and expose everything.
” He didn’t slow. “And once that happens, the network burns clean—records wiped, routes rerouted, kids dispersed where we can’t reach them.
I have the team in Maine, off-grid. When the heat drops, we move properly.
We take the whole system down, not just one node. ”
“It’s more than one cop,” I said. “More than one level of law enforcement. I’m not waiting for our window of opportunity to close.”
“Caleb, think?—”
“No.” I cut over him, sharper now. “I told those boys we’d get their brother and sister back. Eden’s fourteen, five months pregnant—nothing but inventory. Noah is a prisoner. I’m going in. I’m pulling the two of them out. And I’ll grab whatever intel I can find.”
“I understand, but?—”
“If this goes wrong, you burn my connection to the Cave,” I said, my voice steady despite the pressure building in my chest, “and you put retrieving them at the top of the list. No delays.”
“You’re alone out there?—”
I cut the line.
Novak rolled his chair forward, steady, certain. “You’re not alone,” he said. “There are two of us.”
We swung into planning mode. This was happening, and we had to focus on what we did next. So much for planning and waiting and having a team here to extract the victims safely.
“For the collars, there’s a stronger signal here.” I marked it, just inside the compound perimeter, offset from the main buildings. “Small structure. Probably shielded. That’s our best bet for the control hub, but there’s another, more direct control on Michael himself.”
He studied it, committing it to memory the way he did everything.
“If we take out the control hub?” he asked.
“We can’t destroy it,” I said immediately.
“If the failsafe kicks in, worst-case, every collar fires.” I pulled up the final piece, the one I’d been building while he was gone.
“I can spoof the signal. Feed it something clean. Delay commands, override triggers. It won’t last forever—but it’ll give us a window. ”
“How long?”
“Three minutes. Maybe four if nothing glitches. Time to get to Michael and get that other control.”
“That’s enough.”
“It’s not a clean extraction of two people, not just Noah and Eden; this is going right into the nest of vipers and cutting off the head.”
I watched him for a second—two of us weren’t enough, but it would have to be.
“When do we move?” he asked.
I checked back at the screens, at the map, at the blinking markers that represented lives reduced to data points and probabilities.
“Tonight,” I said.
Because waiting wasn’t an option anymore.
And neither was failure.