Stealing Solace (H.A.V.E.N. Hidden Ally Vigilante Extraction Network #8)

1. The Camp

The Camp

Solace

I know morning has arrived because the port starts moving before the sun reaches the narrow window above my head.

Men shout to one another outside. A truck reverses somewhere close by, its warning beeps cutting through the steady rattle of generators and the slam of metal doors. Voices follow, mostly Greek, some lower and harder to place.

A freight engine starts nearby, coughing twice before settling into a rough idle. Beyond it all, waves strike the harbor wall with a rhythm I’ve listened to for five days.

Work continues less than fifty feet away.

No one out there knows I’m here.

The room was probably used for storage before Meridian decided it needed somewhere to hide people. There’s a thin mattress on the concrete floor, a plastic bucket behind a stained curtain, and a bottle of water delivered once a day with enough bread to keep me alive.

The door has no handle on this side. I’ve checked every hinge, every crack, and every inch of the window frame. The opening is too small to climb through, and the metal grille has been fixed into the wall.

I’ve tested that too.

My fingers are still scraped from the attempt.

Five days ago, I walked into my supervisor’s office with the names of eleven missing women and copies of transport records proving none of them had been transferred to another camp.

I expected excuses. I expected another warning about incomplete paperwork, language barriers, and the confusion created when hundreds of people move through an overstretched system.

I didn’t expect the door to lock behind me.

They took my phone, my identification, and the folder I carried into the office. They asked who else had seen the records. I told them no one, but the questions continued until they were sure I was lying.

They were right.

A colleague in London has copies of the intake sheets and transport manifests. She knows the vehicle registrations don’t match any recognized aid organization. She knows women listed as transferred never arrived at the facilities named in Meridian’s system.

The message I managed to send on my first night here was brief.

They know I copied the records.

I have no way of knowing whether she received it, or whether she understood what I needed her to do. Report it. Share everything. Make enough noise that Meridian can’t erase eleven women and a social worker without anyone asking why.

Outside, a truck door slides open. Men exchange instructions near the harbor road, and a woman begins pleading. Her voice disappears beneath the revving engine.

I cross to the door and press my ear against the metal, trying to catch a name, a destination, anything I can use if I get out.

Footsteps enter the passage.

They stop outside my room.

For five days, one man has brought my food and water.

This morning, there are two.

Locked Room in Mytilene Port, Greece. 0730 hours

The footsteps stopped outside my room twenty minutes ago.

The two men spoke in low voices before walking away without opening the door. I’ve been listening for their return ever since, but the passage remains quiet. Outside, the port continues its morning routine, and the sounds pull me back to the camp.

The work at Meridian was real. That’s what made everything else so difficult to see.

The families who came through my tent carried Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and half a dozen other broken places with them, each story different and every form too small to hold it.

Every morning, hundreds of people queued outside the administration tents before the heat became unbearable. I processed asylum claims with an interpreter beside me, trying to turn lives into boxes on a form without making the people telling those stories feel like paperwork.

Names, countries of origin, missing family members, routes taken, violence survived. Each file represented someone waiting for permission to begin again.

By noon, I was usually helping with food distribution because there were never enough hands. Rice, canned vegetables, powdered milk, bottled water. Meridian’s logo appeared on every carton and staff vest, polished proof that donations were reaching the people they were meant to help.

The clinic treated infections and injuries. Lawyers assisted with appeals. Social workers arranged temporary housing and reunited families separated during their journeys.

Good people worked there. Dedicated people. That was another reason I didn’t question the gaps sooner.

My afternoons belonged to families who needed more than forms and supplies. I counselled parents whose children woke screaming, teenagers who hadn’t spoken since crossing the sea, and women who survived things they could only describe with lowered eyes and locked hands.

I couldn’t change what had happened to them, but I could listen. I could help them understand their responses were normal after experiences no one should endure.

I knew their names.

That was why I noticed when they disappeared.

The first was nineteen-year-old Amira, who came to my office twice after arriving alone from Syria. She was waiting for news of an aunt in Germany and terrified she’d be deported before they reconnected.

When she missed our next appointment, her bunk was empty. The woman beside her said Amira had left during the night with two Meridian employees.

Her file recorded a voluntary transfer to supported accommodation.

No destination was listed.

A week later, twenty-two-year-old Laleh disappeared from the same section. She’d been offered cleaning work at a hotel near Athens, though no employment approval appeared in her case notes. Her file was closed before I could ask who arranged it.

Then there was Samira. Yara. Nasrin.

Young women, usually travelling alone or separated from relatives. Each disappeared after dark. Each lived in the south section. By morning, their belongings were gone, and the women in the neighboring bunks had been warned not to ask questions.

I began writing down names in a notebook hidden inside the lining of my bag.

Eleven women in less than three weeks.

Appalling.

When I raised the pattern during a staff meeting, my supervisor barely looked up from his laptop.

“Transfers happen every day, Solace.”

“Without destinations?”

“The system isn’t always updated immediately.”

“They’re all from the south section, and they’re all moved at night.”

His fingers paused above the keyboard.

“Focus on the cases assigned to you.”

I left his office with a smile, apologized for overstepping, and returned to work.

That evening, I opened the camp’s transport database and started searching.

A key scrapes inside the lock, pulling me back to the room.

This time, the door opens.

Locked Room in Mytilene Port, Greece. 0745 hours

The man who enters carries a bottle of water and a paper bag. I’ve seen him twice since I was brought here, though he’s never given me his name or answered any of my questions.

He places both near the door while the second man watches from the passage.

“Where are the women?” I ask.

His expression doesn’t change.

“The women from the container. What have you done with them?”

The second man says something in Greek. The first straightens and steps back without looking at me.

“Please. Some of them need medical treatment.”

The door closes. The key turns, and their footsteps recede along the passage.

I stare at the paper bag without moving toward it.

They know which container I mean.

I found it three nights before they took me.

The transport database showed six women assigned to a Meridian vehicle scheduled to collect medical supplies from the port.

The vehicle had made the same journey four times in two weeks, always after midnight, though no supplies appeared in the camp inventory.

I waited near the south section that evening and watched a white minibus arrive shortly after eleven.

Two men escorted three women from their shelters and loaded them into the back.

The women carried no luggage. One was crying.

Another kept looking toward the administration tents as if she expected someone to intervene.

No one did.

I followed in the small car assigned to outreach staff, staying far enough behind that the driver wouldn’t notice me.

The minibus entered the commercial port through a service gate.

My Meridian identification got me past security when I claimed I was collecting an urgent delivery for the camp clinic.

The vehicle was empty when I found it beside a row of shipping containers.

I heard the women before I saw where they’d been taken. A faint cry came from a blue container near the rear fence, partly hidden behind freight pallets. Its doors were secured with a heavy chain, but air holes had been drilled through the metal. Through one of them, I saw faces.

At least eight women were inside.

Plastic water bottles lay scattered across the floor.

Two buckets sat in the rear corner, and thin blankets were spread over the bare metal.

One woman was lying down while another tried to wake her.

The container was a holding cell, close enough to the docks for the women to be loaded onto a ship or moved by truck before anyone knew they were gone.

I photographed the container, its identification number, the minibus, and the men guarding the service road. Then I returned to camp and copied every intake record and transport manifest connected to the missing women.

The next morning, I took the evidence to my supervisor.

Petrakis examined each photograph slowly. He was a respected regional director who spoke at donor events about dignity, safety, and Meridian’s commitment to protecting vulnerable people.

I believed he’d call the police.

Instead, he placed my phone on his desk and smiled.

“You’re mistaken, Ms. Montgomery. But thank you for your concern.”

Locked Room in Mytilene Port, Greece. 0800 hours

The paper bag contains bread, an orange, and a small carton of juice. I eat slowly, saving half the bread despite knowing they’ll take anything left behind when they return. Five days of captivity has taught me to prepare for the possibility that the next meal won’t come.

A truck passes close enough to vibrate the floor. The sound is followed by the scrape of metal against concrete and a series of muffled voices beyond the wall.

Women’s voices.

I move closer and place my ear against the plaster. Someone coughs. Another woman speaks in Arabic, too softly for me to understand more than a few scattered words.

Water. Sister. Please.

The blue shipping container is on the other side of this wall.

I hadn’t known where they brought me that night.

There was a hood over my head before they forced me into a vehicle, and I lost track of the turns after we left the camp.

Now I understand why the sea sounds so close and why trucks arrive at all hours.

They brought me to the port and locked me in the room beside the holding cell I tried to expose.

Petrakis must have called them as soon as I left his office. The bastard.

I’d known his response was wrong, but I hadn’t understood how much danger I was in, or how badly I’d misjudged him as decent with integrity. He’d returned my phone after deleting the photographs, then watched while I slipped it into my bag.

“Perhaps you should take the rest of the day off,” he’d said. “You’ve been working too hard.”

I thanked him and walked back to my office without looking behind me. The originals were gone from my phone, but copies had already been uploaded to an encrypted folder and sent, along with the transport records, to my colleague in London. I’d used the staff bathroom to send one final message.

They know I copied the records.

I planned to leave the camp, drive to the nearest police station, and contact the British consulate from there. Before I reached my car, two men stepped from between the administration building and the supply tent.

One grabbed my arms. The other covered my mouth with a cloth that smelled sharply of chemicals.

I fought hard enough to tear his sleeve and kick the first man in the shin, but there was no one nearby to hear me.

They dragged me behind the supply building, forced me into a vehicle, and pulled the hood over my head.

When I woke, Petrakis was standing near the door of this room.

“You should have accepted my explanation,” he said.

I asked what would happen to the women.

He smiled as if I’d confirmed something he already knew.

“The same thing that happens to people no one is looking for.”

A sudden blow strikes the wall beside my head. I jerk back as a woman calls out from the container. Another blow follows, then another. She’s hitting the metal from inside, using whatever she can find to make herself heard.

I press both palms against the wall.

“I hear you,” I whisper.

She can’t hear me in return, but I stay there anyway.

I came to Greece to help. I found something worse than war.

And now I’m behind the same door I tried to open for others.