2. The Darkest Front
The Darkest Front
Steve
Victor brings Solace Montgomery’s photograph onto the main screen.
We saw the file yesterday at Blackstone HQ, but seeing her face again doesn’t make the facts any easier to hear.
It never does. Thirty-one, British, a social worker who’s spent six years helping displaced women and children.
In the photograph, she’s standing outside a row of temporary shelters with several kids gathered around her. Her smile is tired but genuine.
The HAVEN team sits around the conference table. Jan is beside me, her attention fixed on the screen. Angus, Jax, Mercy, Cole, Liberty, Serenity, Dimitry, Crew, Faith, Renzo, Grayson, and Felicity fill the remaining seats while Victor stands at the head of the room.
No one has touched their coffee yet.
“Quick recap before we move,” Victor says. “Meridian Global Aid Foundation operates across Greece. Food distribution, medical clinics, housing assistance, and legal advocacy. Legitimate work, legitimate funding, and enough access to turn vulnerable women into targets.”
The screen changes to a map of camps, transport routes, and ports.
“Behind that work, women are disappearing. Meridian identifies those with no relatives nearby, incomplete documentation, or limited contact outside the camps. They offer jobs, safer housing, transport to another facility, anything that gets them into a vehicle without drawing attention.”
Faith studies the financial data beside the map. “And the aid organization gives them access to every detail they need.”
“Names, ages, family connections, legal status, medical records,” Felicity says. “They don’t need to hunt for vulnerable women. The women are registering themselves in Meridian’s system.”
Her voice goes quiet at the end. We know why. Serenity survived the same decision.
Victor looks around the table. “Refugee camps. They’re trafficking refugees.”
The room seems to shrink around us.
We’ve dealt with women trapped by money, ambition, employment, immigration status, and men who made sure no one would believe them.
This is uglier in a different way. These women have escaped war, persecution, violence, or hunger.
They’ve crossed borders and seas to reach people wearing aid vests and promising safety.
Then those people sell them.
“Bloody hell.” I rub a hand over my chin. “That’s sick.”
Jan’s hand closes around mine beneath the table. Her anger shows in the set of her jaw as she stares at the routes leading from the camps to the ports.
“They’ve already lost homes, families, everything familiar,” she says. “They arrive needing protection, and Meridian uses that need to choose its victims.”
Dimitry hasn’t moved since the map appeared. Serenity watches him from the seat beside his, but she doesn’t reach for him. She knows him well enough to leave the choice to him.
“I told you,” he says. “Every predator finds the weakest prey.”
There’s no shock in his voice, only confidence of the truth.
He knows what criminal organizations do with people who can disappear without creating questions. He knows how routes built for weapons and drugs become routes for women. He knows the men behind them won’t see frightened human beings inside those vehicles.
They’ll see cargo.
Victor replaces the map with Solace’s final message.
They know I copied the records.
“Solace found their operation,” he says. “Five days ago, she vanished.”
Five days. Long enough for a trafficking network to move someone across borders if they wanted to.
I look at her photograph again.
“Then we find her,” I say.
Dimitry remains standing beside the screen, his attention fixed on the routes running between the camps and the ports.
“My brother can identify which networks are moving the women,” he says. “He’s worked across Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and the eastern Mediterranean. He knows the ports, the islands, and the places between them where no one asks what a boat is carrying.”
Victor studies him. “You trust him?”
“With this?” Dimitry glances at Solace Montgomery’s photograph. “Yes. Of course.”
It isn’t quite an answer to the question Victor asked, and everyone in the room knows it.
Serenity leans forward. She knows Dimitry’s history better than most of us, including the parts he rarely discusses. “What aren’t you telling us?”
His expression barely shifts. “Nikolai is the best tracker in the Mediterranean. But he’s… difficult. Cold.”
Jax raises an eyebrow from across the table.
That earns the faintest response from Dimitry. “He makes you look chatty.”
Cole coughs into his fist. Crew barks out a laugh, not even trying to pretend he’s subtle.
“How difficult?” I ask.
“He doesn’t work well with teams.”
“Neither did half the people in this room when they arrived,” Victor says.
Fair point.
“Just tell him there’s no ‘I’ in team,” I say.
Dimitry opens his laptop and sends a secure connection request. We wait while Grayson routes it through HAVEN’s encrypted system. He’s already stripped the location data and buried the call beneath enough digital misdirection to make any bastard following it question his career choices.
The main screen goes dark, then resolves into the image of a man sitting in a poorly lit room.
Nikolai Volkoy looks enough like Dimitry to make the relationship obvious, but whatever warmth Dimitry reserves for Serenity and the team is absent from his brother’s face.
His hair is shorter, his features harder, and he watches the room as if memorizing every person in it.
He doesn’t lean toward the camera or adjust the screen. He sits so still the rest of us look restless.
“Nikolai,” Dimitry says. “This is HAVEN.”
His brother says nothing.
Victor brings up Solace’s photograph beside the video feed, followed by the transport manifests and the map of Meridian’s routes. “Solace Montgomery. British social worker. She discovered women being trafficked from a refugee camp in Greece. She’s been missing for five days.”
Nikolai reads every line without asking a question.
The map changes to show the shell companies Grayson and Faith have connected to Russian organized crime. Three freight operators. Two port-services companies. A charter business with boats moving between the mainland and several islands.
Crew shifts closer to the screen. He studies the vessel registrations and routes with the same concentration Nikolai gives the names beside them. We’ll need both of them in Greece, one who understands the criminal networks and one who can read the water.
“These companies mean something to you?” Victor asks.
Nikolai’s gaze settles on the map.
“I know the routes.”
His eyes move to Solace’s photograph and stay there.
“When do we leave?”
“Today,” Victor says. “HAVEN flies to Athens in two hours. Dimitry will send the route and rendezvous point through the secure channel.”
“I don’t need Athens.”
“No,” Victor says. “You need Lesbos. Meet us there.”
Nikolai gives one short nod. “Send the file.”
The screen goes black before Victor answers.
Dimitry closes the laptop and glances around the table. “That’s the most agreeable answer you’re likely to get from him.”
I look around the table. Jax, Cole, Crew, Dimitry, Jan, and the others are already studying the same maps with the same purpose.
We can handle difficult.
Finding Solace is the part that matters.
Blackstone Learjet, En route to Athens. 1300 hours
The Blackstone Learjet lifts out of San Francisco under a clear sky, banking east while the city drops away beneath us.
No one treats it like a luxury flight.
Jax is across the aisle from me, reviewing camp schematics on a tablet.
Cole sits beside Liberty, the two of them going through medical extraction contingencies with the kind of quiet focus that tells me they’re already picturing every way this can go wrong.
Crew has the maritime routes open in front of him, his attention fixed on ports, island crossings, and every possible place a boat can disappear between Greece and Turkey.
Back in San Francisco, Victor is holding the fort with Serenity, Mercy, Faith, Grayson, and Felicity, which means we’ve got more backup than HAVEN’s ever had. Financials, digital systems, survivor insight, and coordination, all moving behind us while we head for Greece.
Dimitry is near the front, finishing an encrypted call before the jet reaches cruising altitude.
“Lesbos,” he says into the phone. “Not Athens. We’ll come through the mainland first, but you meet us there.”
Whatever Nikolai says is too low for me to hear.
Dimitry’s mouth tightens. “Because this is not one of your solo jobs.”
Another pause.
“Yes, I know you hate teams. Try surviving one.”
Jax glances up at that. “Promising start.”
Dimitry ends the call and slips the phone into his jacket. “He’ll meet us on Lesbos.”
“Happy about it?” Jan asks from beside me.
“No.”
“Coming anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’ll fit right in,” Liberty says.
A few quiet smiles move through the cabin, but they don’t last. The screens in front of us keep dragging everyone back to the same ugly truth.
This isn’t an exclusive estate tucked behind Tuscan gates.
It isn’t a polished tech compound in Atherton with manicured lawns and men who believe money makes them untouchable.
We’re flying toward a humanitarian disaster zone where predators have learned to hide inside the machinery built to protect desperate people.
That changes the feel of it.
I’ve seen crime scenes, violent homes, trafficking operations, and men who turned fear into business. HAVEN has taken apart enough Meridian fronts to know how well evil can dress itself up.
Refugee camps are meant to be the place people reach after they’ve already survived the worst day of their lives. War. Persecution. Hunger. Boats that should never have carried children across open water.
And Meridian is waiting there with forms, food, and transport lists.