15. Sophie
SOPHIE
Ifind the transportation link, and I know instantly that the two names are about to become one.
I've been chasing the refrigerated-unit company for days.
Tonight I finally crack how the syndicate pays its drivers, because everyone has to be paid, and payment always leaves a trail.
The drivers are contractors, invoiced through a staffing shell, and that is funded by a management company, and that draws from an account that, when I finally pry it open, receives a quarterly transfer authorized inside Ashcroft Holdings.
The authorization carries the same dead-window signature we've been tracking.
"Lucian." I don't care that it's four a.m. I'm in his room waking him. "Get up. I've got it. I've got the mechanism."
He surfaces fast, alert between one breath and the next. "Show me."
He follows me back to the monitors, and he follows the cursor moving node to node.
"The driver payroll isn't coming from the syndicate's side of the network.
It's coming directly out of Ashcroft Holdings.
Somebody inside is paying the people driving those trucks.
" My voice tightens. "This isn't diverted money passing through three shells anymore.
Someone inside Ashcroft is directly authorizing the payroll. "
Lucian braces, and I watch the horror move through him. "How long?"
"The driver payroll goes back four years, same as the shipping. But the account it draws from…" I pull it up. "That account's older. And it's touched by exactly one office now. The CFO's."
Talbot in operations had the access at least thirteen years ago, but Talbot never touched this account. Only the CFO's suite has, and only in the dead window, and only ever in a manner scrubbed clean afterward.
"Clifford," Lucian says, and it comes out like something torn.
"I can't prove it to a certainty yet. His credentials, his office, his window…
but a suite means more than one pair of hands, and I won't hang a man on circumstance.
I need one more transfer. One I can tie to his hand specifically and not just his office.
Give me another day and I'll have the anomaly that names him alone. "
I don't get another day. Hector's alarm goes at dawn, and it's not one house this time. It's five.
We crowd into the war room while the reports stack up, and the map fills with red marks faster than I can process them.
A bear clan in Montana, two wolf families along the northern corridor, a lion household in the Dakotas, a safe house in the Cascades that Kurtis' people built with their own hands.
Coordinated, simultaneous, hitting across a thousand miles inside the same twenty-minute span, which no organization does by luck.
They knew where all five were at once. They had every location and every evac route in advance.
"This is live intelligence," I say, and my stomach drops as I understand what it means.
"Nobody plans five simultaneous strikes off old data.
Somebody fed them these locations in the last few days.
The traitor isn't just historical, Lucian.
He's active right now, today, watching us hunt him and selling us out in real time to slow us down. "
Lucian's already moving, already Alpha, the grief from an hour ago locked away behind command. "Kian, Kurtis, get your people rolling. We can't reach all five, so we separate. Which have the shortest evac windows?"
"The Cascades house," Hector says, reading. "Families still inside. Twenty minutes, maybe less, before the syndicate's on top of them."
"Then that's ours." Lucian swings to me. "Sophie…"
"Don't." I'm already grabbing my laptop. "You need the live evac routes rerouted around the blue lines, and I can read the truck data faster to find the gaps. I'm not staying while families are taken. I'm coming, and I'm working the whole drive."
He doesn't argue. "Then work fast. You're my eyes on their trucks."
The Cascades run is ninety minutes of me hunched over a screen in a speeding SUV, calling reroutes into a headset while Lucian drives and Hector rides shotgun with a rifle across his knees.
I earn my seat, I really do, I catch a syndicate transport idling at a junction the evac convoy was about to hit, and I reroute the families onto a logging spur with four minutes to spare.
I flag a second unit closing from the south and buy Kian's wolves the warning they need to peel off and screen it.
As we reach the staging point below the Cascades house, three families are already moving through the trees on foot with wolves flanking them, and the syndicate's trucks are chasing ghosts down roads I emptied.
We save four of the five houses. The fifth, the Dakotas, we lose, they're gone before anyone can reach them, and I kick myself all the way home, four saved and one taken.
Lucian finds me later with my laptop finally closed, staring into an abyss.
"You saved four houses tonight," he says quietly. "Dozens of people who'd be in a truck right now if you hadn't been in that car."
"And a family in the Dakotas who's in one anyway." My voice isn't steady. "Four's better than none, I get it, but it doesn't make the one weigh less."
"No," he agrees. "It doesn't." He takes my hand. "That's the shit part."
I lace my fingers through his and hold on, and somewhere in the exhaustion my analyst's mind won't quit, and it circles back to the thing it caught in the chaos and set aside.
"Lucian. The reroutes tonight." I sit up.
"Somebody knew our evac routes in real time.
Not the old ones, the new ones, the ones we generated when we found out the pride was infiltrated.
That data lives in exactly one place." My pulse picks up.
"The live routing system. And that was accessed forty minutes before the strikes by a credential I flagged and didn't have time to chase.
I have it on my machine. One final anomaly, timestamped tonight, tied to one hand. "
He goes still. "Whose?"
I'm already opening the laptop again, exhaustion gone. "Lucian, I think tonight he got impatient."