Chapter 29
The war-room looked exactly the same as it had when Tyrone walked out of it a little over six hours ago, which felt fucking offensive considering nothing about him was the same man who had left.
Someone had cleared away the abandoned mugs, Monster and Redbull cans, and food wrappers from the hours they’d spent hunting for Kelsey, but the whiteboards still carried the remnants of the operation, with route lines and names sitting alongside times that no longer mattered because his little girl was upstairs asleep in his bed with Glenna wrapped around her.
Petrovic’s photograph still occupied one corner of the main screen, a red marker drawn through the bastard’s face sometime after the Carabinieri confirmed the scene outside Genoa was secure, while the other monitors had already moved on to the paperwork that came after men died and somebody needed to explain why.
He dropped into the chair beside Colt and stretched his legs beneath the table, ignoring the protest from muscles that had been operating on adrenaline for too fucking long.
He’d managed a shower before coming down, but sleep had been impossible after leaving Glenna and Kelsey.
His body wanted it. His brain had other plans, and apparently so did Gunnar, because every man who had gone out tonight was sitting around the table.
Talon had already checked Zombie over, and the Malinois was settled nearby, while Remi and Jorja remained at their stations in TOC after spending the recovery op working the intel side from the compound.
Mojo looked as wrecked as the rest of them. He leaned back in his chair with a fresh coffee trapped between both hands, his eyes bloodshot and the usual humor nowhere to be found.
Gunnar waited until everyone was settled before he looked around the room.
“First things first. Everybody came home. Kelsey came home. Petrovic and the other two hostiles on-site are confirmed deceased, and Midas’s Carabinieri contact has control of the property.”
Marco nodded from the other side of the table. “They’re treating it as an organized crime site with suspected trafficking links. They’ve already found enough inside the main house that nobody’s gonna question why Petrovic got dead.”
Tyrone’s jaw tightened, but he resisted the urge to ask what they’d found. He didn’t need the details. Glenna and Kelsey didn’t need him carrying them upstairs with him when he went back to them.
“Anything tying back to us?” Gunnar asked.
“No.” Marco took a swallow of coffee. “They know somebody hit the property before they arrived, but they’re not asking questions they don’t want answers to.
The weapons on the DBs tie back to Balkan organized crime, and Petrovic was already flagged by Interpol.
They’ll bury themselves in paperwork for the next six months. ”
“Good.” Gunnar looked at Tyrone. “You want to add anything to the operational side before we close it?”
Tyrone shook his head. “No.”
That was apparently enough, because Gunnar didn’t make him sit there and narrate every movement they had all lived through. “Then the recovery op is closed from our end. We’ll do the formal reports later after everybody gets some fucking sleep.”
“Thank Christ,” Colt muttered.
A couple of tired chuckles moved around the room before Gunnar’s expression hardened again. “Now Sullivan.” The atmosphere changed immediately, and Tyrone sat straighter as Gunnar’s gaze shifted toward his brother. “Zipper.”
Remi rolled his shoulders, shoved his Monster farther out of the way, and brought Sullivan’s photograph onto the main screen.
He was younger in the image, dark hair without the silver Tyrone had noticed when they met at the café, his face carrying the hard confidence of a man people followed because they trusted him to know where he was taking them.
Tyrone had trusted him.
Dwight had trusted him more.
That was the part that hurt.
“While you lot were out playing in the mountains, Jorja and I kept pulling the bastard apart,” Remi said. “We already knew about the gambling debt and the foster-care connection, so I stopped looking at what we knew and started looking at what didn’t fit.”
Tyrone leaned forward. “Which was?”
“The hundred grand.”
Remi highlighted the first major reduction in Sullivan’s debt. “This disappears three days after Dwight dies. Kelsey doesn’t enter foster care until years later, so she can’t be the reason for it. That meant Sullivan gave White Shadow something valuable before Kelsey ever became useful to them.”
Colt’s expression hardened. “The op.”
Remi looked at him. “That’s what I thought, too. So I went looking for proof.”
Tyrone felt the first cold pull low in his stomach. He’d known where this was going before Remi said it. Some part of him had probably known since Gunnar asked why Sullivan hadn’t pulled Dwight from the task force. “What did he sell?”
Remi’s eyes met his, and he confirmed it. “The op.”
I’ll fucking kill the bastard the second I see him.
Tyrone stared at him. “Can you prove it.”
“I can.”
Those three words carried more weight than anything else Remi could have said.
He pulled another file onto the screen. “Sullivan was smarter back then. He didn’t send the mission packet, didn’t email a fucking route map and sign his name to it.
What he did was copy pieces of movement data into an encrypted archive tied to the same account he used for the bookmaker.
The drive was filled with dates, approximate infil windows, repeated movement through the same valley, shit like that. ”
Tyrone’s chest tightened, because his team had spent weeks building Ahmed Shah’s conditional awareness, by moving enough equipment and personnel through Kunar that their presence became something the enemy noticed but stopped reacting to.
The whole point had been to make the eventual hit look like one more routine movement.
“He sold them the pattern,” Gunnar said quietly.
Remi nodded. “Then he sold them the day the pattern was going to change.”
Tyrone pushed back from the table hard enough that his chair rolled several inches before stopping. He didn’t stand, although every muscle in his body demanded movement. “Show me.”
Remi enlarged the recovered record. There wasn’t much there. A string of numbers, a date, a time window and a mission identifier that meant absolutely nothing to anybody in the room who hadn’t once lived inside that operation.
Tyrone knew it immediately and his stomach turned. “Fuck.”
Colt looked at him. “That it?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t recognize his own voice.
“That’s the op where Dwight was KIA.” The room disappeared around him for a second.
He was back there with the heat pressing through body armor while the smell of dust, sweat, and blood filled his nose.
Dwight was on the ground in front of him and Tyrone’s hands were inside a chest that should never have been opened in the field.
Somebody was yelling for the bird and Tyrone was telling Dwight to stay with him as though the stubborn bastard could decide whether his heart kept beating.
He had spent years replaying the same minutes, asking what he had missed, what he could have done faster and why he hadn’t seen how bad Dwight was bleeding sooner.
None of those questions had ever included the possibility that the men waiting for them had known they were coming because their commanding officer had sold them the fucking route.
Gunnar’s voice cut through the memory. “Zorro.”
Tyrone dragged air into his lungs. “I’m good.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Didn’t say I was fucking happy, Grizz. Said I’m good enough to hear the rest.”
Gunnar held his gaze for several seconds before nodding at Remi.
Remi popped the tab on a new Monster and stuck a straw in the can before taking a long sip.
“The archive gives us the mission identifier, date, and movement window. The bookmaker’s ledger gives us the corresponding debt reduction three days later.
That alone would be enough to make somebody start digging, but Sullivan kept insurance. ”
“Of course he did,” Jorja muttered.
“Exactly. Men who betray everybody eventually assume everybody else is gonna betray them too.” Remi pulled up another encrypted folder. “He kept copies of communications with the White Shadow intermediary. Not everything, but enough. There’s one exchange after the ambush.”
A line of text appeared on the screen. Tyrone read it once, then again, but the words didn’t change.
Outcome exceeded requirement. Credit applied as agreed. Further cooperation expected.
His hands went cold.
“Exceeded requirement,” Colt repeated, disgust making his voice rough. “Meaning they weren’t expecting casualties?”
“We can’t prove what White Shadow expected,” Remi said. “But Sullivan’s response matters.”
Another line appeared beneath the first.
No further operational personnel. Agreement was intelligence only.
Tyrone stared at the screen. Sullivan hadn’t intended Dwight to die. Somehow, that made absolutely no fucking difference.
“He sold intel to people tied to the target package and then got surprised when they used it to kill Americans,” Gunnar said.
“Pretty much.”
“What happened after?”
“Sullivan panicked.” Remi scrolled. “He stopped communicating through that channel for almost eight months. The gambling continued, though, and the debt climbed again. White Shadow kept the records because obviously blackmailing a former Special Operations commander is useful. Then years later, Glenna loses housing, Kelsey enters the system, and suddenly Sullivan has something else they want.”
Tyrone closed his eyes for a moment. Dwight’s daughter. That’s who they’d fucking wanted. He opened his eyes again. “We already proved that part.”
“Yeah. This is where it gets new again.” Remi switched screens. “You wanted to know why Sullivan came to Italy.”
Tyrone leaned forward. “He told us it was because he didn’t want to discuss Dwight’s supposed gambling problem over the phone or in writing.”
“Which was bullshit,” Colt said.