Perfect.
I crossed the boardwalk, the wind slicing at my jacket. The admin building rose just ahead—gray concrete, tinted windows, the kind of architecture designed by someone deeply committed to misery.
The spotter didn’t follow.
Not yet.
Good. One problem at a time.
“Opening the stairwell,” I murmured.
“Copy,” Alphabet said.
I tugged the door. It gave.
Empty.
I slipped inside and let it close behind me, the sound swallowed by concrete walls and humming fluorescent lights.
Showtime.
And if the spotter had friends? If this place wasn’t as ordinary as it pretended to be?
Then this was the moment everything cracked open.
The stairwell smelled like dust and rusted metal—the kind of place janitors avoided and security forgot existed. Perfect. I took the steps two at a time, listening for footsteps above or below. Nothing. Just the thrum of HVAC and the distant bellow of cargo haulers outside.
Alphabet guided me soft in my ear. “Top of the stairs. Door opens into the west end of the control room. Two workstations, one break table. No heat signatures on the thermal ping from twenty seconds ago.”
“Copy.”
Thermal ping, my ass—he was probably using a hacked port building blueprint from 2004 and vibes. But Alphabet’s vibes were usually terrifyingly accurate.
At the top landing, I cracked the metal door open an inch.
Voices.
Two of them.
Close.
My pulse ticked once, not out of fear—just calibrating.
Alphabet hissed, “That’s new. Hold.”
The voices came clearer through the crack. One male. One female. Both bored. Both complaining about the morning cold and whose turn it was to refill the sugar packets.
Civilian port workers. Not cartel. Not security.
I could work with bored.
I pushed the door open like a man who absolutely belonged there.
The woman glanced up from her coffee. The man was elbow-deep in a vending machine, trying to shake loose a stuck bag of chips. Neither looked alarmed. Good.
“Oh—hey,” the woman said. “Can we help you?”
I plastered on my best sheepish grin. “Uh… yeah. I’m supposed to drop off disks from the visitor center. Some… PR thing.” I patted my camera bag. “They told me someone up here handles the media archive?”
