I finished the line of code I was running, checked the result, then leaned back and looked at him.
“We need to know what soon means,” I said.
Then the next set of data flashed onto the screen.
“Fuck.”
I opened a channel to Lyric and sent everything over, already searching for a way in.
“Caleb?” Lyric asked instead of saying hello.
“They’re moving victims in two days. How long until we can get backup here?” I said.
“Okay,” Lyric murmured, and I heard him typing. “We can’t get anyone to you fast enough for forty-eight hours. I could pull private contractors, we have Shadow Team in Maine that owes us a favor, but even if they have anyone, you’re looking at?—”
“We have less than forty-eight hours.”
“The law enforcement situation’s blown wide, and our people are tied up here, we’ll have to monitor and track?—”
“I’m going in.”
“No. Listen to me. That compound sits on the edge of three counties and two federal jurisdictions. The second anything kicks off—alarms, gunfire—you’ll have 911 calls, fire response, deputies, maybe state. You insert now; you collide with law enforcement and expose everything.” He didn’t slow. “And once that happens, the network burns clean—records wiped, routes rerouted, kids dispersed where we can’t reach them. I have the team in Maine, off-grid. When the heat drops, we move properly. We take the whole system down, not just one node.”
“It’s more than one cop,” I said. “More than one level of law enforcement. I’m not waiting for our window of opportunity to close.”
“Caleb, think?—”
“No.” I cut over him, sharper now. “I told those boys we’d get their brother and sister back. Eden’s fourteen, five months pregnant—nothing but inventory. Noah is a prisoner. I’m going in. I’m pulling the two of them out. And I’ll grab whatever intel I can find.”
“I understand, but?—”
“If this goes wrong, you burn my connection to the Cave,” I said, my voice steady despite the pressure building in my chest, “and you put retrieving them at the top of the list. No delays.”
“You’re alone out there?—”
I cut the line.
Novak rolled his chair forward, steady, certain. “You’re not alone,” he said. “There are two of us.”
We swung into planning mode.This was happening, and we had to focus on what we did next. So much for planning and waiting and having a team here to extract the victims safely.
“For the collars, there’s a stronger signal here.” I marked it, just inside the compound perimeter, offset from the main buildings. “Small structure. Probably shielded. That’s our best bet for the control hub, but there’s another, more direct control on Michael himself.”
He studied it, committing it to memory the way he did everything.
“If we take out the control hub?” he asked.
“We can’t destroy it,” I said immediately. “If the failsafe kicks in, worst-case, every collar fires.” I pulled up the final piece, the one I’d been building while he was gone. “I can spoof the signal. Feed it something clean. Delay commands, override triggers. It won’t last forever—but it’ll give us a window.”
“How long?”
“Three minutes. Maybe four if nothing glitches. Time to get to Michael and get that other control.”
“That’s enough.”
“It’s not a clean extraction of two people, not just Noah and Eden; this is going right into the nest of vipers and cutting off the head.”
I watched him for a second—two of us weren’t enough, but it would have to be.
