His hand found mine. Brief contact. Fingers pressing against my palm.
"Then let's win it."
The flannel shirt was still in my room. Draped over the chair. A complication. A reason to come back.
I looked at the whiteboard. The service road approaching from the east. The worker housing where people like Mateo were being held. Branded. Numbered. Waiting for someone to open the door.
My mother had walked north through the desert thirty-one years ago, following promises that turned to dust. Her son was going north tomorrow, and the promises he carried had edges.
Forty-eight hours. The clock had started. I let my hand rest on the Ka-Bar at my hip. Felt the familiar weight of the handle.
But this time, when I walked out of the storage room, Logan walked beside me. His shoulder brushing mine in the narrow corridor. The contact steady. Present.
This time, there was someone waiting on the other side of the mission besides an empty room and another night spent converting thought into edge.
And somewhere out there, a deputy director of the FBI was about to learn what happened when you built your empire on the bodies of people who looked like my mother.
11
PROWL
LOGAN
The cattle ranch sat in a shallow basin fifteen miles west of Billings, the buildings arranged in loose clusters that reminded me of every ranch I'd ever worked—except for the details that were wrong.
The feedlots to the south were standard. The main barn to the north was standard. Three long worker housing structures on the eastern edge—converted cattle barns, exactly what I'd described to Diego on the whiteboard two days ago. But the office trailer in the center had a light burning behind drawn blinds at two in the morning, and the two men walking the perimeter weren't checking fence lines. They were running patrol routes.
Ghost and I had been bellied down in the dry grass on the eastern hillside for forty minutes. The predawn cool had worked through my jacket twenty minutes ago—not cold enough to see my breath, but enough to settle into my joints and remind me that summer was losing its grip. The ground beneath mesmelled like dry earth and fertilizer runoff, a smell I knew from my own ranch. But underneath it: diesel, exhaust, and the stale heaviness of too many bodies held in too little space for too long.
I adjusted the binoculars and swept the compound again.
"Two guards," I murmured into the comms. "Both armed. Sidearms visible, probably more underneath. They're not rent-a-cops."
"Copy." Diego's voice came through the encrypted channel, the crackle making him sound farther than the three hundred yards that separated us. He and Irish were on the opposite hillside, closer to the worker housing. "What are you seeing?"
"Military bearing. The way they scan—it's not bored security. It's systematic. Trained."
"Iron Wolves."
"That's my read. Eight-minute rotation. Both guards cross near the office trailer, then one checks the housing doors every twelve minutes. There's a window when both are on the south side of the compound."
"How long?"
"Ninety seconds. Maybe two minutes if they stop to talk."
A pause. Then Diego's voice, flat and focused: "Enough."
Ghost shifted beside me. The movement made almost no sound against the dry grass. I'd worked with Rangers who couldn't manage that kind of stillness. Ghost had it. He'd barely spoken since we'd left the vehicles, communicating in hand signals and single words, his focus absolute. The restless energy that bounced his knee in every meeting had compressed into something precise and lethal.
"Office trailer," Ghost said quietly. "Third window from the left. Filing cabinets. Four of them, lined up against the far wall."
I swung the binoculars. He was right—a gap in the blinds showed the gray bulk of filing cabinets, labels visible on the drawers. Seven years of records, if we were lucky.
"Good eye."
"It's what I do."
I checked my watch. 2:23 AM. "We've watched long enough. I've got the pattern. Next rotation puts both guards on the south side in ninety seconds."
