Luis nods again. “I filed the amendments under that shell tag because it bypasses manual review in Vigo. It’s coded as legacy freight, so it doesn’t get audited the same way.”
Cillian’s eyes move to me for half a second, then back to Luis. “The early arrivals?”
“Timestamped system edits,” Luis answers, shaking his head defeatedly. “I pushed duplicate IDs into circulation before customs synced the logs. Once your containers got flagged twice, your lanes would look unstable.”
“And then?” Cillian prompts.
Luis exhales shakily. “Then Norte would offer their own routing service as a solution. They’d say they could stabilize the corridor. That was the play.”
He grips the edge of the desk. “I made it look like you couldn’t control your paperwork so they could step in and take the corridor. I’m sorry, it was my job.”
“So you altered shipping schedules,” I say, stepping closer to the desk. “You amended time slots and reassigned carriers.”
Luis nods quickly. “Only timing. Nothing else.”
“That’s not true,” Cillian interjects.
Luis presses his palms flat on the metal surface. “The containers were clean when they left Vigo.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Cillian replies.
Luis pauses for a breath to look at the faces surrounding him, then the guns, the floor, finally Cillian. “The problem was the staging.”
I feel it before I understand it. Luis glances at me, then back at Cillian. “The early arrivals were decoys. We booked clean shipments a day ahead, then logged them into the system so the yard ran inspection on schedule.”
“And?” Cillian asks.
“And while the yard was focused on those loads, a separate truck came through on a matched manifest.”
Cillian’s gaze sharpens. “Matched how?”
Luis swallows. “Same container ID. Same barcode.”
I step forward. “That’s impossible unless the code was cloned.”
Luis nods. “It was.”
The room stills. “You’re saying the Vigo office duplicated the digital ID of a legitimate container?” I raise my brow.
“Yes.”
“And the cloned code was attached to a different physical container.”
“Yes.”
Cillian leans back slightly, eyes cold. “So the product never touched my inspected lanes.”
Luis nods again. “It came through a secondary gate with a clean digital trail.”
I feel it click fully now. “That’s why nothing flagged on chemical tests,” I say. “Your inspections were real, but they were looking at the wrong metal box.”
Cillian looks at me briefly, then back at Luis. “What was in the cloned containers?”
Luis hesitates.
Cillian doesn’t raise his voice, and yet, it still sounds like the lashing of a whip. “Answer.”
“Finished synthetic opioids,” Luis mumbles. “Pressed tablets. Small batches.”
