Chapter Twenty-Five
Ian had called it the Rogue Division compound. From the outside, driving past on a Hill Country back road, it looked like nothing—scrub oak, cedar, a chain-link gate with razor wire that could have belonged to any ranch property in the county. A guard station manned by a woman who checked Ian’s credentials with the flat efficiency of someone who’d done it ten thousand times.
Beyond the gate, a gravel road wound through the trees, and the compound revealed itself in pieces.
Fallon sat in the back seat of Ian’s SUV and leaned toward the window. Isaac was in the passenger seat beside Ian, one hand braced on the dashboard.
A low concrete building sat behind a stand of live oaks, the kind of structure she would have driven past without a second glance. Then another, set further back, connected to the first by a covered walkway. Then a third. Then the road curved, and the trees thinned, and the compound spread out before them like a small town that had decided to hide itself in plain sight.
“You said we were practically tripping over it,” Isaac said from the passenger seat.
Ian glanced at him. “You were. Twenty minutes outside Austin. You probably drove past the turnoff a dozen times.”
Isaac leaned forward. “How many buildings are we looking at?”
“You’ll see.”
Fallon pressed closer to the window. The scale kept growing—clusters of low-slung structures connected by gravel paths, a larger building with an antenna array on the roof, what looked like residential housing set back along a ridge. Hundreds of acres. All of it practically invisible from the road.
Ian pulled into a parking area and killed the engine. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
He led them through the front entrance of what seemed like the main building and into a corridor that opened to glass-walled offices, workstations, whiteboards covered in operational shorthand. People moved between the rooms with the focused energy of a place that never fully shut down.
“Briefing rooms are down that hall,” Ian said. “We run simultaneous operations, so everything’s modular. Teams can stand up and break down without stepping on each other.”
Fallon looked through one of the glass walls. A woman in tactical gear was marking a map on a digital screen while two men listened. The woman pointed at something and one of the men nodded. Routine. Practiced. The kind of coordination that came from infrastructure, not improvisation.
Isaac stopped beside her. “How many operations at a time?”
“Depends on what’s going on in the world. Right now, four active. Two in surveillance, two in execution.”
Isaac exhaled through his nose. A quiet sound, but she caught it. He was just as impressed as she was.
Four simultaneous operations. Dedicated teams. Modular briefing rooms. She’d been running one target at a time out ofsublet apartments with a laptop, planning operations on kitchen tables, doing reconnaissance from coffee shops with bad Wi-Fi.
With resources like this, she could do so much more. All those families still waiting for a consequence that would never come through the legal system. All those targets she and Cass had identified but couldn’t get to because there were only two of them and the list never got shorter.
She caught Isaac’s eye. He shook his head once, slow, the disbelief plain on his face. He’d spent years at Zodiac and never known any of this existed.
They continued walking through the building then went out a side entrance and crossed the campus under a covered walkway. Ian pushed through a set of double doors that led to the residential buildings. Single-story units, clean lines, small porches. A man sat on one of them reading a paperback, a cup of coffee on the railing beside him. He nodded at Ian as they passed.
“Some operatives live on-site,” Ian said. “Not because it’s required, but because many of them don’t trust themselves to live in the civilian world. Or they don’t feel safe there.”
Fallon slowed.
“What does that mean, exactly?” Isaac asked. “That they don’t trust themselves?”
“It means their particular set of skills and/or instincts don’t turn off when they leave the compound. They’re aware of that, so they choose to live here where they can get…assistance if needed.”
She heard the slight pause before assistance. Wasn’t sure exactly what that meant.
“And some of these people spent years in environments where hypervigilance kept them alive, and civilian life feels like wearing a costume.” Ian’s voice carried no judgment. “The compound gives them a place where they don’t have to pretend.”
That, Fallon definitely understood.
This was a place where they didn’t have to pretend. Every apartment she’d rented, every cover story she’d maintained, every conversation with a neighbor where she’d smiled and talked about freelance graphic design—all of it had been performance. Every single day, performing. And here was a place built on the premise that certain people shouldn’t have to.
“I get that,” she said quietly.
