Page 50 of The ARC Unit: Breach

The vehicles themselves had given us a pattern but very little else. We needed to stop asking only where the cars went and start asking what the people around them had in common before the investigations began.

“Go back to expenses.”

Raven looked at me. “Whose?”

“Everybody. Companies too. Anything that touches the targets in the month before surveillance starts.”

“That’s broad.”

“You wanted work,” I said.

“Wolf wanted work. I wanted lunch.”

“It’s 10:30.”

“Early lunch.”

I ignored him.

Romania produced the first useful oddity.

One of the shell entities already sitting in the Cerberus ledger had paid a company called Aster Private Events GmbH four times over six months. The payments were not large enough to stand out among the transportation invoices and consulting fees around them, and nothing about the company itself looked criminal. Aster organized private dinners, weddings, parties and luxury events across Central Europe, with occasional contracts stretching into France and northern Italy.

I opened its public site. Beautiful people stood beside pools drinking champagne under strings of lights.

“This doesn’t look very Cerberus.”

Raven leaned closer. “That’s usually the point.”

“Four payments.”

“Could be parties. Criminals celebrate birthdays too.”

“Do they expense them through shell companies?”

“The boring ones do.”

I opened the dates.

The first payment came three days before a known Cerberus intermediary appeared in Salzburg. The second came the week of a private event outside Lyon where another name from the financial network had surfaced in local reporting. The third didn’t connect to anything obvious but the fourth had been made eleven days ago.

I looked at Raven.

He had stopped joking.

“Upcoming contract?”

His fingers moved over the keyboard.

Aster’s public calendar showed nothing, which made sense for a company selling privacy to wealthy clients. Raven moved through corporate records, invoice metadata, receipts and a procurement portal until a subcontract finally gave us something useful.

Temporary staff and catering had been booked through separate vendors, with private security sitting under its own subcontract. All of it landed on the same date. Three days from now, and the location was an estate outside Stuttgart.

I leaned closer to the screen.

“That’s local.”

“Forty-two minutes from here.”