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I dragged the sheet over my chest, swiped the call open, and held the phone between us. “Hello?”

Tiny breaths trembled through the speaker. “Mommy?”

I jackknifed upright. “Nora? I’m here, bug. Are you hurt?”

“No.” Fabric rustled, muffling her voice before she came back. “Auntie gave me a phone, but I have to be quiet.”

Maksim grabbed his earpiece and shoved it into place.

“I'll try and track the connection. I'll be in the control room.” Roman ran for the operations room bare-chested while Kirill killed the bedroom light for reasons only he knew.

I yanked the phone up and pressed it so tightly against my ear it hurt. “That’s okay. You whisper.” My voice shook, so I paused to steady it. I couldn’t stand the idea of making her more afraid. “Tell me what you can see.”

“Boxes.” Her breath touched the phone in tiny bursts. “Lots of boxes, and it smells funny.”

Something scraped near the phone. Nora sucked in a frightened breath when a metallic crash sounded farther away.

“Mommy, Auntie says I have to hide because the bad man found us.”

29

MAKSIM

Nora’s final word barely left the speaker before the line filled with static.

“Nora?” Anika crushed the phone against her ear, the sheet falling away as she lunged from the bed. “Baby, answer me.” She pressed the volume button as though she could force her daughter’s voice back through the connection.

I touched the transmitter in my earpiece. “Roman, hold the connection. I want every tower that phone touched.”

Keys clattered in the operations room down the hall. “Working.”

The phone turned to dead air before Anika could get Nora to answer again. She stared at the dark screen, shoulders heaving as she worked to regain control. Then, with a cry, she grabbed her pants from the floor and shoved one foot into them while Kirill yanked open the drawer where Roman had secured our weapons. My holster hit me in the chest. I caught it, strapped it on, and shoved my arms into my shirt without bothering with the buttons.

“Again.” Anika hit redial while hopping into the second leg. The phone rang once, then delivered a mechanical notice that the subscriber couldn’t be reached. “No. No, come on.”

I snapped up her shirt before she had to search for it and held it open. She pushed her arms through, dragged it down, and ran for the door. There wasn’t time to fix the buttons on my shirt. There wasn’t time for anything except finding Nora before the man on the other side of that crash we'd heard reached her.

Roman stood in the center of the safe house’s operations room, barefoot and bare-chested, with two monitors awake and a third loading the city’s cellular grid. A map bloomed across the wall as we entered. Three circles overlapped near the north end of the harbor and I barely managed to stop from barking commands at him.

“The phone connected through this tower first.” He tapped the widest circle, then eliminated most of it with two quick commands. “The next handoff narrowed the signal to the waterfront. I lost it when the device went dark, but the final connection lasted long enough to place it inside six blocks.”

Anika planted both hands on his desk. “There are hundreds of buildings in six blocks.”

“Not hundreds with this much metal around them.” Roman isolated the background noise from the call. Nora’s voice vanished, leaving fabric scraping against the microphone and the harsh slam that had frightened her. He stripped away the echo and replayed it. “A container door, cargo hook, or loading mechanism. Something built to move several tons.”

Kirill shrugged into his shoulder rig. “She said boxes.”

“She’s four.” Anika redialed and listened to the same dead recording. “Anything square is a box.”

Roman brought up property records beside the map. Most of the names meant nothing to me, but one black square near the water belonged to a shell company we’d tied to Sokolov years ago. Mikhail’s trail had ended somewhere along the waterfront too. The shipyard had closed after an inspection found enough violations to bury the owners beneath fines, but someone still paid the power bill.

Roman highlighted the property at the same instant I pointed. “How close?”

“Inside the final signal radius.” He pulled live feeds from a security camera across the street. “The buildings are drawing electricity tonight, and the security contract was renewed four months after the closure.”

I opened the command channel. Twenty-seven men waited for orders at the safe house, with more stationed between us and the mansion. “Teams one and two take the roads north and south of the property. I want another unit on the water and medics behind the western perimeter. Bring pediatric supplies for two children. No lights, no sirens, and no one enters the shipyard before I arrive. Move.”

Kirill laid two rifles and a row of magazines across the table, apparently offended by the idea that he might have to choose. Roman transferred the data to a mobile system and finally stopped long enough to pull on a shirt. Anika walked into the armory and took a vest from the rack.