“Four hours in good conditions,” Oliver says. “This time of year, with the snow pack on the upper ridge, call it six.”
“And undetected?”
Oliver’s mouth curves slightly. “If it is me leading, four.”
Rafe straightens. He looks at Nick across the room. A silent exchange passes between them—the compressed communication of men who have operated together long enough to hold entire conversations without words.
Nick gives a single nod.
“We are not moving on the site until we know what is inside it,” Nick says, addressing the room. “I am not walking my people into a contaminated excavation blind. And I am not tipping Dominic off by triggering whatever surveillance he has on that access road.”
“He has surveillance,” I say.
Every head in the room turns toward me.
“He has surveillance on everything he considers an asset,” I continue. “Motion activated. Cellular relay so the signal does not require a local receiver. His security contractor installs the same system on every property. I watched them do it at the Porto Alegre warehouse three years ago.”
Nick crosses the room. He stops beside the coffee table and looks down at the map, then at me.
“Can it be spoofed?” he asks.
“Kaila,” I say, instead of answering him directly.
Kaila looks up from her keyboard.
“Can you spoof a cellular motion relay if I give you the contractor’s system specifications?” I ask.
Kaila’s sharp eyes gleam. “Give me the contractor name and I will have their firmware architecture in twenty minutes.”
I give her the name. She is already typing before I finish the second syllable.
Something shifts in the room when I do that. It is subtle. It is not dramatic. Nobody announces it. But I feel it in the way Oliver angles his body slightly toward me when he returns to the map, and in the way Daniel glances up from his screen with a look that is no longer pure assessment. And in the way Nick watches me from across the coffee table with that particular, focused intensity—the Commander recalibrating the weight of the piece he is playing with.
I am not a rescued princess standing at the edge of their operation.
I am inside it.
Mia calls out from her laptop without looking up. “Second nested folder is clean. Daniel cracked it.” Her pen moves rapidly across the notebook page. “We have names.”
The room contracts.
Nick moves to Mia’s station. Rafe follows. I follow Rafe.
The second nested folder contains a contact ledger. Not financial records. Names, cellular numbers, coded location markers, and beside each entry a single letter designation—a simple, brutal ranking system. A for active. D for dormant. T for terminated.
There are thirty-one names on the list.
Eleven of them carry government designations in the location field. Federal agency codes, stripped of identifying detail but unmistakable in structure to anyone who grew up watching Dominic manage his political relationships.
“He has eleven federal contacts active on this operation,” Mia says. “Whatever is in that mountain, it reaches high enough that he needed federal cover to access it.”
“That is why the closure record is missing from public databases,” Nick says.
“Someone pulled it,” Mia confirms. “This did not happen accidentally. Someone with database access and the authority to scrub a federal record did this deliberately. That takes either significant political leverage or significant money.” She pauses. “Given what we are looking at, probably both.”
The fire crackles in the hearth. Wind presses against the cabin walls. The frost on the windows has begun to melt at the edges, thin rivulets of water tracking down the cold glass.
I stare at the contact list on Mia’s screen.