Page 68 of Undertow

“With what authority?” Reagan turned on him. “Wade, Graham has a missing person’s report with the FBI. He’s described Gabe. He’s described Cara. If any of us show up within fifty miles of that facility⁠—”

“Then we don’t get caught.”

The silence that followed was the sound of six people looking at the distance between what they should do and what they had to do and finding nothing in between.

Gabe leaned against the kitchen counter. He’d been quiet through most of it—the dangerous quiet, the one Cara had learned to read as gears turning behind the badge. “Tom. If you had physical access to Pacific Crest’s network. How long?”

“To pull Elena’s medical records? Twenty minutes. To crack the financial servers and trace the shell companies from inside?” Tom tilted his hand. “Forty. Maybe an hour if their security’s been upgraded since Elena left.”

“And what would you have when you came out?”

“Everything. Dosing schedules. Pirelli’s name on the administration orders. Internal memos, supply chain records, the works. And if the financial servers are connected to the same local network—which they usually are in facilities that size—I can trace the shell company payments from the inside. See what the outside walls are hiding.”

Reagan: “You’re talking about breaking into a hospital.”

Tom: “I’m talking about walking into a hospital with someone who knows the layout and sitting at a computer for forty minutes.”

Reagan looked at the closed bedroom door. Everyone did.

No one said Elena’s name. No one had to.

Gabe was watching her. Not the cold distance of the last few days. Something else. Something like the man who’d stood in her bakery kitchen and said he didn’t care what her reasons were.

“So we go back,” Cara said. “We get what’s on those servers. And we finish this.”

Nobody argued. The trumpet player on the corner had gone home. The Mission was going dark outside the windows, the Sunday crowds thinning out, the city settling into the orange glow of streetlights and restaurant neon. Somewhere down the block, a church bell rang. Once. Twice. The kind of sound Cara hadn’t listened for in years.

Lord, I don’t know if I’ve earned the right to ask You for anything. But Elena doesn’t deserve what’s happening to her. Help me help her.

36

By evening, they were all running on fumes, and it showed.

Gabe sat at the kitchen table of the second-floor walkup in the Mission and watched the team try to stay awake through the most important conversation they’d had since Elena walked out of that Oregon rain and into their lives.

Piper was asleep on the couch. Tom had covered her with a throw blanket and gone back to his laptops without saying anything.

Elena sat at the head of the table.

That was new. Sunday afternoon she’d been behind a closed door, thin-voiced and far away. Now she was here, hair pulled back, eyes rimmed with sleeplessness but open. Present.

“Okay,” he said. “Before we tackle how to get back into Pacific Crest, let’s lay out what we’ve got.”

Tom walked them through what they’d gathered: the professional analysis of the mystery drug, the shell company structure—six layers deep, all roads pointing at Graham Whitfield’s name on the paper, the Julian Whitfield payment, untraceable to its source but impossible to explain in any context that didn’t involve a contract killing.

And most importantly, Elena’s testimony about the hospital and the drugging. It was the most powerful piece of evidence they had, but she was clearly traumatized. It wouldn’t be hard to argue that she’d been deeply unreliable for years, even. Without corroborating evidence, it would be all too easy for high-paid lawyers to rip apart her testimony.

“What we don’t have,” Tom said, “is a paper trail. We need Elena’s medical records. Ideally, we’ll find Pirelli’s name on the administration orders. I’m also hoping for shipment logs from the Oakland lab with signatures on them. If we’re lucky, I’ll find internal memos, too.” He gestured at his laptops, at the three days of work that had gotten them this close and no closer. “All of that lives on Pacific Crest’s local network. None of it’s reachable from here.”

Reagan blinked, her exhaustion all to obvious. “So we’re talking about physically entering a functioning medical facility and accessing their network?”

Tom tapped the table. “Exactamundo.”

She winced. “How long do you need, once you’re in front of a terminal?”

“Hard to say.” Tom grimaced. “Ten minutes. An hour?”

The silence that followed wasn’t resistance. It was a group of tired people staring at a wall they couldn’t see over.