Page 123 of The ARC Unit: Breach

Wolf came closer to the table. “Kade?”

“He recognized him.”

Jackal’s posture changed on the couch while Raven opened the interview summary. Varga claimed he did not know a real name, corroborating the answer Luca Bellandi had given me at the pool party. That’s because he doesn’t ‘actually formally’ do names.

According to Varga, the man in the photograph was someone couriers went through when a normal movement changed. If a holding site was burned or a route had to move quickly, requests climbed until they reached him. Varga could not tell investigators where Kade worked from or who sat above him, but he had identified two numbers in his phone as contacts used when a transfer needed approval outside the usual chain.

Raven opened the first thread.

The messages themselves were short enough to be almost useless without Varga explaining them. Most of the thread was stripped down to addresses or vehicle plates, with messages deleted soon after they were read. An exchange from three weeks earlier included the photograph of the woman whose false identity we had found in Varga’s bag after she disappeared from Haus Eberhardt.

I read the translated message again.

MOVE HER. NEW NAME FOLLOWS.

Under it was the same temporary identity Varga had been carrying when Jackal caught him.

“Varga says this contact belongs to Kade?” Wolf asked.

“He says Kade controls it,” Raven replied. “Could be Kade personally. Could be somebody answering for him. Varga can’t prove which.”

“What can we prove?” He followed.

I pulled the route map onto the larger screen. “That the same contact appears before four transfers in Varga’s records. Two start at addresses already tied to Cerberus holding sites. The other pair end at distribution addresses we didn’t have before.”

Wolf looked toward the map.

I continued before the details could become more complicated than they needed to be. “Varga says routine pickups never went that high. These were exceptions, usually after someone ran or a location became unsafe enough that the original plan had to change. When that happened, this was one of the contacts he waited on.”

Raven opened another record. “One of the four is the woman from Haus Eberhardt. Another is a nineteen-year-old from Slovenia who disappeared after leaving a hotel job. We have no recovery record for her.”

Jackal’s face had gone still. “Where’d they send her?”

“Lyon first,” I said. “After that we lose her.”

Wolf studied the map for long enough that I could tell he was sorting what we knew from what Varga wanted us to believe. “So Kade isn’t processing every move. He gets involved when somebody needs authority to change one.”

“That’s Varga’s version,” I said. “The phone supports part of it.”

Raven brought up the wider case map. Haus Eberhardt sat near the center now, connected to Varga and the two new addresses. Other names from Südweg and Morgenstern spread outward from it. Kade’s Stuttgart photograph remained pinned at the top of the board because it was still the cleanest face we had for the man we believed could move through more than one part of the network.

The picture looked almost harmless compared with the records beneath it, just a young man in a white shirt with long dark hair who would not have looked out of place at half the bars in Stuttgart.

Wolf noticed where my attention had gone.

“Don’t make him interesting,” he said.

“I wasn’t.”

“Good.”

There was enough edge in the answer that Raven glanced over before returning to the computer.

Wolf nodded toward the transfer records. “I don’t care how good looking he is or how well he blends into a party. Women were moved after he approved the change. I want him alive because he can open the rest of this network.”

Nobody argued with him.

Appearance had never been evidence of innocence, and the woman from Haus Eberhardt had tried to escape only to end up with a new identity instead of freedom. Somebody had approved that move, and Varga had just put Kade closer to the decision than ARC had ever managed before.