Page 136 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“You’re impossible.”

“You’ve mentioned that.”

“More than once because you keep earning it.”

He passed another truck and settled back into the right lane. “If I actually told you everything I’m into, you’d spend the rest of this drive deciding whether to move closer to the door.”

I glanced at the passenger door, then back at him. “That’s a lot of confidence for a man wearing a mask while he says it.”

“You asked.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t move.”

His hands stayed steady on the wheel, though his shoulders tightened slightly beneath the jacket. I knew him well enough now to catch the smaller changes, and from the brief glance he gave me, he knew I had caught this one.

“Maybe,” I repeated, quieter this time, “I’d be interested.”

Wolf took a slow breath through his nose. “We’ll see.”

For several seconds I forgot every clever response I had ever had in my life.

Then I smiled and turned toward the window before he could see too much of it. “So you admit I might be able to handle it.”

“No.”

I looked back at him. “Seriously?”

“You being curious doesn’t prove anything.”

“You are unbelievably arrogant.”

“You keep asking questions you don’t like the answer to.”

“I like some of the answers.”

His fingers tightened around the wheel.

Wolf did not respond and I let him have the silence because, for once, I was enjoying it.

◆

We reached Strasbourg a little after noon. Moreau met us in a quiet office near the river that looked exactly like the sort of place nobody would remember visiting, which I assumed was intentional. Moreau was a French liaison with dark blond hair and somewhere in her forties, who looked visibly relieved to hand responsibility for the records to somebody else.

The packet turned out to be even simpler than we thought. A transport company connected to one of Varga’s contacts had used the same storage address on several handwritten forms, and Moreau had kept the originals because two of the signatures did not match the names entered into the electronic system. I spent less than forty minutes with her as she showed me where the forms had come from and explained which clerk had flagged them, then gave Wolf the sealed packet for transport.

Though I might have been silently hoping for it, there was no dramatic revelation waiting inside the office. We had a new address to check and the name of someone Raven could verify once we got back. But after this week, I was beginning to appreciate intelligence that arrived without anybody bleeding on it.

Wolf waited until we were back in the car before asking, “Useful?”

“Yes. The storage address is probably more important than the names on the forms. Moreau thinks the signatures were copied from older paperwork, so Raven can compare them before we treat either person like a real lead.”

He started the engine. “Good.”

I buckled my seat belt and glanced at him. “That’s all I get?”

“What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a sticker.”