Page 166 of The ARC Unit: Breach

I leaned beside him. “What did the account do overnight?”

His expression changed enough that the remaining sleep left my head.

“Quite a bit, actually.”

Wolf stepped closer as Raven opened the transport account we had abandoned around midnight. The reimbursements from Strasbourg were still on one side, but Raven had added a second set of payments beneath them.

“The account holder is another shell,” he said. “I’m sparing you the name because I care about your happiness. What matters is what it pays for.”

“Drivers.”

“Drivers first. Then fuel cards, short-term van rentals and private security. Last night it paid two refrigerated vans for thirty-six hours of standby.”

I stopped with the coffee halfway to my mouth. “Where?”

Raven brought up a map of southwest Germany. A marker sat north of Freiburg and east of the Rhine, less than an hour from Strasbourg by road.

“Old cold-storage facility outside Offenburg,” Raven said. “Used to handle produce distribution. The current lease is held through the same shell that pays the transport account.”

Wolf looked at the payment list. “Why refrigerated vans?”

“Could be legitimate cargo,” Raven said. “Except the facility hasn’t filed commercial refrigeration use in almost two years, and the company on the lease has no registered food contracts.”

I moved closer to the screen. “Anything else?”

Raven opened a purchase history. “Bottled water in bulk. Disposable hygiene supplies. Cheap packaged food. Cleaning chemicals. Enough for far more people than the four employees officially attached to the property.”

The categories were ordinary enough to exist anywhere. Together, beside the driver payments and the standby vans, they made the back of my neck tighten. Bear came downstairs with plaster dust on one shoulder and joined us without asking for an explanation.

Raven moved the map wider.

“German police have already been asked to put eyes on it,” he continued. “No approach yet. Just traffic and exterior observation. Keller is running their side.”

I knew which Keller he meant before Raven opened the secure call. We had worked with Matthias Keller at Haus Eberhardt, close enough that I remembered his instinct to protect the rescued women’s privacy before I remembered any detail of the paperwork he carried.

His face appeared on Raven’s screen now, tired and clean-shaven, with short salt-and-pepper hair combed back from his forehead and faint lines carved around his eyes that made him look older when he wasn’t smiling. He had a straight nose with a square jaw beginning to soften with age, and the collar of a dark jacket visible at the bottom of the frame.

“Morning,” Keller said in English. “You found another terrible building for me?”

“Potentially,” Raven replied.

“I was hoping for fraud. Fraud has chairs.”

Bear pulled out a seat. “What do you have?”

Keller shifted the camera and brought up still images taken from across a service road. The property looked larger than the satellite view suggested, a low industrial building with three loading bays and a taller refrigerated section behind it. Faded blue lettering remained on one wall from whatever company had operated there before. Two cameras covered the front drive. Another pointed toward a side personnel door.

“Three vans entered between 0420 and 0510,” Keller said. “None left. One small truck arrived after six with food and bottled water. Driver stayed eleven minutes. We have two men outside who do not behave like warehouse staff.”

The next image showed one of them smoking beside a loading bay with a pistol visible beneath his jacket when the wind pulled the fabric open.

Wolf’s eyes hardened. “Any women?”

“No exterior movement. Curtains or coverings on every office window. Thermal from public road is poor because the old insulation is doing its job. But we have heat in sections that should be empty.”

Raven opened the Haus Eberhardt transfer schedule beside Keller’s images. Seventeen women had been moved before our raid. We had spent days trying to follow the routes after that, but several records ended with destination codes that never resolved to actual addresses.

I looked at one of the codes again.