Page 2 of The ARC Unit: Breach

She had also explained why she wanted me there. I was used to following money through companies and accounts designed to hide where it came from, and I could work comfortably in Serbian and Italian as well as French and Russian. That meant ARC could put me in front of people without needing an interpreter every time an investigation crossed into another country. For a unit chasing traffickers across Europe, Vale considered that useful.

She asked more about the criminal networks I’d worked on and the source meetings I’d handled, then told me I was being sent to Germany. I’d asked what ARC needed from me.

“For some reason, Mia, they keep finding where people used to be,” Vale had said.

At the time, I’d assumed there was at least some humor in it but the operational reports suggested otherwise.

I flipped to the next sheet.

K.A.D.E

Known Access + Distribution Entity

K.A.D.E. had started as a placeholder. Nobody knew whether it referred to a person or some kind of Cerberus software, so intelligence agencies gave it the broadest name they could. Eventually, surveillance confirmed there was a man behind it.

Nobody knew his real name or exactly how much authority he had, but he kept appearing around Cerberus movements. ARC believed he had access to the people and routes that kept the trafficking network running. If they could take him alive, he might give them a way farther inside.

The photographs were terrible. One showed part of his face as he left a building. Another caught him from across a street, too far away to offer much beyond long dark hair and an age somewhere in his twenties.

ARC had spent months chasing him without getting close enough and Romania was the easiest example. By the time ARC reached the warehouse there, Cerberus was already clearing it. Prague was worse. A man connected to Kade changed hotels and disappeared before the team could move on him.

Every time they got close, somebody was already gone. The reports kept treating that as evidence that Cerberus knew ARC was coming. I went back to the dates.

Romania had started clearing out before ARC received the mission. The Prague target changed his routine before ARC had officially been assigned to him.

I read both timelines again.

If Cerberus was already moving before ARC knew there was somewhere to go, then maybe everyone was looking for the warning in the wrong place.

I opened my notebook.

What happened before ARC got involved?

Underneath it, I wrote:

Look earlier.

I stared at the words for another second, then closed the notebook. I wasn’t going to solve an international trafficking network between airplane coffee and the captain asking us to put our seat backs upright.

When the announcement came that we were beginning our descent into Stuttgart, I packed everything away, with Wolf’s file ending up on top of the stack again.

Limited tolerance for outside interference.

I slid it into my carry-on.

“We’re going to get along beautifully.”

◆

The fluorescent lights in the Stuttgart airport bathroom were cruel enough to make nine hours of travel feel personal. I stood in front of the mirror and pulled the elastic from my hair. My dark brown waves had survived the beginning of the flight reasonably well before one side apparently spent several hours flattened against an airplane window, and no amount of running wet fingers through them was going to make the result look deliberate.

My skin was naturally a lighter olive, though exhaustion had drained most of the warmth from it. My brown eyes looked more golden when I was tired, which was probably the only thing the flight had improved.

I leaned closer to the mirror while fixing the hair around my face. My nose had the same slight curve along the bridge it had always had, something I’d spent enough of my teenage years wishing was smaller before eventually realizing that whenever I imagined it differently, the rest of my face looked wrong.

At twenty-seven, I had mostly made peace with it.

“Good enough.”