Page 41

He pulled the pick and tension wrench from his pocket and went to work by feel alone on the deadbolt. The lock was a standard single-cylinder. The Diehls had put their security in the deadbolt itself, not the quality of it, which told Ryder they were worried about their own crew being curious, not a professional getting in.

He made it through the lock in under thirty seconds. He eased the door open, slipped inside, and pulled it closed behind him.

A desk against the far wall, deep enough for two monitors, both dark. A second, smaller desk to the right with its own setup. Filing cabinet in the corner. No windows. The air was warm and stale, sealed up and baked by the equipment running inside it.

He sat down at the main terminal and woke the screen. This was it.

He typed the sequence Cassandra had drilled into him, practiced over and over with salt shakers and café items. At this point, it was automatic; his brain was hardly needed. Three creams, one ketchup bottle, four sugars and a fork. She taught him well, hadn’t allowed errors. It was paying off now.

The login cleared. He was in.

The directory tree unfolded the way she’d described it. Folders nested inside folders, organized by date and category. He navigated the structure left to right, top to bottom, looking for the file architecture that would hold client records, transport manifests, communication logs. The pieces that would map the trafficking network and lead them to the kids.

He found logistics. Shipping routes, quantities, dates, drop coordinates. Drug runs, from the look of it. Destinations along the border and two in the Houston area. He found weapons inventory. Serial numbers, purchase records, some redacted. He found financial records. Account numbers, wire transfers, payment schedules tied to the logistics files.

Drugs and guns. The Diehls’ bread and butter, organized with a precision that said somebody in this operation was meticulous.

But nothing for the trafficking side. No client list, no transport logs for children. No communications referencing the network Rogue had been tracking.

Fuck. Where was it?

He ran the keyword searches Cassandra had given him. Every term she’d flagged as likely to surface in a trafficking operation. Transport. Cargo. Manifest. Placement. Delivery. He worked through the list and watched the results come back empty, one after another.

He tried alternate directory paths, the backup structures she’d warned him might exist. Nothing. He went back to the root and looked for hidden folders, anything that didn’t fit the visible architecture.

Nothing.

He sat back and stared at the screen. Every sequence, every navigation path, every shortcut she’d taught him had gotten him into the system. The training was faultless.

But whatever they needed wasn’t here.

He looked over at a second desk that was two feet away. Another computer that actually looked older.

He rolled the chair over and tapped the spacebar. The screen lit up with a login prompt that looked nothing like the first one. Different interface, different color scheme, different architecture.

He ran the same entry sequence he’d used on the first system. Nothing happened. The screen didn’t respond. He tried the two alternate bypass routes Cassandra had built into his training in case the primary sequence had been changed. The login prompt sat there, blinking, unmoved by his attempts.

He stared at the blinking cursor in the empty password field and tried to think about what Cassandra would do if she were sitting here instead of him. She’d know what she was looking at. She’d read the interface, understand the architecture, and already be three steps into solving it.

Ryder was looking at a locked door with no pick and no idea what kind of lock it was. And every second he wasted, he was closer to being caught. He reached into his boot for the burner phone. One bar of signal. He dialed.

One ring.

“Go ahead.” Fallon. Low and controlled.

“I’m in the computer room. I got through the first system clean. Ran the full search. It’s all business operations. Drugs, weapons, finances. No trafficking data.”

A beat of quiet, and then Cassandra came on the line. She must have been sitting right next to Fallon, waiting. “Ryder?”

“I’m in trouble, Cassie. I got in the first system, but this one, I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

“Okay. Describe the directory structure.”

He told her. Both systems. Kept it short, kept his voice low.

She was quiet for a moment. He’d heard that silence in the lab, late at night, when she was chewing through something her brain hadn’t solved yet.

“The second terminal. Is there a network indicator anywhere on the screen? A connection icon, a signal bar, anything in the corners?”