Victor didn't send anyone to check Harlow's office. He went himself.The room was on the second floor of the secured building, at the end of a corridor that required two badge scans and a six digit code to access. Victor punched in the numbers without slowing down, pushed through the heavy door, and stood in the doorway.The office was neat. Harlow had always been neat. His desk was clear except for a pen holder, a framed photograph of his wife, and a small lamp that was still switched on, casting warm light across a surface that looked like its owner had stepped out for coffee five minutes ago and planned to return.Victor opened the top drawer. Pens, paperclips, a phone charger, a sealed envelope containing emergency cash. Second drawer. Personnel files, contact lists, schedules. Third drawer. Empty.Victor stared at the empty drawer for three full seconds."Cross." Victor's voice carried down the corridor. "What was in Harlow's third drawer?"Leonard Cross appeared in the doorway.

The team deployed in three vehicles. They drove fast, broke two traffic signals, and arrived at the Ashland warehouse in fourteen minutes.The building was empty.Not partially empty. Not cleared in haste. Completely, surgically, immaculately empty. The filing cabinets that had been stuffed with documents hours earlier were gone. The laptops were gone. The external hard drive was gone. The corkboard with its photographs and charts had been removed from the wall, leaving behind four small holes where the pins had been and nothing else.The floor had been swept. The surfaces had been wiped. The air carried the faint chemical smell of industrial cleaning solution.Whoever had been operating out of this warehouse had packed up an entire intelligence operation and vanished in the span of a few hours without leaving a single fingerprint, a single fiber, or a single piece of evidence that they had ever been there.Cross called Victor from inside the empty building. "It's clean. Everything is

"And the last meeting happened twelve hours before he disappeared." Cross set the tablet down. "After that, nothing. No calls, no movement, no activity of any kind."The room was quiet for fifteen seconds. Then Dominic cleared his throat."Sir, with respect, the evidence points in one direction." Dominic chose his words carefully. "Harlow accessed restricted files three days before disappearing. He withdrew seventy five thousand in cash. He met an unknown contact at concealed locations. And he left without his weapon, his phone, or his wallet. That profile looks like a man who planned to leave and didn't want to be followed.""It looks like that." Victor's voice was flat. "Which is exactly why I don't believe it."Dominic blinked. "Sir?""Harlow served me for nine years." Victor pressed his thumb against the edge of the desk. "He was in this room when I built half the infrastructure in that notebook. If he wanted to betray me, he could have done it any time in the past decade with far

Victor didn't retreat. He moved forward. His body stayed low, his footwork precise, his awareness operating on instincts that had been built across twenty years of surviving rooms exactly like this one. He grabbed the nearest attacker by the jacket, drove his elbow into the man's jaw, and threw him sideways into a table that collapsed under the impact.The fight lasted three minutes. Victor's men pushed the attackers back through the main room, forcing them toward the rear exits. Two masked figures dropped unconscious near the bar. A third crawled toward a side door with a broken arm. A fourth, faster than the others, sprinted toward a wall panel that swung open to reveal a hidden exit behind the old storage room.Victor chased him. He closed the distance to four feet. His hand caught the edge of the man's jacket. The fabric tore. The man twisted sideways, slipped through the narrow opening, and disappeared into a tunnel that led beneath the building and surfaced somewhere Victor coul

He took only two men. Dominic drove. A guard named Fischer sat in the back seat with a weapon holstered beneath his jacket and the expression of someone who understood that this particular trip was not routine.Greenfield Recovery Center occupied a converted Victorian building behind a row of oak trees on a residential street that looked deliberately chosen for its quietness.The facade was well maintained, the landscaping was neat, and the sign near the entrance was small enough to miss if you weren't looking for it.Victor walked through the front door and approached the reception desk. A woman in her forties looked up from a computer screen and produced a professional smile that lasted exactly as long as it took her to register the expression on Victor's face."Good evening." Victor placed both hands on the counter. "I'm looking for information about a patient who has been receiving visits from a man named James Harlow."The receptionist's smile vanished. Her eyes darted to a colle