Marco's counter intelligence effort paid off within a week.The informant who delivered the breakthrough was not a soldier or a scout or anyone with tactical training.He was a former accountant named Perry Tobin, a pudgy man in his late forties with bifocals held together by medical tape and a photographic memory for numbers that had once earned him a six figure salary and now earned him twelve cans of food."The primary base is a shopping mall." Perry sat at Marco's kitchen table, sketching on the back of a cereal box with a pencil stub.His hands trembled from the cold, but his lines were precise. "Three miles southeast. The Ridgemont Galleria. Four stories, underground parking, loading docks on three sides. They've fortified the main entrances with concrete barriers and the roof has at least six observation posts.""How do you know this?" Marco studied the sketch with narrowed eyes."Because they recruited me." Perry pushed his taped bifocals up his nose. "Three days ago. Offered

Perry Tobin showed up at the basement door a week later with his taped bifocals sitting crooked on his nose and an expression that said he had found something worth more than twelve cans of food."I have a name." Perry sat down at the kitchen table and pulled a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket. "Danny Okafor. Junior officer. Frontline patrol unit. Been with the Consortium since the second week of the apocalypse.""Why does he matter?" Marco sat across from him, arms folded."Because he's angry." Perry unfolded the paper and slid it across the table. It was a rough sketch of the mall's interior layout with names written next to sleeping quarters and supply rooms. "Three of my sources inside the mall heard him complaining to another soldier about the supply distribution. Colton's inner circle eats fresh canned food three times a day. Okafor and the frontline soldiers get rationed porridge twice. One of them said Okafor used words that would get him shot if anyone important was

Marco struck twice more over the following ten days.The second ambush targeted a smaller supply movement, two trucks with a light escort, traveling a different section of the route. This time Marco used no explosives at all. He parked the SUV across the road around a blind curve, waited for the convoy to stop, and opened the warehouse portal underneath both cargo compartments while the drivers were still trying to figure out whether the abandoned vehicle ahead was a trap or simply debris. The supplies vanished in under ninety seconds. Marco drove the SUV off the road before the escort soldiers finished their sweep of the tree line.The third ambush was even cleaner. A single truck carrying ammunition, traveling at night with minimal escort. Marco used the thermal display to track it from a mile away, opened the portal from behind a collapsed wall, and stripped the cargo bay without the driver ever knowing anything had happened until he arrived at the outpost and opened empty doors."

"Move. We have twenty minutes before anyone notices you're not on the patrol route."Marco debriefed Okafor personally in the safe house basement, sitting across from the defector at the kitchen table with Tank lying between them like a furry referee. Natalie stood behind Marco's chair, listening to every word."Tell me everything you haven't already told me." Marco's voice was calm, professional, the tone of a man conducting a job interview rather than an interrogation. "Troop strength. Defensive layout. Colton's personal habits. Anything that wasn't safe to put in a dead drop note."Okafor talked for two hours straight. He described the mall's internal structure, the placement of guard rotations, the armory location on the second floor, Colton's private quarters on the third.He confirmed the troop count at roughly eighty five active fighters and described the weapons inventory in enough detail that Marco could calculate the exact firepower the Consortium could bring to bear in a fu

"Then you're free to leave." Marco's voice carried no threat and no malice. "Nobody is being forced into anything. But if you stay and you don't contribute, you don't eat from my stockpile. That's the deal. Take it or leave it.""Why should we trust you?" An older man stepped forward from the back. His coat was torn and his shoes were wrapped in plastic bags. "You sealed Building 4 and let everyone inside die. You killed Ashford and his people at a dinner party. Half the neighborhood is terrified of you.""Good." Marco looked directly at the man. "Being terrified of me means you're paying attention. Every person who tried to take what belongs to me, Ashford, the armed gangs, the convict women, all of them are dead because they thought they could force their way into something I built with my own hands."He paused and let the silence work."But I have never once attacked someone who didn't attack me first. I have never taken food from someone who couldn't fight back. And I have never b