The helicopter didn't land at a mountain bunker or a lakeside safehouse.
Jenkins set the Little Bird down with a shuddering crunch on a patch of broken asphalt behind a chain-link fence, in the middle of a sprawling, rusted-out industrial scrapyard. Towers of crushed cars rose like grotesque sculptures against the night sky. The safehouse was the foreman's office: a corrugated metal shack with a single yellow bulb, plastic sheeting duct-taped over broken windows.
A man emerged from the shack, silhouetted by the weak light. He wasn't holding a rifle or a medkit. He had a tablet, its glow illuminating his tired face. He was Miles, their logistics, finance, and forgery guy. He looked like a perpetually tired middle manager, which was essentially his job. He tapped the screen without looking up. "The monthly fee for keeping this eyesore operational just spiked. Fuel surcharge. Risk premium." He finally glanced over, his eyes landing on the black body bag being unloaded from the chopper. "And you brought extra cargo. That's a separate line item. Biohazard disposal rates."
Godwin ignored him, striding toward the shack. "We need a door that locks and a clean line out of here by dawn."
"You need a miracle. I can procure a decent lock," Miles said, falling into step beside him, still scrolling on his tablet. "The line out is trickier. Every camera between here and the state line is probably blinking your faces to a server farm."
Inside, the shack was one room. A space heater glowed orange in the corner, fighting a losing war against the damp cold. The "comm suite" was Miles's dented laptop, synced wirelessly to the tablet. A jury-rigged satellite dish pointed through a hole in the roof. The walls were papered with faded shipping schedules, freight codes, and a map dotted with push-pins marking ports and truck stops.
David slumped onto a cracked vinyl couch, the adrenaline gone, leaving hollow exhaustion. Stephanie stood frozen just inside the door, still hugging her vest.
A second figure straightened up from a makeshift workbench—a welding mask pushed up on her forehead, coveralls stained with grease and something darker. Doc. Not a surgeon. A former combat veterinarian who'd found steady, cash-only work patching up things that couldn't go to a hospital. She eyed them, then the bag on the floor.
"Welcome to the kennel," she said, her voice rough. She walked over to the bag, unzipped it halfway, and peered inside with the clinical detachment of someone inspecting meat. "Cause of death: catastrophic cranial disruption. Recent." She looked up at Godwin. "He's starting to attract flies. You have until the smell sets into the floorboards to tell me what you need from him before I dig a hole."
The brutal pragmatism hung in the close air. This was the aftermath. Not debriefs and encrypted servers, but decomposition and disposal fees.
Makarov finally spoke, his voice a low rumble. "We need his eye."
Doc didn't flinch. "The retina. For the thing in the girl's vest." It wasn't a question. She'd seen the bulge, the way Stephanie protected it.
Stephanie flinched at the word 'thing,' but her hands tightened. She slowly drew the data drive from her vest. It looked absurdly sleek and clean against the grime of the shack. She placed it on a crate that served as a table.
Miles wandered over, peered at it, and snorted. He didn't touch it. Instead, he pulled a small, high-resolution camera attachment from his pocket, clipped it to his tablet, and took a few macro shots of the drive's edges. "Hardware-level biometric lock. Cute. The verification request will be routing to some server bank with better HVAC than this place." He swiped through the magnified images on his tablet. "You don't need the eyeball. You need the server address. The eye is just the key that fits the lock on the door. I can't make a key. But if you tell me where the door is, I might know a guy who can pick it."
"How do we find the door?" Godwin asked.
Miles zoomed in on a shot. Etched microscopically along the edge was: CTL-77B / LOT 451 / MSC-REPO. "Container tracking lot number. 'MSC' is a freight carrier. 'Repo' means it was seized from a defaulted shipment." He sat at his laptop, the tablet syncing data. His fingers flew. "Let's see what company was so eager to get their hardware back they sent men with guns instead of a lawyer…"
They waited in the thick silence, the only sounds the hum of the laptop, the hiss of the heater, and the distant skittering of rats in the scrap piles.
After ten minutes, Miles sat back. He turned the tablet around. On it was a bland corporate filing. "The shipment was paid for by a corporate account belonging to Valkyrie Strategic Support, LLC. Delaware registration, zero public profile. Their listed business is 'logistical consultation and asset recovery.'" He looked at Godwin. "They're a repo company. For very expensive, very secret things."
"A PMC?" David asked from the couch.
"A shell," Miles corrected, tapping the tablet. "A clean, legal face. The kind that hires other PMCs—like the ones who just tried to kill you—to do its dirty work." The screen showed a generic corporate website with stock photos of people in headsets. No eagle. No globe. Just empty professionalism hiding a vacuum.
Godwin stared at the screen. The enemy wasn't a secret society with a lair. It was a business. A company with accountants and lawyers, whose product was silence and whose method was murder.
"Can you get into their server?" Godwin asked.
Miles gave a thin, weary smile, holding up his tablet like a shield. "I can't hack the Pentagon. But I can bribe a night-shift data center technician in New Jersey who has gambling debts. It'll cost you."
Outside, Doc fired up the backhoe, its diesel engine coughing to life. The clock on the body had run out.
Godwin looked from the drive to the corporate website on the tablet to his team, scattered and exhausted in the grim shack. The fight had changed. They weren't soldiers against spies anymore. They were a bankrupt small business going to war with a multinational.
"Do it," Godwin said.