Chapter 109 Obviously

Chapter 109 Obviously
Lucia meets them at the door the next morning already dressed in a dark jacket zipped to her chin and her hair pulled back tight.
David stops in front of her, taking in the outfit with an expression that isn’t quite surprise. “Where exactly do you think you’re going?”
“With you,” she replies. “Obviously.”
“No.”
Lucia squares her shoulders. “I wasn’t joking yesterday when I said I wanted a seat at the table.”
“And I wasn’t joking when I gave you one,” David responds levelly, unbothered by the challenge in her voice. “That seat just isn’t out in the field.”
She frowns. “What the hell does that–”
“You have a sharp eye,” David interrupts. “Better attention to detail than half the men in that command room, honestly, and that’s not flattery, it’s an assessment. That skill set is worth considerably more to me on the comms than it is standing in a doorway getting shot at.”
Lucia’s expression remains skeptical.
“You’ll have the building plans,” David continues. “Every camera feed we can access. You’ll see things the men inside won’t. If something changes, if someone moves where they shouldn’t, if you notice something that doesn’t make sense, you tell us immediately.”
Elias watches her jaw tighten, watches the argument building behind her eyes, and then watches her visibly decide not to have it right now.
“Fine,” she says. “Comms.”
“You’ll be watching the cameras,” David instructs. “Movement, headcounts, anything that changes on the ground faster than we can track it from inside. You’ll be talking directly into our earpieces the entire time.”
Lucia nods, still clearly unhappy about it, and steps aside to let them pass, though Elias catches the look she sends his way as he moves toward the van, something between a warning and a plea.
‘Come back in one piece.’
He doesn’t say anything back. He just nods once and climbs in.
~
The safehouse turns out to be exactly what David’s intel suggested it would be – a low, unremarkable building on the edge of an industrial stretch, lightly guarded, more of a cash waystation than any kind of real command post.
Lucia’s voice comes through Elias’s earpiece as they approach.
“Two men outside the eastern entrance.”
Elias glances toward the building. “I see them.”
“There were three thirty seconds ago.”
David’s voice cuts in. “Where’s the third?”
“Moving around back. Camera three caught him heading toward the loading bay.”
Elias looks at Marcus. Marcus gives a small nod, and they move.
Low level doesn’t mean bloodless, though, and Elias learns that within the first ninety seconds of the raid, moving room to room alongside men he spent months training himself to consider the enemy.
A man comes at him from a side corridor with a knife instead of a gun, and Elias disarms him fast, the movement so automatic it barely registers as a decision, sweeping the man’s legs and pinning him against the wall hard enough that the fight goes out of him almost immediately.
His earpiece crackles. “Elias.”
“What?”
“Don’t take the next door.”
He glances toward the door directly ahead. “Why?”
“Camera four just went dark.”
“Could be a power failure.”
“It isn’t.”
Something in her voice makes him stop. “How do you know?”
“Because every other camera is still running.” A beat. Then Lucia speaks again, faster now. “And the outage started six seconds after you entered the corridor.”
Elias looks at the door. “Someone cut the feed?”
“Someone wanted that hallway blind.”
David’s voice comes through. “Marcus, take the opposite route. Elias, hold position.”
They move according to the new instruction, and thirty seconds later Marcus’s voice comes through.
“Found something.”
Elias follows.
At the end of a narrow service corridor, Marcus has stopped beside a section of wall that looks exactly like every other section around it. Except it isn’t. There’s a thin line running vertically through the paint.
A concealed door.
Marcus looks at Elias, then his earpiece crackles again.
“That’s it,” Lucia’s mechanical voice comes.
Elias looks toward the ceiling. “You knew?”
“I knew there was a blind spot here. I didn’t know there was a door.”
Marcus runs his fingers along the edge.
“Good enough for me,” Elias responds as he forces it open.
The room beyond is small and windowless. A surveillance room. Three monitors are still glowing on a desk, one of them showing the warehouse floor, another showing the exterior loading bay, and the third showing the eastern entrance.
Elias steps inside slowly and instantly notices someone has been sitting there recently. A chair pushed back. A half-empty cup of coffee. An open laptop. And on the wall beside the monitors, a printed layout of David’s estate.
“Someone was watching us,” Marcus says.
Lucia is silent for a second. Then, “Look at the monitor.”
Elias turns. “What?”
“The eastern entrance.”
Elias looks and sees that the feed is frozen. Not the image itself, but the timestamp. He moves closer. “That’s not live.”
“No,” Lucia confirms. “It’s looping.”
Marcus’s expression hardens. “For how long?”
Lucia is already checking the other feeds. “Three minutes and forty-two seconds.”
David’s voice comes through the comms. “Can you tell when they left?”
“Not from the camera.” Lucia pauses, then switches feeds. “Wait. There.”
She enlarges the image, and for a second, nothing happens. Then a shadow moves across the edge of the frame. Someone is there.
Lucia’s voice drops. “Behind the containers.”
Marcus is already moving and Elias follows. They reach the loading bay seconds later, just as a man bolts from behind the containers. He gets barely three steps before Marcus takes him down.
The operative fights hard enough to make it clear he isn’t a frightened low-level guard, but Elias and Marcus have him restrained within seconds.
As they haul him upright, Lucia speaks into Elias’s earpiece. “That’s him.”
Elias looks at the man. “You’re sure?”
“No.” A beat. “That’s why I said it like that.” Despite everything, the corner of Elias’s mouth almost lifts. Lucia continues, “He was hiding from the cameras. That means he knew exactly where they were.”
David approaches the captive as Marcus searches him quickly, but finds nothing. No phone. No identification. No weapon beyond the one already taken from him.
By the time it’s over, they’ve got one live operative bound and hauled toward the van, and a duffel bag of ledgers that mean absolutely nothing to Elias but visibly mean a great deal to Marcus, who flips through the first few pages with the specific focus of a man finding exactly what he came here for.
But Elias can’t stop thinking about the empty surveillance room. Someone had been there. Someone had been watching them. And someone had left before they arrived. The operative doesn’t stop talking the entire ride back.
“You’re all dead,” he says, twisted awkwardly in the back seat with his hands zip tied behind him, directing most of his fury at whoever happens to be closest. “You have no idea what you just started.”
Nobody answers him.
He keeps going anyway, insult after insult, until his eyes land on Elias, and something in his expression shifts, the anger cooling into something closer to recognition.
“You’ve got his walk,” he says, apropos of nothing at all, studying Elias with a slow, assessing look.
“What?”
“The old man’s boy,” the operative says, and there’s something almost fond in the way he says it, an old phrase Elias hasn’t heard directed at him since he was too young to fully understand what it meant. “I’d know that walk anywhere.”
Elias doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know how to answer cause he has no idea what that even means and doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking.
The man just smiles and falls silent for the rest of the drive, watching Elias with an expression that lingers uncomfortably long after they’ve reached the estate.
~
Elias comes back with blood on his knuckles, more from the corridor fight than anything else, a shallow split across two of them that’s already stopped bleeding but hasn’t been cleaned yet.
Lucia’s waiting near the entrance when he walks in, and she reaches for his hand before he’s even fully through the door, turning it over to inspect the damage with a focus that doesn’t leave room for argument.
“It’s nothing,” he says.
“I didn’t ask if it was something,” she replies, already pulling him toward the small first aid station set up near the west wing.
She cleans it anyway, carefully dabbing at the split skin with something that stings enough that he hisses through his teeth once, and she doesn’t apologize, just keeps working, her focus entirely on his hand.
“How did it go,” she asks eventually, not looking up.
“We got what we needed.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He’s quiet for a second, watching her work. “It went the way these things go.”
She nods, accepting that, and finishes wrapping a thin strip of gauze around his knuckles before finally setting his hand down.
“You saved me in there,” he says while flexing his fingers.
Her eyes lift. “I was on comms.”
“Exactly.”
She looks at him for a second longer than necessary, then looks away. “I only noticed the camera.”
“You stopped me from walking into a blind spot.”
Lucia looks away. “That’s what I was supposed to do.”
“Yes, it was.” He looks at the bandage around his knuckles. “You were good.”
They settle into a comfortable silence for a while, just existing, before Lucia speaks.
“I keep waiting to hate him,” she says quietly. “Whoever pulled that trigger. I keep expecting it to arrive, this huge, consuming hatred… but it hasn’t. Mostly I just feel hollow.”
“Hatred comes later,” Elias murmurs. “Sometimes. Maybe.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It’s not meant to be reassuring. It’s meant to be honest.”
She looks at him for a moment, searching his eyes. “And what do you feel?”
He holds her gaze.
“Angry,” he says. A beat. Then, “For you.”
She doesn’t say anything to that, just looks down at her own hands for a second, and he lets the silence sit there, unforced, until she finally exhales and nods.
~
Down in the war room an hour later, Marcus delivers what little the operative gave up before he stopped talking entirely as David listens silently.
“No address,” Marcus tells him. “No name. Nothing we can actually use. Just this.”
He plays back the recording from the van, static crackling slightly before the operative’s voice comes through, still smug even bound and cornered.
“You really think Ghost is going to run from David Reid?” the recording says, and Elias can hear the smile in it even secondhand. “No no. Ghost wants David to come for him.”
The recording ends and silence settles over the room.
Marcus looks at David. “He knew we were coming.”
And for the first time since they returned, nobody has anything to say.