Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 34715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 174(@200wpm)___ 139(@250wpm)___ 116(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 34715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 174(@200wpm)___ 139(@250wpm)___ 116(@300wpm)
There’s no signal out here worth a damn, the mountains blocking everything like a natural Faraday cage. But my kit doesn’t rely on one tower or one network—I've rigged it with satellite uplinks and boosters from my cyber gigs. I pull the small drone controller from my bag, power it on, and launch. The drone rises with a faint whine, its rotors slicing through the fog as it climbs above the canopy until it gets line-of-sight to a cell relay miles away. Then the map loads on my tablet.
Heat signatures from the skirmish. Movement lines tracing our paths and theirs. The last place we saw Nash and Sin—Nash with his extraction know-how leading point, Sin covering flanks with his surveillance gear.
I set a boundary radius around the ambush site, then widen it until the screen gives me something other than swirling fog and empty trails.
A single vehicle ping appears on a service road two miles south. It’s old data, a momentary capture from a hacked trail cam, but it’s a start. A dark van, no plates visible, windows tinted black, speed steady at 45 mph, route deliberate like a pro driver avoiding detection.
I pull up the camera nodes I tapped earlier on the way in—part of my prep work for this family mission. There are fewer than people think out here in the wilds, but there are always more than they notice if you know where to look. A lodge entrance cam caught a glimpse of the van's side. A private gate cam on a nearby estate, timestamped just after the ambush. A forestry road cam with a blurred feed, but enough to confirm direction.
I stitch the clips into a single flow using software I've customized for my security jobs. It isn’t perfect—gaps where coverage drops—but it doesn’t need to be. It needs to point. The van moves south, then veers east. It avoids towns, skirting populated areas like a ghost. Avoids main highways, sticking to backroads. Heads toward a corridor that leads straight to Halo City.
My spine tightens, a rare physical tell breaking through my control.
Halo City isn’t just a place. It’s a system. A gleaming metropolis of money and influence, where offshore accounts fund private airstrips, and corporate security firms—like the ones we've all worked for at some point—hold government contracts with zero accountability. The kind of city where a man can vanish if the right person decides he should. Our father's trail led us here initially, whispers of his involvement in exposing some underbelly of it all.
Which means if Nash and Sin were taken, they were taken for a reason. Leverage against us. Information on Dad's whereabouts. Or a message to back off our search.
Crewe steps closer, reading the screen over my shoulder, his protection detail habits making him scan for threats even now. “That route. It's textbook evasion.”
“Yeah,” I say, my mind already mapping contingencies.
Jace jogs down from the ridge, eyes wild but focused—the combat consultant in him assessing the group. “Tell me you’ve got something, Banks.”
“I’ve got a direction,” I answer, zooming in on the projected path.
Colt’s face goes hard, rifle slung but ready. “Then we go. All of us.”
“We go smart,” Crewe says immediately, his voice carrying the weight of years guarding high-profile targets.
Colt bristles, pacing halting. “Smart is how they got away in the first place. We should've hit harder from the start.”
“No,” I snap, and my voice cuts sharper than I intend, echoing my role as the intel guy who prevents disasters. Everyone stills. I take a breath and force myself back into control, the data grounding me. “Smart is how we get them back alive. And find Dad in the process.”
Jace’s jaw flexes, but he nods. “So what’s the plan, professor?” It's his old nickname for me, from when I'd bury myself in code while he trained.
I look down at my screen again. “We don’t chase into Halo City blind. We need a hook. A reason to be there that doesn’t scream Hawthorne brothers on a rescue op for our kidnapped siblings and missing father.”
Crewe’s eyes narrow. “We already have one. Dad’s trail pointed there weeks ago.”
“Dad’s trail is what got Nash and Sin taken,” I say flatly. “We need a new angle. Something tied to the same network. Something we can access without tripping every alarm in that viper's nest.”
Mack’s voice comes through the headset again, controlled now but tight, his logistics brain kicking in. “Banks. Talk to me. What do you have?”
“Halo City,” I say. “That’s where the vehicle path points. They’re moving Nash and Sin into a controlled environment—probably one of those fortified compounds run by the security firms there.”
A low exhale from Mack. “Of course they are. Fits the pattern we've seen in Dad's notes.”
“We need to break their control,” I add.
“How?”
I stare at the map. The truth is sitting right there in the roads and the timing. In the fact that they didn’t kill Nash and Sin outright—they took them alive, zip-tied and dragged, not executed. That means they want something. They want us to stop our search for Dad. Or they want us to trade information. Or they want to see how far we’ll go to get our family back.