Page 28 of Make Them Pay

“For how long?”

I don’t have a good answer. Contaminated water can knock a person down for hours or days, and my body’s been running on empty for too long.

“We’re inside,” I say. “The mapping has to finish before tomorrow night. If I stop now…”

“If you collapse, it stops anyway.” She puts her hand over mine on the keyboard. Deliberate this time. Her fingers wrap around mine and the cool of her skin against my fever-hot hand is the first relief I’ve felt in an hour. “Let me take it.”

“You’ve never done something this big live.”

“I’ve been watching you for six hours. I know the tools. I know the system because I helped map it.” She squeezes my hand once. “Teach me what I’m missing. Then lie down.”

I look at her. Those green eyes are steady. Her jaw is set. It’s the same look she gave me the first night when she told me she wasn’t cargo.

The dizziness rolls through again, worse this time. The screen swims for several long seconds.

I don’t have a choice.

“Okay,” I say. “Pull your chair closer. I’ll walk you through the rest.”

I spend the next forty-five minutes teaching her the final pieces while my body slowly shuts down. How to finish the mapping. How to move the money. How to package the proof for the people who can use it. How to erase our trail if something goes wrong.

She takes it all in the way she always does. Fast. Complete. Without missing a thing.

At eleven fifteen my hands stop cooperating. The fine control needed to type simply disappears.

“Cot,” Enley says.

I make it there on my own, barely. The four steps feel like they’re happening underwater. I sit on the edge. Then I’m lying down, and I don’t remember the transition.

“The access codes change every six hours,” I tell the ceiling. My voice sounds far away. “Refresh them at four or we lose the connection.”

“I know. You already told me. Twice.”

“The safety trigger is…”

“I know. Sleep, Render.”

The ceiling blurs. The light above me turns into a soft smear that pulses with my heartbeat. The fever climbs higher. Thoughts start to break apart before I can finish them.

The last clear thought I have is this: Enley Cameron is about to finish the most important digital strike I’ve ever planned, against one of the most dangerous people we’ve ever faced, with no one to back her up if something goes wrong.

And I trust her completely.

12

Enley

The silence Render leaves behind is louder than any sound I've heard in this storage unit.

He's on the cot. Eyes closed. Breathing in the shallow, rapid pattern that says the fever has taken the driver's seat and everything else, the planning, the control, the wall, all of it, is passenger now. His skin has gone from pale to flushed in the twenty minutes since he lay down, a patchy heat that turns his neck and the exposed skin of his forearms the color of sunburned clay. I put the blanket over him even though his body is generating enough heat to warm the room. The medical kit has ibuprofen. I gave him four. It's not enough. Nothing I have in this storage unit is enough for an infection that came from crossing a dirty river two days ago and then refusing to rest.

He'll argue when he wakes up. He'll say he's fine, the same way he says he's fine about the concrete floor and the three hours of sleep and the fact that he's been running his body like a machine that doesn't need maintenance. He'll try to get back to the table and I'll have to stop him and that argument will cost us time we don't have.

Because the clock hasn't stopped. We’re close to the breach. And the Goldenbell offensive, the digital operation that was supposed to run in parallel with the physical rescue, is now sitting on my shoulders alone.

I turn to the laptop. The financial core of Goldenbell's network is still open. Render's access credentials are still active. The transaction mapping he started is approximately forty percent complete, the trust in the Channel Islands partially exposed, its inbound connections traced but its outbound routing still a maze of subsidiary accounts and shell entities spread across four jurisdictions.

Sixty percent of the map. That's what I need to build in the next five hours before the credentials cycle and I have to refresh the access or lose everything.