Page 102 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“What about Südweg? The one Kade said.”

He pulled the transport company beside it.

The relationship was less direct than I expected and more useful because of it. Südweg Transport had moved vehicles for Morgenstern nine times over four months, usually under generic service descriptions that could mean almost anything. When we laid the routes beside Cerberus reporting, the dates stopped looking generic.

A Südweg truck crossed from Austria into Germany on the same night nineteen-year-old Lenka Horvat disappeared after leaving a club in Salzburg. Another company vehicle entered France before two Romanian women carrying newly issued travel documents appeared near Mulhouse under names that did not exist six months earlier. I opened the missing person files and felt the party drain out of the investigation entirely.

“How many?”

Raven began building the overlap instead of answering too quickly.

By lunchtime, we had eleven women whose phone activity or travel records touched routes used by Morgenstern or Südweg after they disappeared. Four more surfaced through forged identities that failed basic verification. One passport used a missing woman’s photograph with a birth date six years wrong. Another identity belonged to a real woman who had been dead for more than a year before someone used her documents to cross into France.

Bear came in from the training yard while Raven was tracing the second passport. Dirt darkened one knee of his trousers and streaked his forearm, evidence that at least part of the morning had involved the ground winning.

He took one look at the screen and stopped thinking about lunch.

“What is that?”

I briefed Bear as he moved closer and read through the names without speaking. Outside, a burst of controlled rifle fire cracked from the wooded lane, followed by silence long enough that I could hear Raven’s keyboard again.

“They still out there?” I asked.

Bear nodded. “Wolf wanted another pass through the north approach. Jackal found a route he didn’t like.”

“Is that why you’re covered in half of Germany?”

“This is the clean version.”

He opened the refrigerator, handed me a bottle of water before taking one for himself, then pointed at my shoulder. “How’s it doing?”

“Better.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It aches when I reach too high and otherwise behaves itself.”

“Nice. Just keep being boring.”

“You make recovery sound inspirational.”

“That’s my gift, ma’am.”

He went back outside, leaving a trail of dried mud near the door that he would probably clean later because nobody else in this building seemed capable of noticing dirt until Bear pointed at it.

The work got worse once we left the party behind and followed Morgenstern into overnight security contracts at properties with no obvious reason to need armed coverage. Südweg serviced three of those addresses, which gave us a smaller set to work through instead of another continent-sized list of possibilities.

Two addresses went nowhere, one because the property had been sold and another because the billing line turned out to belong to a corporate retreat center with enough public records to account for every person there.

The remaining address sat outside Ulm, where Haus Eberhardt presented itself as a private rehabilitation residence. Its website showed pale rooms and warm wood, landscaped grounds around a converted farmhouse, all photographed in the kind of soft evening light that made every window look welcoming. The facility held a twelve-bed license and reported six current residents. Raven pulled its utility history, and the numbers made the declared occupancy look ridiculous.

“That is not six people,” I said.

Water use had been running at nearly three times the expected level for months. Food orders arrived in bulk quantities without matching the dietary planning or pharmacy purchases a legitimate residential treatment program should have generated. A commercial laundry contractor collected enough bedding every week to support more than thirty occupants.

The security schedule made the picture worse because Morgenstern billed perimeter coverage every single night. Two guards after midnight on normal weeks. Four during several short periods that lined up with Südweg vehicle visits.

Kade’s trail was nowhere on the invoices, but the route had begun with a conversation he controlled at the pool party. His file already held forty-three people tied to movements carrying his presence or access signature. Haus Eberhardt did not prove that every woman connected to this property belonged in his personal count, yet it was the first time I had watched that machinery expand outward from words I had heard him say in person.