Page 173 of The ARC Unit: Breach

He crouched near the mechanism. The old cold-room doors had been designed to seal tight enough to hold temperature for hours. Someone had added a modern hasp and two heavy padlocks to this one, then run a steel bar through a welded bracket beside the frame. Bear looked once, rejected the Halligan, and reached for the compact hydraulic tool clipped to his bag.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Take them,” Wolf said.

The bar bent first. The camera had no audio from inside the room, but when the final lock gave, the door moved outward less than an inch before stopping against pressure from the other side. Bear froze.

“Something behind it.”

Viper came back to him. Together they pulled carefully until the gap widened. A mattress had been shoved against the door from inside. A bare hand slipped around its edge, trembling hard enough that I could see it on the camera. Bear let go of the tool and dropped his weapon onto its sling.

“Easy,” he said. “Easy. We’re opening it.”

More hands appeared as the mattress shifted. When the door finally opened far enough for the camera to see past Bear’s shoulder, bodies filled the frame along both walls and behind the mattress. I stopped trying to count.

They were packed along the walls and between stained mattresses that covered nearly every section of concrete. Some stood because there was nowhere else to go. Others stayed seated with their backs pressed against the insulated panels, arms wrapped around themselves despite the warmth that was probably trapped inside. Plastic water bottles lay empty beside a bucket near the corner. The room had no windows, and the only privacy was a sheet tied between two pipes around another bucket. Several women recoiled when Viper entered.

One grabbed the woman beside her and pulled her backward. Bear stayed at the threshold.

“Raven, tell medical we have nine in room one.”

Wolf did not step fully inside. He looked past them toward the rear wall, then toward Bear.

“Viper, with me.”

Keller touched my shoulder.

“Now.”

I grabbed the photographs and followed him out of the command vehicle. After hours in the heated van, the late-afternoon cold went straight through my jacket as we moved toward the property with two female German officers and a paramedic team behind us.

The warehouse looked larger from ground level, its concrete walls blotting out most of the lowering sun. I could smell diesel from the vans before we reached the open side door, mixed with wet asphalt and something chemical leaking from the building itself.

Keller stopped us at the threshold while Bear checked the corridor.

“Clear to room one,” Bear said. “Stay left. Do not go past my marker.”

Keller repeated the instructions in German for the officers behind us.

I stepped inside. The smell reached me before the room did. Disinfectant covered the top of it, harsh enough to sting my nose, but underneath was sweat, urine, damp fabric and old food. Something medicinal hung in the air too, sweet and faintly chemical, the same kind of smell I remembered from the sedatives recovered at Haus Eberhardt. My throat tightened, and I breathed through my mouth until the first wave of nausea passed.

The loading corridor was colder than the room beyond it, though the refrigeration system had been shut down long ago. Concrete walls held onto the chill and threw every sound back at us: boots over concrete, radio chatter, a woman crying behind the steel door, another coughing while someone tried to calm her. Bear stood beside the entrance to room one, one hand up to keep the flow controlled.

“Medical first. No questions unless somebody offers you something urgent.”

Keller nodded. “Understood.”

I went in behind the first paramedic. The room looked worse without a camera flattening it into a screen. Mattresses covered the concrete in uneven rows, most thin enough that the floor showed through the fabric where bodies had worn them down. A few blankets had been shared between several women. Empty food wrappers and crushed bottles filled a cardboard box near the door. The bucket behind the hanging sheet had overflowed onto the floor at some point and been covered with cleaning powder that did almost nothing for the smell.

One woman had a bandage around her forearm that had gone gray at the edges. Another sat with both wrists tucked beneath her thighs, hiding bruises that climbed past the sleeves of an oversized sweatshirt. A third would not raise her head until the female officer beside me crouched far enough away to speak without touching her. Several women wore clothing that did not fit, including men’s sweatpants cinched with string, oversized sweatshirts, cheap shirts printed with logos from cities hundreds of kilometers away and slippers with socks or bare feet.

There were no bags, coats, phones or jewelry anywhere I could see, nothing one woman could point to and call hers. Cerberus had taken names and passports along with the rest of their belongings and reduced each person to whatever was easiest to move. Keller stood near the door and began speaking German, then English, telling them medical help was coming and nobody would be taken anywhere without being told where they were going. A woman near the back answered in Romanian.

I moved toward her slowly.

“Română?” I asked.

Her eyes snapped to mine. I switched languages and told her we were police with medical help behind us, and that nobody in the room belonged to Cerberus. She stared at my face long enough that I could see her deciding whether the words were another trick.