PART 10:

I need you to understand what that means before we arrive. Reyes looked at him in the mirror. Understood, sir? The garage door opened. The SUV pulled out into the hard morning light and turned south toward the river. And Gabriel sat in the passenger seat with his phone in his hand and the schematic on the screen and the image of a service corridor that didn’t exist on any official document, but that someone had built into the bones of his empire while he was looking at something else.

And for the first time in 20 years of operating inside machinery that he controlled completely, Gabriel Veil understood what it felt like to be inside someone else’s. The river route took 19 minutes instead of 15 and Gabriel used every one of them. He had the schematic on his phone and Rowan on an open line and the particular quality of silence from Reyes and Park that experienced men produced when they understood the situation had moved past the briefing phase, and into the phase where talking was a liability.

The SUV moved along the river road with the morning light coming flat off the water, and Gabriel looked at the schematic and listened to Rowan walk him through the building’s internal structure from memory, cross-referencing against the official layout to identify every point where the eastern service corridor, the one that didn’t exist on paper, would have to intersect with the documented architecture.

Load-bearing wall between the server room and the eastern service access would be here, she said. Her voice was controlled, but he could hear the fever in it, the slightly too deliberate spacing between words. Which means the corridor entrance is either behind the maintenance panel on the building’s east face, or it routes through the sub-level utility passage.

Sub-level, Gabriel said. Declan likes sub-levels. He thinks they’re invisible. Sub-level it is. A pause. Keyboard sounds. The utility passage connects to the building’s original infrastructure. Predates the hub’s construction by about 30 years. Sewer adjacency. It won’t be on any of our systems because it was never part of our build.

Which means no cameras. Which means no cameras. Which also means they know that. Yes. Gabriel looked up from the phone. The industrial district was visible ahead. The flat roof geometry of warehouses and processing facilities, the skeletal shapes of loading cranes against the sky.

How many people can they have positioned inside? The hub’s regular staff would be six on day shift. If the compromised infrastructure lead cleared the schedule, she stopped. He did. I just pulled the shift logs. Day shift was called off this morning. Maintenance closure. So, the building was empty of friendly personnel.

Whatever was inside now was entirely theirs. Gabriel thought about the arithmetic of that. Reyes and Park and himself against an unknown number of Pharaoh assets who’d had hours to position and who knew the building’s actual layout including the parts Gabriel didn’t. “19 hours, 40 minutes.” Rowan said. She said it without commentary which was its own form of commentary.

“I know.” “The physical hardware is in server rack seven, sub level one. The override requires a direct cable connection and a 12-digit input sequence. I can transmit the sequence when you’re in position.” A pause. “It takes four minutes to execute once initiated.” Four minutes connected to a cable in a server room in a building full of people who are waiting for exactly this approach.

Gabriel filed the number. “One more thing.” Rowan said. Her voice shifted just slightly. “The back access point. The one your uncle had built. I found a reference to it in a construction invoice from four years ago. The contractor who built it was a man named Devereaux. He’s in the hub’s personnel log for this morning.

” She let that land for a moment. “He came in at 6:00 a.m. and hasn’t left.” So the man who built the back door was currently inside the building which meant the Pharaoh assets had a guide which meant their positioning inside the structure was not guesswork. They’d been walked through every inch of it by the man who’d installed it.

Gabriel put his phone down on his knee and looked at the road. “Reyes.” he said. “When we go in we are not going in through the front.” The sub level utility access was a corroded steel hatch set into the pavement of the alley behind the hub’s eastern face padlocked with a lock that was older than the hub itself and hadn’t been changed in 30 years.

Park had it open in 40 seconds with a tension wrench and a pick he produced from his jacket with the ease of long habit and no comment. Gabriel went down first. The utility passage smelled like standing water and rust and the particular stale cold of spaces that hadn’t seen circulation in years. The ceiling was low enough that Gabriel had to angle his shoulders and Park, who was broader, had to turn sideways at intervals.

They moved with their phones producing minimal light. Enough to navigate, not enough to announce. The passage ran east-west for approximately 40 m and then turned north. At 30 m north, it intersected with a junction where the original infrastructure branched into three directions. Gabriel stopped at the junction.

Listened. From the northern branch, barely audible through 30 years of concrete and corroded pipe, voices. Not distinguishable. Just the presence of them. The muffled cadence of men talking in a space that carried sound poorly. He pointed north. Then held up two fingers and pointed at the branch entrance.

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