Chapter 9 - THE FALCON'S NESTTwo hours later, a matte-black Ford F-350 with reinforced steel bumpers and scrambled transponders rolled out of the warehouse doors, heading inland toward the city.
Inside the cab, I sat in the passenger seat with a tactical laptop open on my knees, tapping into the satellite feeds Sully had helped decrypt. In the back seat, Nora and Lily rested, the little girl finally sleeping soundly under a warm blanket.
"We have visual on Thorne's primary headquarters," Marcus said, keeping his eyes on the winding mountain road ahead. "The old municipal water tower on the outskirts of the harbor district. It's where he runs his smuggling operations."
"He's not just running operations from there," I said, staring at the glowing data streams scrolling across my laptop screen. "Look at this. The financial routing codes. Thorne isn't trying to steal the Calder empire—he's selling it. He’s liquidating the entire infrastructure to an offshore cartel in exchange for safe passage out of the country tonight at midnight."
"Liquidating?" Marcus’s hands tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. "Everything your father spent forty years building?"
"Sold to the highest bidder in three hours," I confirmed, closing the laptop with a sharp snap. "If we don't stop him before midnight, every port, every shipping lane, and every corrupted politician on the East Coast belongs to a cartel that won't leave a single witness alive—starting with Harbor House."
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"So what's the play?" Sully asked from the back, checking the slide of a suppressed Glock he had tucked into his waistband. "We walk in there with two guns and a prayer?"
"No," I said, pulling my Sig Sauer into my lap and sliding a fresh, full magazine into the well. "We don't walk in. We crash the party."
