Chapter 2 - Inside the House of PhantomsWhile Gabriel raced into the trap at North Valley, Detective Renee Cole and a heavily armed tactical unit breached the abandoned North Valley facility's secondary entrance in Columbus.
The air inside the decaying administrative building smelled of damp drywall, rotting carpet, and old paper. Dust motes danced in the sweep of tactical flashlight beams.
“Clear!” shouted the lead officer, sweeping a dusty hallway lined with peeling teal wallpaper.
Renee kept her hand on her service weapon. Something felt wrong. The intelligence Gabriel provided pointed to North Valley being a front for laundering assets and isolating children, but the silence here was too heavy. It was a ghost town.
Then, her radio crackled.
“Detective Cole, this is dispatch. We ran the IP address from the phone call Candice made to Gabriel. It wasn't routing from the highway. It was bouncing off a local tower... right beneath your feet.”
Renee stopped dead in her tracks.
She shone her flashlight down. Beneath a layer of industrial linoleum sat a heavy iron hatch, locked with a biometric keypad.
“Bring the cutting torch,” Renee ordered into her radio, her heart pounding against her ribs.
When the heavy steel door finally gave way, a wave of stale, chemical air rushed up. It wasn't an abandoned youth center. It was a subterranean data and holding facility. Rows of computer servers hummed in the dark, blinking with rhythmic green lights.
And on the central monitor, a live camera feed was broadcasting something that made Renee’s blood run cold.
It showed Gabriel’s truck arriving at the real North Valley facility three hours outside the city.
And sitting right beside the main control console, watching the monitor with a cup of black coffee, was a man wearing a silver ring set with a blue stone.
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He wasn't Dr. Samuel Reed.
It was a man the police had buried five years ago.
