Page 100 of Travis
“I knew you’d found something worth standing up for. I like to be prepared.”
We both rolled our eyes.
The data started populating on the main screen within minutes. Maude was thorough when she had a target.
“Fourteen properties within the zone,” Maude reported. “Mostly what you’d expect for rural Montana. Ranches, small farms, a few residential parcels. But one of them doesn’t fit. Forty-seven acres, listed as agricultural land, owned by a shell company registered in Delaware. The company was incorporated fourteen months ago. The property sold two weeks later.”
“What kind of agriculture?” Sera asked.
“The county assessment says hay. But the power draw is roughly equivalent to a small commercial facility operating around the clock. Hay does not require twenty-four-hour climate control.”
“What else?” Sera was already at her workstation.
“Single access road from a county highway. No other public ingress. The power account was opened immediately after the sale closed.”
Sera was pulling the property data into her model. I watched the parcel take shape on her screen, surrounded by the courier routes that bent around it.
“This is where Kindt runs his operation from,” she said. “The couriers don’t go near it because he doesn’t want any trail leading back. Every route in the network radiates outward from this area and bends around it on the way through.”
“If we’re right, taking that property would collapse the entire pipeline.”
“Not just collapse. End.” She turned from her workstation. “The courier network is replaceable. Individual routes can be rebuilt. But the hub is the infrastructure. The logistics, the coordination, the money. You take down the full hub and there’s nothing left to rebuild around.”
I sat back in my chair and let that settle.
For days we’d been circling the same impossible question. Stop the Ghost and children keep suffering. Continue the Ghost and eventually get caught or killed. Two versions of the same failure, and neither of us could find a way through it.
This was a way through it.
“We’ve been thinking about it wrong,” I said. “Both of us. We’ve been asking whether the Ghost should keep going. That was never the right question.”
She tore her eyes from the screen. “Then what is the right question?”
“How to end Kindt for good. Not disrupt him. Not slow him down. End him.”
“And the answer is in that zone.”
I looked at the gap on the main screen. For so long the Ghost had been a war of attrition, one van, one route, one handful of kids at a time. I’d always known I couldn’t sustain it. But the alternative had been to stop, and stopping was something I couldn’t do. So I’d kept going, and the damage piled up on both sides, and the math never changed.
Now the math had changed. One target, one operation. Take it and the whole network would fall.
I could feel it in my chest. Not the sick lurch from earlier. Something closer to relief, and that scared me almost as much as the discovery itself, because hope was a dangerous thing to carry into an operation. Hope meant having something to lose.
I had a lot to lose now. And every bit of it was in this room.
Sera had just discovered a way for me to survive and be able to live with myself at the same time. The Ghost no longer had to choose between innocent children and his own life.
She was watching me. I could see the same calculations moving behind her eyes. But hers had gone further than mine, or maybe just in a different direction, because what I saw settlinginto her expression wasn’t excitement. It was the look she got when the math was pointing somewhere neither of us wanted to go.
“We can’t do this ourselves, Travis.”
“I know.”
“I don’t mean it’s hard. I mean it’s impossible. Two people and a computer system can’t confirm what’s in that zone, can’t plan an operation against it, can’t execute anything at that scale. This isn’t a courier on a highway. This is an entrenched facility with security and infrastructure and God knows what else.”
I didn’t argue. There was nothing to argue with.
“Even getting close enough to see what’s there would take a team,” she said. “People who know how to approach a protected site without being seen. People with tactical training. You have that, but I don’t. I would be more of a liability?—”
