Chapter 10
The interior of Marcus’s house was in absolute disarray. Kitchen cabinets hung open, their contents—plates, canned goods, and spice jars—swept onto the linoleum floor in a chaotic heap. Papers and technical manuals were scattered everywhere like fallen leaves, fluttering slightly in the draft coming through the broken window.
Elena slipped through the window frame, landing lightly on the shattered glass with the rubber soles of her beige flats, careful to make as little noise as possible. "Marcus?" she called out in a low, sharp whisper, but only the hollow echo of her own voice answered back.
She moved through the dining room into the hallway, her industrial flashlight cutting a narrow beam through the darkness. Marcus’s home office—the room where he kept his radio equipment and analysis hardware—had been systematically gutted. The heavy server racks had been pulled away from the wall, their wiring ripped out by the roots. The computer monitors were smashed to pieces on the desk, their glass screens spiderwebbed and useless.
Whoever had been here had not come to negotiate or intimidate; they had come to erase every trace of Marcus’s investigative work. But where was Marcus?
Elena checked the master bedroom, the bathroom, and the basement stairs. The house was entirely empty of people, though the lingering scent of ozone and expensive cologne suggested the intruders had departed only minutes before her arrival. On the center of Marcus’s overturned mahogany desk lay a single object: an old, cracked pocket watch that belonged to his late father, resting beside a handwritten note in frantic script.
She picked up the note. It read: They took the hard drives. They know about the secondary node at the old substation on 4th Street. Don't go there alone.
May you like
Elena’s jaw tightened as a wave of fierce anger washed over her. They had taken Marcus to force her hand, assuming she would panic and run straight into their trap. But they underestimated her resolve. She didn't panic; she calculated. If Marcus was being held at the disused municipal substation on Fourth Street, she had roughly an hour before they finished extracting whatever data they needed from him and silenced him permanently.
She slipped the note into her pocket, turned off her flashlight to preserve the bulb, and stepped back out into the freezing night air. She needed transportation, and Arthur’s driveway next door was currently empty of the black sedan.
