Third POV limited
Back at the other penthouse, they stood guarded around the old bald man lying on his back, exhausted, under the watch of the guards, his half-eaten plate of bacon sitting cold and forgotten on the table.
"We know you’re not Marcus Stellano, our man, but we also know there’s something you’re not telling us." Dax whispered, voice void of emotion, watching the old man’s trembling fingers drip blood onto the couch.
"Either you give me an answer, or I finish what they already started. Who’s S.S.?" Saint questioned, picking up the chopstick and the pocket knife resting beside the plate of bacon.
"I don’t know that man. Ahhhh!" He groaned in pain, his eyes nearly rolling back. "That man has no real ID. He could walk past me a hundred and one times, and I still wouldn’t recognize him, same as Marcus Stellano. I’m just a worker under him, more of a distribution middleman." He confessed, the stinging pain nearly numbing him entirely.
"So what’s MER, then?" Dr. Quinn asked, sinking onto the nearest couch, tired, pulling off his glasses.
"What the hell is MER? S.S. had access to the same supply network involved with the poisoned champagne, but I swear, man, I didn’t know the bottle was poisoned." He revealed, scrambling to defend himself.
"Has he ever contacted you to come pick up the drinks yourself?" the hacker asked.
"S.S. contacted me a few months back, maybe three months now." He whimpered, pressing a strip of torn fabric from his pants against his bleeding hand. "He reached out through another intermediary and requested a certain supply of drinks. I don’t know what he needed them for."
"Do you remember the location?" Milo asked, eyes fixed on the weakening old man.
"An isolated spot, here in Chicago, some uncompleted building."
"That matches the S.S. trail," the hacker said immediately.
On the other end of the city, S.S. received a call, phone pressed to his ear. He wiped his sweat with a nearby cloth before stepping outside, away from the noise, to take it.
"We just got word Leonardo never showed up at the shop. The others said some guys pulled him out a few days ago, and they didn’t look like cops." A harsh, thick voice came through on the other end.
"Even if they’ve got their hands on him, there’s not much he can give them to lead them here." S.S. replied, unbothered by the situation.
"A few minutes ago, some men showed up at the location you just left. One of them matched a sketch a witness near the bar was able to give me."
"They’re following the trail. So what should I do?"
"Move the children."
Saint had the guards release Leonardo, who wasn’t Marcus, since he’d given up enough to be useful for now. Once Leonardo was taken from the house, Milo and the hacker continued decoding the paperwork from the location, hoping for anything else useful. After several minutes of decryption, they found another fragment, MER: Subject 23. Milo froze, eyes locked on the laptop screen, unable to look away.
"MER: Subject 23." The hacker repeated, pulling everyone’s attention. "Subject usually refers to a species designation, or part of a larger project." He rambled, trying to connect the pieces.
"The file’s connected to the children," Dax chimed in.
"No." The hacker shook his head. "There’s not enough here to know exactly where the children were taken, but there’s something strange about this file. It wasn’t created at that location, it was accessed there and printed out so they could distribute it among themselves. Someone must have lost their own copy in the process. That means whoever was running that location was only using it as a temporary point."
"Then where did they take the children?" Saint asked, tired of the rambling, needing nothing more than to get his hands on Alyssa.
"We still don’t know yet, so instead of guessing, why don’t we go back through everything we’ve already collected?" Milo said, already flipping through pictures he’d taken while searching the building.
"There was a trail of muddy sand in part of the room. At first I thought it was construction dust, but there’s no way it could be this muddy, since it wasn’t spread evenly through the building." Milo said, showing them the picture. "There was a lot of it right at the entrance, which means something was moved through there repeatedly."
"One of the rooms was noticeably colder than the rest." Dr. Quinn interjected almost immediately. "I couldn’t find an obvious reason for the temperature difference, but it looked like there was some kind of industrial cooling system installed in that particular room."
"Whatever was stored there needed a controlled temperature," Saint added.
"I need a torch and a mirror, and turn off the lights," the hacker urged.
Adrian immediately cut the lights, and a guard handed over a flashlight. The hacker laid the paperwork flat on the table, angling the beam so it fell directly across the page.
Numbers covered the sheet.
"What are these? Subject IDs, or...?" Dax asked, mouth slightly open.
"They’re not that. Several of the numbers repeat, same as MER did." Milo noted.
"They’re actually timestamps, mixed with subject numbers. We can use this to reconstruct part of the timeline." The hacker said, still studying the page.
"How the hell is that possible?" Dax asked, thoroughly confused.
"No, we can." Milo assured him, already piecing the timestamps together with what they had. "The bus didn’t disappear after leaving its normal route."
"Then when did it disappear?" Saint pressed, his patience brewing thinner by the second.
"There’s a short window where it was still moving. Then the signal cuts out, but another signal appears somewhere else." Milo continued, before the hacker cut in.
"Was it a distraction?"
"No, because after the distraction, the bus disappeared completely. They didn’t hijack it the moment it dropped off the tracking system..."
"They intercepted it before that point," the hacker said.
"How far?" Saint asked.
"Fuck, sorry, I didn’t mean to curse." Liam, the hacker, apologized immediately, still studying the transportation data. "I just found somewhere they might have taken the children."