Chapter 13: The Warehouse Breach
The roof ventilation shaft was choked with thirty years of coal dust and grease, but it offered a silent, direct line of sight down into the heart of the customs warehouse. Below me, three men in dark tactical gear were methodically feeding boxes of paper files into an industrial shredding machine while a laptop screen glowed amber in the center of a scarred wooden worktable.
I dropped down from the rafter with absolute silence, landing cat-footed on a stack of wooden pallets three feet behind the nearest guard. Before he could turn his head, my arm hooked under his chin, applying precise pressure to the carotid artery. He slumped unconscious against my shoulder before his boots could scrape the concrete.
The second guard whirled around, a heavy iron wrench raised in his fist, but I ducked beneath his swing, drove the heel of my palm upward into his nose, and swept his legs out from under him in one fluid, rehearsed motion. He hit the floor hard and didn't move.
At the worktable, the third man—the syndicate's local logistics coordinator—froze with his fingers hovering over the laptop's keyboard. He slowly raised his hands, his eyes wide with disbelief as he looked from his unconscious associates up to me standing in the dim light of the overhead sodium lamps.
"Where are the remaining hard drives?" I asked, stepping forward until the barrel of my suppressed sidearm rested lightly against the edge of the wooden table.
"In the wall safe," he whispered, his voice shaking. "Behind the map of the harbor. Just don't shoot."
Before I could reach for the dial, the heavy steel exterior door at the far end of the warehouse groaned open with a loud screech of rusted hinges. Heavy footsteps echoed across the concrete floor, followed by the sharp, metallic sound of a shotgun being racked.
"Clear the room!" a harsh voice shouted from the shadows.
Before the gunman could acquire his target, the main gates outside flared with blinding white headlights. Julian had timed the diversion down to the second. Sirens began to wail in the distance—real municipal police units responding to the silent alarm Julian had triggered at the perimeter gate.
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The gunman panicked, turning his weapon toward the blinding lights at the entrance. That half-second hesitation was all I needed. I crossed the open floor in three long strides, slammed my shoulder into his chest, and drove him backward into a stack of empty crates until his weapon clattered uselessly onto the floor.
Within minutes, the warehouse was secure, the evidence seized, and the local authorities were swarming the perimeter.
