Chapter 9 Dead Witness

Finding the maintenance engineer who serviced the suburban building's basement level took Van hours of detailed and precise work inside the safehouse.

He had to cross-reference municipal payrolls. The union logs had redacted names but the payroll didn't.

Two contractors, one dead and the other missing.

The engineer, a mid-level contractor named Gabbie Muller, hadn't returned to his registered address after the explosion. His last known address was a motel in the upper eastside and a PO box that hadn't been checked in fifteen months.

Van drove his sedan. His side still hurt. He had cleaned himself but didn't stitch the wound. Just plaster.

He parked across the street watching the entrance of a motel. Van stepped out of his car, the collar of his jacket pulled up against the evening air. He moved through the parking lot with silence and calm.

Gabbie Muller was all worked up shoving a canvas duffel bag into the trunk of a beat-up

sedan when Van stepped out from the motel's stairway. The man was an ordinary man, soft around the middle, wearing a faded utility jacket, his thinning hair glued to his forehead by his own sweat. When he saw Van emerge, he stopped what he was doing mid-motion, hand hung in the air, blood draining from his face. The duffel bag slipped from his shaking grip, hitting the asphalt. Van didn't bring out any weapon. The quiet stillness spoke for itself.

“Please,” Gabbie said a little above a whisper. He raised his hands, backing up slowly until he hit the bumper of his car. “I'm leaving. I'm leaving right now. You don't have to do this.”

Van stopped in front of the man keeping a restrained distance. His hands visible, hanging loosely by his sides.

“I'm not the person who paid you, Gabbie,” Van said, his voice low and calming. “But they are coming. Tell me what you gave them, and I'll let you get in that car and drive away.”

Gabbie's wide eyes darted toward the empty road before going back to Van.

“I didn't know they were going to bring the whole building down,” Gabbie babbled in a desperate rush. “I swear. They just asked for the sub-basement blueprints. They paid me fifty thousand to disable the gas leak sensors for a twelve-hour window. They said it was just an insurance job. A small fire.”

Van clenched his fist, but he kept his posture steady. “Who are they? Who paid you?”

“I don't know his real name. He wore a suit, drove a car with tinted windows. But he wasn't a gangster. He was government or high-end corporate. He had a low haircut.”

Military, Van thought.

Gabbie wiped the sweat from his eyes, his breathing shallow and rapid. "But I didn't trust him. Before I handed over the blueprints, I copied the routing number from the offshore wire transfer. I tracked the holding company."

Van took a half-step forward, his focus narrowing down. "And?”

“It is a private holding facility in the central business district,” he rasped. "Zenith Mercantile. Vault 73. The routing numbers traced back to a physical ledger kept there. I saw the transfer authorization slip he left on the dashboard. The signatory stamp was from Black Crown. I couldn't find anything on Black Crown.”

Van got what he needed. He stepped back. “Get in the car. Drive until you hit the border. Don't stop.”

Gabbie didn't need to be told twice. He grabbed his stuff and threw himself into the driver’s seat. The engine roared to life almost immediately.

Van turned away, pulling his collar back up against the wind. He walked slowly across the parking lot, putting distance between himself and the panicked engineer. The man had given him tangible information and verified what he already knew. Van reached the door of his car and pulled on the handle.

Across, Gabbie put his sedan into reverse.

The sound didn't register as a gunshot. It was too quiet. A suppressed hit that hardly cut through the surrounding noise of the parking lot.

The driver's side window of Gabbie's sedan imploded into a shower of tiny glass fragments.

The sedan lurched backward, slamming into the wall of the motel. The car horn blared as Gabbie's lifeless body slumped against the steering wheel.

Van didn't drop his body to the ground. He instantly calculated the angle of the shattered window. The shot had come from a higher position across the street. Just one shot. They hadn't come for him. They had been waiting for Gabbie to come out of his motel room.

Van scanned the rooftops once before he moved. Nothing. Whoever had taken the shot was already gone. Van rushed across the parking lot. He approached the idling sedan. The horn continued its relentless honking.

He looked through the shattered window. Gabbie was dead. Van didn't focus on the body. His eyes followed the movement of the bullet. It had passed clean through the man, tearing through the passenger seat, before burying itself into the frame of the passenger door.

Van pulled a folding knife from his jacket and leaned into the car. He carved away the interior plastic and pried the bullet out of the frame.

He held the bullet up to the motel's light.

It was an armor-piercing round, engineered from a classified alloy designed to completely bypass ballistic tracking.

Van stared at the specialized scoring marks etched into the base.

He recognized the exact manufacturing imperfections of the bullet.

This specialized ammunition wasn't manufactured for the general Valorian military. It couldn't be bought by anybody.

It had only been forged for a highly classified, special black-ops unit. The unit which he led with his special call sign.

Task Force Nexus.