At my father’s funeral, the gravedigger pulled me aside: “Sir, your dad paid me to bury an empty coffin.” I said, “Stop joking.” He slipped me a key and hissed, “Don’t go home. Go to unit 17—NOW.” My phone buzzed. Mom texted, “Come home alone.”…

He knew I was lying.

I knew he knew.

Neither of us mentioned it.

By the time night settled over the waterfront, the world had narrowed to breath, shadow, and the metallic taste of fear.

Patricia’s team moved with a quiet efficiency that made me feel both safer and more useless. They fitted me with a vest, an earpiece, and instructions so simple they were almost insulting: stay behind cover, keep low, do not advance without command, do not fire unless directly threatened. One agent showed me how to disengage the safety on the handgun they reluctantly gave me. Another made me repeat the rule about trigger discipline twice.

I heard the words.

I retained almost none of them.

The warehouse loomed ahead of us like a dead ship run aground—vast, rusted, black against a bruised sky. Broken windows on the upper levels reflected the harbor lights in shattered strips. The air smelled of salt, oil, and old rain.

We approached from the waterside through a drainage channel lined with concrete and weeds.