| ALESSANDRO |

FORTY - FOUR

The door shuddered once behind us and sealed the warehouse into its own weather: salt air threading through broken panes, the low animal hum of a portable generator, the thin hiss of cables crossing concrete like black vines. Everything smelled of brine and rust and the stubborn sweetness of jasmine from somewhere I couldn't name. Naples outside was a thousand moving parts; inside, time gathered itself on two battered folding tables and a rolled map.

Imran didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. "Phones off. Names off," he said, and everyone's posture shifted an inch toward the inevitable.

Two people were already in place. Nico hunched cross-legged in front of a nest of laptops, his face washed blue and green by surveillance feeds, the ghost-white of thermal silhouettes patrolling a perimeter they didn't know was being studied. Eva leaned against a crate, sleeves pushed to the elbow, a compact pistol disassembled on a black cloth in front of her. She cleaned each piece like prayer beads, slow and exact, the smell of gun oil muscling into the salt. Imran already told me about both. 

A heel clicked on the iron stair. Lila stepped into the light with the unhurried grace of someone who had never needed to rush to be first. She wore dark trousers that made a secret of their expense and a black silk blouse that shouldn't have belonged in a room like this and somehow did. Her light-brown hair fell loose, catching the monitor glow in copper strands. The hazel of her eyes held the screens and sent their light back warmer.

"You brought me to a sauna for spies," she said, mouth grazing a smile. "How very you, Khan."

Imran didn't give her the satisfaction of a laugh, but his eyes softened half a degree. "We work with what we have."

"And sometimes with who," she murmured, glancing at me. "Yasmine." She offered a cool hand. "Ready to crawl through a throat the sea forgot to swallow?"

"If it brings me to him," I said, and my voice didn't shake the way my fingers wanted to.

Nico spun a monitor toward us. The lie of Le Caverne Wellness & Spa unrolled in satellite gray, tidy as a floor plan, deceitful as a lullaby. Three pale wings hugged a courtyard. A service road curved in a clean question-mark toward a gate. Beyond, the cliff dropped to a slick of black and a white seam where waves gnawed at stone.

"Let's keep it simple," Nico said, which meant it wouldn't be. His accent clipped consonants like wire. "Outer gate: dual mag-locks, mirrored cameras, dog in twenty-five-minute loops, rent-a-cop muscles with maritime training. Predictable. Boring. Deadly if you get sentimental."

Eva's mouth tipped. "I don't do sentimental."

"The flaw is the old city's," Nico continued. His finger tapped a scar running under the north wing. "Storm drain. Officially collapsed. Actually ignored. Still connects to the maintenance labyrinth under the spa."

"How tight?" I asked.

"Shoulders scrape," he said. "Knees regret. Spiders write sonnets about you."

"Water?" Imran asked.

Nico's hands fell into a rhythm on the keys. A municipal page, an engineering diagram stolen from a cloud at three in the morning, filled the screen. "Pump station here. If we cut power, level drops forty centimeters for fifteen minutes. That's your crawl. Then backup generator kicks. Water says ciao."

Eva's fingertip tapped the pump icon. "Entry?"

"Service hatch with a laughable padlock," Nico said. "Cameras on approach. I loop them for twelve minutes. After that, the system forces a reset. You reappear as yourselves and not as ghosts."

"Zwölf," Lila repeated quietly, as if the German made it sharper. "Twelve minutes to vanish and reappear with a man chained in a basement."

Imran leaned over the table until the map owned the whole of him. "Roles. Nico stays outside—eyes, alarms, cameras. Eva with me and Yas into the storm drain. Lila, you drive the south service road and act like a rumor if anything official stirs. In the basement, Eva secures exit path and marks locks. Yas and I find Alessandro. No heroics. No improvising. We move on timing, not hope."