Reyes’ face went flat. She grabbed the handset and listened. Her jaw tightened. Then she turned to me, and for the first time I heard the coldness of the world in her voice.
“They’ve hit Gage’s van,” she said. “Someone intercepted it on a feeder road. He’s alive but they took the hard drives. We’ve got agents on route.”
The breath left me.
“No,” Tyler whispered. “Gage was our last mover. He put the backups on different servers, but the drives in the van were important.”
“Do we have redundancy?” Reyes asked.
“We do,” Tyler said, voice thin with calculation. “We have fragments. But someone’s trying to starve us of proof and speed.”
The rest of the afternoon turned into a blur of phone calls and court filings. Reyes secured emergency subpoenas to freeze suspected accounts. Marisol publi
