You can own every single ship on the ocean, but you are still at the mercy of the man who controls the steel tracks waiting at the shore.
The air inside the secure regional command hub in Almaty was thin and cool, smelling faintly of heated server racks and fresh mountain rain from the peaks outside. Heavy blast windows looked out over the sweeping concrete railyards of the central Asian terminal, where thousands of freight cars sat beneath towering yellow gantry cranes. Ethan Vance stood before a massive glass projection table, his large hands flat against the glowing edge as the data from the North Sea drive unspooled into the local terminal. Sarah Vance sat directly across from him, her eyes tracking the complex financial streams flashing across her monitors.
"The data drive from the
