September 5, 2025 · I-10 East, Louisiana · 21:00 (CST)
The I-10 East was wet and mostly empty and the rain had been coming down since Baton Rouge without any indication it intended to stop. The Aventador's wipers worked at the pace of something that found the rain more of a suggestion than an obstacle and the matte black body moved through the Louisiana night at a velocity that the speed limit signs had given up trying to address several parishes back.
The Night-Wing had put down at The Hive at 07:00 that morning. He had spent four hours running the full Hive reactivation check — every server bank, every surveillance channel, every weapon in the armory, Albert's Samurai Edge still in its glass case where it had been since 2013 unchanged. Then he had pulled the Aventador out of the cargo bay and pointed it east on I-10 and driven.
Eight hours. Texas giving way to Louisiana. The landscape flattening and greening and growing wet. The air coming through the climate system changing quality — heavier, warmer, carrying the specific organic sweetness of bayou country that no climate system fully filtered out. The Gulf Coast pressing in from the south. The Spanish moss beginning on the trees.
New Orleans was forty minutes ahead. The rain had not stopped once.
The in-ear comms vibrated. He tapped once.
∗ ∗ ∗
"I genuinely despise this weather," he said. "It has not stopped since Louisiana began."
"September in New Orleans," Ingrid said. "Ninety percent humidity and twenty rain days a month. You chose your timeline."
"I did not choose the timeline. The Connections chose the timeline."
"Then blame them for the rain." A pause — the specific pause she used when she was moving from the opening exchange to something she had been sitting with. "Congratulations, by the way. Rebecca told me. I could not let it go without saying something."
"She tells everyone," Alen said.
"She tells the people who matter to her," Ingrid said. "Which is not quite the same thing."
He did not say anything to that because it was accurate and he had no correction available.
"So," Ingrid said, and the quality of her voice shifted slightly — the professional register present but something underneath it that was not quite professional, not quite playful, precisely calibrated to the space between the two. "When will it be my turn?"
The Aventador held its speed through a long curve and the rain came down on the windshield in sheets and Alen was quiet for a full three seconds which was considerably longer than his standard response time for anything.
"What did you just say," he said.
Ingrid laughed. Not the professional laugh she deployed in briefings — the other one, the one that existed below the DSO handler register and that he had heard exactly twice in fourteen years and that she reserved for the moments when she had said something that had produced an effect she found genuinely satisfying.
"Calm down," she said. "I'm joking. Mostly."
"Ingrid," he said.
"Work," she said, the laughter settling back into the professional baseline. "I know. I'm stopping."
The rain came down. The road ran east.
"Zoe Baker," he said.
"Zoe Baker," she confirmed. "Thirty-one. Marigny neighbourhood, Frenchmen Street, apartment above the Blue Corner bar. Current alias, current employer, current routine — all in the package I sent to Trinity this morning." A pause. "The routine is what concerns me. She wakes at 06:00, leaves for the Courier-Tribune offices at 07:30, returns home at approximately 21:00. Alone both directions. Same route. Same timing. She has been doing this for four months without varying the pattern."
"She is a reporter," Alen said. "Not a field operative."
"No," Ingrid said. "But she filed a stalking report with the NOPD six weeks ago. Someone following her. The department did not pursue it." A beat. "She goes to the same diner every evening — Café Du Monde adjacent. A man named Thibodeau runs it. He is a contact of mine from the field period. I have a table booked for you under the name Conrad. He knows the name."
"She eats there every night," Alen said.
"Same table. Same order. She smokes outside after. She is under considerable stress and has been for several months — the investigation has been closing in on something and she knows it and she does not know how to stop now that she is this close."
"One more thing," Ingrid said. "For the parking and the safe house — Helena Harper. She moved to Frenchmen Street eighteen months ago. Blue house, north side. I have already sent her your details."
He let that land for a moment. Helena Harper. Former Secret Service, former DSO adjacent, Leon Kennedy's partner in Tall Oaks and China. At 37 she had walked away from every institutional affiliation she had ever held and was living in New Orleans for reasons that were probably similar to the reasons every other person in his network had ended up somewhere unexpected doing something that was not what they had originally planned.
"She left the DSO," he said.
"She left everything," Ingrid said. "She and Leon — that chapter closed a long time ago. She needed something outside of it." A pause that was not quite neutral. "She moved on, Alen. Let her have that."
"I was not going to—"
"I know," Ingrid said. "I'm just saying it first. Frenchmen Street, blue house, north side. She is expecting you."
The call ended. The rain continued. The New Orleans city lights appeared on the horizon ahead — the specific warm glow of a city built on water reflecting its own light back up through the humidity.
∗ ∗ ∗
Frenchmen Street at nine in the evening was exactly what Trinity had described and considerably more alive than the description had accounted for. The crowd overflowed the pavement onto the street itself — not chaotic, the specific organised flow of a place that had been doing this for a very long time and had developed its own logic about how bodies moved through it. Brass band audible from two blocks before he turned onto the street. String lights on every wrought-iron balcony above. The rain had reduced to a warm persistent drizzle that nobody on Frenchmen Street was paying any attention to because this was September in New Orleans and rain was simply the atmosphere being itself.
The Aventador moved through the crowd at the pace the crowd permitted, which was slow, the matte black body drawing the specific quality of attention that a car that is not quite possible to look away from draws — not alarm, just the involuntary register of something that does not fit the category of things normally encountered on a music street in the rain.
The blue house was on the north side, exactly where Ingrid had said. Large, Creole-style, the deep blue paint catching the string-light glow from the bar across the street. Wrought-iron front gate. The upper balcony dark. A light in the ground-floor window.
He parked the Aventador against the kerb and got out into the warm rain and walked to the door and knocked.
Five times. Evenly spaced.
A pause. A footstep on the other side of the door. A brief, professionally silent assessment through the peephole — he stood still and let the assessment happen because the woman on the other side of the door had been doing security work for the better part of fifteen years and was reading everything about the situation simultaneously, including the Aventador at the kerb with no visible registration plates and the specific modifications that marked it as something considerably beyond civilian.
A phone rang inside.
Helena Harper's voice, muffled through the door — the specific, slightly exasperated quality of someone who had been expecting a call but not quite at this particular moment: *"Jesus, Hunnigan, is this the man you're talking about — black hooded figure with a matte black Aventador on my doorstep?"*
Ingrid's response was not audible from outside.
A breath. A decision. The sound of a deadbolt.
The door opened.
Helena Harper was thirty-seven years old and 5'7" and wearing a sleep shirt and had the specific quality of someone who had been asleep for approximately forty minutes before being woken — the hair not fully committed to its daytime arrangement, the eyes sharp regardless because sharp was apparently a condition that persisted through sleep for former Secret Service. She was looking up at the hooded figure in her doorway with the contained, direct assessment of a woman who had been in worse situations than this and had the scar tissue to prove it.
"You must be Alen," she said. No question mark. Confirmation.
"Did I come at the wrong hour, Miss Harper," he said.
"Helena," she said. "And no. I sleep early in the rain. Habit." She looked past him at the Aventador, then back at him. "Before you come in — garage is around the side. That car does not stay on this street. Frenchmen attracts a specific kind of attention and I'd prefer not to add to it."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The rain came down between them on the doorstep.
"The garage," he said.
"Side entrance," she said. "I'll open it from inside."
She closed the door. Thirty seconds later the side garage door opened — automatic, smooth, the interior lit and clean and carrying the specific ordered quality of a space maintained by someone who had been trained to maintain equipment and could not stop doing it even in retirement.
He drove the Aventador in slowly. The garage door came down behind it. Helena came through the interior door into the garage and looked at the car for a moment — at the matte black, the modifications, the absence of any identifying markings — with the expression of a woman who had clocked all of it in the time it took the door to close and had decided not to ask about it yet.
She looked at the man who had come with it. At the hood, still up. At the height. At the way he stood in her garage.
"Ingrid said you need a base of operations," Helena said. "And information on a reporter named Baker who is about to get herself killed."
"Yes," he said.
"Then come inside," she said. "I'll make coffee. You can tell me what you actually need and I'll tell you whether I can give it."
She went back through the interior door. He pulled the hood down. The platinum-blonde hair caught the garage light.
He followed her in.
Outside on Frenchmen Street the brass band played through the rain and the crowd moved and the string lights glowed orange in the wet air and Zoe Baker's apartment window was lit two buildings north and she had no idea that the night had just changed.