Team Three was sent to secure the foster home. “Carter, you’re with Team One,” Victor ordered over the radio.
Mike gave a short nod and adjusted the camouflage paint on his face. He hadn’t slept in more than three days, but now his body felt wired tight.
The seizure of the clinic went smoothly, without a single stray shot. Tactical officers entered through second-floor windows on silent ropes. Mike was the first man into the chief doctor’s office.
The doctor was asleep on a leather couch surrounded by folders of black-market records. When he opened his eyes, he found himself staring into the muzzle of a pistol held by the man he had sentenced to a living death.
“Remember me, Doctor?” Mike said quietly. “Time for your own diagnosis. Conspiracy. Fraud. Maybe worse. Visiting hours are over.”
The whimpering doctor, trying to hide behind his white coat, was dragged into the hallway. Mike was already running for the special ward.
The door to Room Four flew open under a heavy kick.
“Ellen!”
He lifted her carefully into his arms. She cried out and threw up her hands against the glare of tactical flashlights. The drugs still clouded her eyes.
Then she caught the smell of his old field jacket—that mix of wool, cold air, and the life she used to know. She froze. Her fingers clamped onto his sleeve so tightly her knuckles turned white.
“Mike… did you really come?” she whispered.
“It’s over,” he said. “Nobody touches you again. We’re going home.”
“Victor, get medical from the agency hospital here now,” someone called.
Ellen was handed carefully to the arriving medics. Mike didn’t waste a second. He climbed into the armored vehicle heading for the last and most important stop: the foster home.
At the same time, the rest of town was coming apart for the men who had run it. Organized crime officers hit the boss’s mansion through the glass roof. The local kingpin tried to shoot his way out with an expensive collector’s rifle, but he was overwhelmed in seconds.
At the construction site, the same thugs who had made threatening calls were thrown face-first into wet concrete. The foreman tried to flush payoff lists down a toilet, but officers caught him before he got the handle down.
Mike arrived at the foster home gates just as the sky began to pale. The local security guards scattered at the sight of armored vehicles.
He ran down a long hallway that smelled of bleach and institutional soap. “Katie! Katie!” he called, opening door after door.
He found her in the corner of a large cold dorm room…
