I nodded grimly. “So they take people to secret prisons in other countries where they can get away with it. Germany must have done a deal with the Russians to use this old Soviet prison in Siberia. This guy who captured JD, Otto Becker, is high up in German intelligence. He probably sends prisoners there all the time. It wouldn’t be hard for him to stash JD there while he figures out what to do with him.”

“Lily, can you show us where this place is?” asked Kian.

A map of Europe appeared on the screen. It zoomed in on Moscow and then started panning north.

And it kept going.

And going.

The cities stopped. The towns stopped. Then the roads stopped and there was just…nothing. Just snow and forests. And still the camera kept moving. One by one, the team reacted, cursing and groaning. Even Cal, who’d spent years living in the wilderness.

The camera finally reached a black dot: the prison. Kian was tapping on his phone, his face grim. “Just to give you a sense of scale,” he said, “See that dark blob, south of the prison? That’s a lake. It’s the size of Belgium.”

We all stared at the screen, slack-jawed. This place was hundreds of miles from civilization.

“It’s minus twenty degrees there,” Kian told us, “and that’s during the day. At night, it can get down to minus thirty Fahrenheit.”

For the next three hours, we studied photos of the prison. The place was a fortress, guarded by heavily-armed German soldiers, in the middle of a frozen hell. Getting JD out was going to be near impossible. And everyone was exhausted: we’d been on the go for two days straight. I shook my head. “Let’s pick this up tomorrow.”

At that moment, we were bathed in blue light. The big screen at one end of the table, the one we’d never managed to get hooked up, was glowing. Erin stood up from where she’d been kneeling behind it. “It works now,” she told us shyly.

I walked Erin home. At the door, she turned back to look at me and the sight of her there, small and vulnerable and so alone, made me want to just pick her up and hug her. She’d lost everything, thanks to me. I had to look after her. I promised JD I would. But as that protective need welled up, it brought all the other emotions with it.

I forced myself to step back into the cold darkness. “I’ll let you know as soon as we have a plan,“ I told her. And trudged away into the snow.

When I hit Main Street, I stopped and looked longingly at the lights of Krüger’s Tavern. A beer or two would help me unwind…