Evan shut the drawer and rose, trying to dissipate the tightness in his chest. He sat on his bed, a Maglev that literally floated two feet off the floor, the slab held airborne by neodymium rare-earth magnets. Closing his eyes, suspended between floor and ceiling, he focused on his breathing, dropped inside his body, felt the weight of his bones inside his flesh. It usually helped him find tranquillity.

But not tonight.

Images strobed through the darkness behind his eyelids. Hector Contrell’s shoulders jerking back as if yanked by strings. Ink pooling in the hollow of his neck, a punctuation mark for the FUCK YOU tattoo. Those mighty legs collapsing, a slow-motion avalanche crumble. The mess on the floor upstairs around the mattress—residue-stained Styrofoam ramen bowls, empty burrito wrappers, crumpled protein packets. The rib cage of the house, bare studs scrolling by as Evan crept inside. The hall telescoping out like some Kubrickian horror, each empty doorframe replaced by another and another.

Evan’s eyes flew open.

No doors. Which meant no door handles. That was what had been nagging at him. The house was open to the world, fluttering tarps in place of walls.

No locked area for the kidnapped girls.

The logistics of moving them around the world were complicated. There had to be a holding area somewhere off premises.

Which meant the possibility existed that another young woman remained in it.

Evan hopped off the bed and moved back into the bathroom, stepping into the shower. He squeezed the lever handle for the hot water, and a moment later came a faint click. The lever, keyed to his palm print, doubled as a doorknob. He turned it the wrong way, and a door, disguised by the tile pattern of the shower wall, swung inward.

He stepped into the Vault.

Four hundred asymmetrical square feet crowded by the underbelly of the public stairs to the roof, the walled-off storage space served as Evan’s armory and ops center. From the weapon lockers to the sheet-metal desk burdened with monitors, servers, and cables, it contained all the tools of his trade. The screens displayed pirated security feeds of Castle Heights. Every hallway, every stairwell, every access door.

He breathed in the smell of damp concrete, dropped into his chair, and rolled to the L-shaped desk to access the law-enforcement databases. All the major criminal and civil records, forensic files, and ballistics registers—anything that the local police could dig up on the Panasonic Toughbook laptops wired into their patrol cars—Evan could access.

His training had consisted of learning a little bit about everything from people who knew everything about something. He was hardly an expert hacker, but he’d broken into a few cruisers and uploaded a piece of reverse SSH code into their laptops—a back door for him to get into the system anytime he beckoned.