Brendan crouched down to her level. This was the hard part. Emma was smart enough to sense danger, but young enough to be terrified by it. He had to find a balance.
“Remember how I taught you about stranger danger, and how we practiced what to do if someone ever tried to take you?”
Her eyes went wide. “Is someone trying to take me?”
“I’m not going to let that happen. But we’re going to go stay somewhere safe for a few days while I take care of some work stuff. Okay? I need you to pack a bag. Clothes for three days, your tablet, your favorite books. Can you do that?”
Emma nodded, her face serious. “Are we in danger because of your SEAL stuff?”
“I’m going to keep you safe. That’s a promise.”
He pulled her into a hug, breathing in the strawberry scent of her shampoo.
“I need you to be brave, Em. Can you do that for me?”
“I’m always brave,” she said with her mother’s fierce confidence. “Mom said Castros don’t quit.”
“That’s right. We don’t.”
While Emma packed, Brendan made two calls. The first was to Moren Dunn, a social worker he had worked with after Rachel died. She had helped Emma process her grief, and she owed Brendan a favor after he had helped her son get clean and into the Navy. Within twenty minutes, she had agreed to take Emma to a safe house, a women’s shelter she ran that had military-grade security.
The second call was harder.
“Command is going to have my ass,” Raymond said when Brendan explained his plan. “But I’m in. Tom and Saul too. We’ve been sitting behind desks too long anyway. This isn’t official. If it goes sideways, it goes sideways. Someone put your kid up for sale, Brendan. That’s a line you don’t cross.”
By the time Moren arrived to pick up Emma, Brendan had traced the auction server to a hosting service in Romania. The service was known for turning a blind eye to illegal content for the right price. But there was a vulnerability in their security Brendan knew how to exploit. Years of cyberwarfare training were not just for show.
“I’ll call you every night before bed,” Brendan told Emma as she climbed into Moren’s car. “And this will all be over soon.”
“Will you catch the bad guys?” Emma asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. Because they’re really bad if they’re messing with you.”
Brendan watched the car disappear down the street, then returned to his computer. The auction page was still active, the timer ticking down. Five hours, eleven minutes now. The bid had jumped to $2.7 million.
He pulled up the source code and started digging.
By midnight, Brendan had assembled a picture that made his blood run cold. The auction site wasn’t just selling Emma. He had found seventeen other listings in the archived sections, all children of military personnel, some as young as five. The oldest had been fourteen. Every single one showed as successfully delivered.
The technical architecture was sophisticated. Multiple proxy servers, cryptocurrency payments, dead drops for information exchange. Whoever was running this had resources and expertise.
But they had made one critical mistake.
They had used the same base-code template for all seventeen auctions.
And that code had a signature.
Brendan recognized it.
Three years ago, he had been part of a joint task force that took down a weapons-trafficking network. The same coding patterns had appeared in their communication systems. They had arrested most of the network, but the technical specialist had slipped away—a man named Clifton McMillan, a former civilian contractor for the Department of Defense who had sold his skills to the highest bidder.
His phone rang.
Raymond.
“Got your intel on Sylvia Castro. You’re going to want to sit down for this.”
Brendan put him on speaker while continuing to type. “Give it to me.”
“She’s in deep gambling debt to a loan shark named Curt Stanton. Ex-military, dishonorably discharged for black-market arms dealing. She owes him four hundred grand. But here’s the interesting part. Stanton has connections to a trafficking network that was never fully dismantled. The same one you worked against three years ago.”
The pieces clicked into place.
Sylvia had needed money desperately. Somehow she had made contact with Stanton. And Stanton, who knew about military families through old contacts, had shown her a way to pay off her debt and then some by providing access to a high-value target: a Navy SEAL’s daughter, trained to be resilient, intelligent, adaptable—exactly the kind of child that would command a premium price in the darkest markets.
“There’s more,” Raymond continued. “We pulled Stanton’s known associates. Clifton McMillan is listed. They’ve been working together for the past eighteen months using the same auction format to move kids. The buyers are all vetted. Wealthy criminals, corrupt politicians, people who want children they can control and mold. They specifically target military kids because they’re trained to be disciplined and obedient.”
Brendan’s jaw clenched so hard he heard his teeth grind.
“Where’s Stanton based?”
