Chapter Two

Agent McCoy returned to see Mrs. Forbes. He met her at the Field Office, and they were going over Rodger Bradford's interview transcripts. McCoy was explaining to Forbes what Rodger Bradford had said to Mrs. Forbes about Nash.

"So the first question you asked was whether Rodger knew a man with a scar, Nash? And Rodger replied by saying that Nash told him to keep his eyes on the floor." McCoy said. He grabbed the transcripts from Mrs. Forbes and sighed.

"Yeah. And when I asked him what that means, he said that the dark can't see you if you don't look back. He said that to a boy named Baylor a long time ago."

Mrs. Forbes took a deep breath and slowly let out a deep sigh for the second time in a row. McCoy grabbed the transcripts and flipped through the pages.

"And when Rodger talked about Baylor, what did he say?" Agent McCoy wondered.

"I asked him if he ever knew Baylor. He said no because Nash told Rodger he worked for the government." McCoy had a flashback to when he was little. He was a five-year-old boy trapped inside a hotel in Birmingham years ago. Other young children were there: a boy screaming, a girl crying. Agent McCoy sighed after his flashback ended. He spaced out.

"Agent McCoy," said Mrs. Forbes. Agent McCoy kept spacing out.

"Agent McCoy?" Mrs. Forbes said.

Agent McCoy sighed and looked at Mrs. Forbes. He then glanced over at the transcripts once again. "Hey, I'm sorry. Please give me some time to look over these transcripts. I need to open an investigation with Internal Affairs." McCoy cleared his throat.

"Sure," Mrs. Forbes said.

"Thanks." Agent McCoy walked away.

Detective Dalton was a part of the investigation, but McCoy wasn't having it. He wanted to investigate this case only within his jurisdiction. But he hated the fact that Dalton was a part of the case too. So McCoy was in his office reading over the copies of the transcripts.

Detective Dalton came knocking on McCoy's door, and McCoy looked up at him. McCoy's heart rate was spiking, and his vision narrowed from the shock of reading a message. He folded the specific page containing the trigger phrase and slipped it under his jacket.

Detective Dalton asked McCoy if he had found any new evidence in the investigation, and McCoy sighed and nodded no. "Well, we only know that Rodger is reunited with his parents, and they're under protective custody in case Nash and Marbel find them." Detective Dalton understood.

"Yeah. So tell me why you just hid a piece of evidence under your jacket?" Detective Dalton asked. Agent McCoy realized he had been caught. So he pulled out the copies of the transcripts and handed them over to Detective Dalton.

Detective Dalton grabbed the transcripts from Agent McCoy and looked at the copies. "So, Rodger unfortunately said in the interview that he knew a boy named Baylor," said Agent McCoy.

"What?" Detective Dalton asked.

"Yeah. It says in the transcripts. Baylor was this young boy who was also kidnapped, tortured, beaten, raped, and almost killed by Nash and Marbel. He was ten years old at the time."

McCoy had another flashback. The flashback ended.

"So, is this Baylor guy safe now?" Detective Dalton wondered.

"Yes. He now works for the FBI. He's working in the Field Office here in Birmingham." Agent McCoy sighed. He closed his eyes for a second and slowly opened them. Detective Dalton asked Agent McCoy if he was feeling okay.

"Yeah. It's just that this Baylor guy has kept his secret for a long time. I just know that he is somewhere in this field office working on an assignment. He is unfortunately not in his office at the moment."

Detective Dalton nodded and said, "Okay?" He frowned.

"Sorry, I'm just trying to wrap my head around this whole thing. Rodger Bradford was five years old at the time of the abduction. He was missing for five years. Unfortunately, Nash would take Rodger for money, and Rodger said in the interview that it was for a bigger deal." Detective Dalton flipped the pages.

"Did Rodger ever say what deal?" Agent McCoy nodded and answered no.

"No. He was too scared to say."

McCoy leaned back in his chair behind his desk. "He said he heard sounds. Rodger said that he heard cars and trucks driving by. I'm thinking he was in some kind of hotel or maybe a house?" McCoy wondered.

At the NYPD this time, Dalton printed out the CODIS sheet. He looked at the physical description of the 2006 child victim—same age, same distinct scars, same origin city as Agent McCoy. Dalton slid the paper across the desk to McCoy and said, "CODIS says that the monsters we are hunting have done this before. And according to the federal database, they said their first victim had escaped the nightmare." McCoy sighed. McCoy had another flashback in which he was screaming as a ten-year-old boy, scared and begging for Nash and Marbel to let him go. The flashback ended once again.

"Look at this, Agent McCoy. The DNA from Ramos's jacket matches a John Doe file from fifteen years ago. The notes said they had another boy. It's an M.O., same psychological abuse... but look at the disposition line. Victim escaped from custody." Detective Dalton said. "The kid broke out of a locked basement, ran three miles through a thunderstorm, and survived. This kid swept his way out of the basement. Some brave boy." Detective Dalton continued.

Agent McCoy was forced to sit there listening to his partner praise his own childhood survival story. He had to keep his face completely blank, as his pulse was high enough to make him feel like he was going to die.

"Darn it. The digital file cuts off here. Because it's a juvenile victim file form over a decade old, the identity, the victim's real name, and the current location of the escaped kid are sealed under federal privacy laws. It just gives a case number: ORI-3304-Child." Dalton turned to McCoy. "Your Bureau, McCoy. You have the keys to the kingdom. Log into your federal terminal and pull up case ORI-3304. If we can find this escaped victim, he's the only person alive who can tell us how Nash and Marbel handle the pressure."

Agent McCoy instantly knew that he did not want Dalton to find out that he was the victim. So he had to exploit the firewall between FBI databases, manipulate the physical paperwork, and control his own psychological reactions. Dalton was a smart homicide detective, so McCoy could not just rely on luck—he had to be highly trained to know that he was smarter than Dalton.

The terminal screen pulsed with a steady clinical green light, casting long, fractured shadows across the cramped field office. Agent McCoy forced his shoulders to drop a fracture of an inch, mimicking a tired federal bureaucrat adjusting to an unwelcome night shift. Inside his chest, his heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird, but his face remained a mask of cool, unbothered competence.  Dalton was leaning too close. McCoy could smell the bitter tang of the detective's third cup of gas station coffee which he tried to ignore. Dalton's eyes weren't watching the computer; they were watching the side of McCoy's neck looking for the telltale throb of a racing carotid artery. Agent McCoy sighed. "The system is lagging," says McCoy. His voice was flat, pitched intentionally lower than his natural speaking tone to mask subtle tremors of adrenaline.

"Quantico runs an automated diagnostic sweet at 2200 hours.  It throttles the local node bandwidth." Dalton worked his way this time. "Just type, McCoy." Dalton said.

The floorboards made a creaked noise under the heavy work boots. "We don't have time for a lecture on federal IT infrastructure. ORI-3304. Let's see what it looks like." McCoy's fingers suspended above the console, terminal keys reflecting the cold blue hum of the server racks. He didn't type. He didn't move. He just stares at the prompt blinking back at him. "Alright McCoy, any day now."
Dalton said.

"I'm looking," answered Agent McCoy. " But you're not going to like it." With a sharp tap of the enter key, the screen split into two windows.

The code scrolled by a feverish speed, bleeding yellow lights: warning. In the center, a spinning wireframe map of the eastern coastline flickered, its nodes rapidly blinking from green to dark dead grey colors. "That is not an infrastructure. That's a funeral."

McCoy successfully manipulated the FBI terminal to lock away his own past as the "ORI-3304," victim, leading Detective Dalton to believe a security protocol destroyed the file. While pretending to battle system wipe, he hid the evidence under his jacket, ultimately shifting their focus from the cold case to tracking kidnappers' current financial movements. Now Agent McCoy was back home and using the wipe. 

McCoy looked deadbolt. He was leaning his forehead against the solid wood of his front door until his breathing subsided. The house was silent and Agent McCoy took a deep breath need he could even turn to face the kitchen table. The silence of his house was deafening after the chaos in the FBI bullpen. Unzipping his jacket, he reached into the inner lining and pulled out the wipe.

It was still warm and Agent McCoy looked at it. He held it up in the dim light of the kitchen island and this tiny piece of hardware was the definition of his own scary past. "ORI-3304" was gone from the bureau's network, buried beneath a phantom glitch. Now he had just made sure it stayed dead. He set it down on the counter. His fingers were steady again.

The hunt for the kidnappers' money could wait an hour. He had to erase the evidence in his hand. McCoy forces himself to remain angry into the computer. He discovers the financial movements aren't a distraction anymore. They are real and are happening right now. McCoy sees hundreds of rapid, automated micro-transactions.

The numbers didn't blink; they cascaded. Across the wide grid of his high-resolution monitor, dozens of distinct ledger lines were updating simultaneously, scrolling upward in a blur of fluorescent dark green text. Each transaction was a tiny drop—$120, $340,$ $215—scartered across a labyrinth of digital payment processors, mobile banking apps, decentralized online wallets.

It was an automated smurfing network, executing thousands of micropayments to bypass federal tracking systems. McCoy leaned in close, his keyboard clocking with furious, staccato strikes as he isolated the source code. His chest tightened. This wasn't a static archive of a closed operation.

The timestamps on the incoming strings matched the clock on his wall. It was ticking up second by second. It was a live pipeline. Money was flooding out of a blind trust and fracturing across the globe, bleeding through the dark web right under the FBI's nose. He targeted the targeted encryption protocol, slamming his thumb against the key to force a deep-layer scrape. The screen flickered.

The decentralized fog parted for a fraction of a split second, collapsing thousands of tiny branches down into the trunk accounts that were pulling the strings. The generic routing codes resolved, replaced by the identities stamped onto the master digital strongroom.

NASH
MARBEL

McCoy froze, his hands hovering the keys as his secondary files were beginning to populate. His breath caught in the lump of his throat. Nash and Marbel were not running a standard financial fraud scheme. Appended to every single transaction line was a strict, terrifying string of alphanumeric parameters: Unit 04-F, Unit 06-M, Unit 03-F.

The numbers weren't serial inventory codes. They were ages. The fury that had been thrashing inside McCoy's chest suddenly went stone-cold. He wasn't tracking an extortion ring or a standard kidnapping ransom trail. He was looking at a live, industrialized logistics ledger for global child traffickers. And according to the glowing countdown timer next to Nash and Marbel's latest cleared escrow, their next major shipment was being loaded tonight.

Until then, the cool night air hit the seat on McCoys neck, turning it into ice. He kept his right arm pinned flat against his side, his forearm masking the subtle bulge of the suppressed SIG Sauer tucked into his waistband. Dalton stood under the amber glow of the streetlamp, her posture rigid, the manila folder held like a shield against her chest.

"Going somewhere, Agent McCoy?" He had exactly three seconds to choose a face. The panicked tech? The arrogant agent? Or the ghost of ORI-3304? He chose none of them. He chose a man who was running out of time. McCoy stepped off the porch, his boots heavy on the concrete as he walked directly toward him. He didn't slow down until he crossed the invisible boundary of her personal space, forcing him to tilt his chin up to meet his eyes.

"Get back in your car, Dalton," he said, his voice dropping to a harsh, gravelly whisper. Dalton didn't flinch. His eyes tracked the slight tension in his shoulders. "I don't take orders from an IT guy who panics and crashes a federal terminal the second a cold case hits his desk. The bureau's forensic team is pulling the server logs right now, Lacey. You want to tell me what they're going to find under your jacket?"

"They're going to find nothing, because the terminal didn't crash," McCoy lied, the deception sliding out with practiced, clinical ease. "It was hijacked. An external kill-switch executed the moment we opened that file. Someone inside the network was monitoring your terminal, Detective. They wanted you to think it was a glitch so you'd walk away." Dalton's eyes narrowed, the detective in his fighting the instinct to arrest him. "And you just happened to run out the back door?"

"I ran because the routing node that initiated the wipe just pinged a physical location forty blocks from here," McCoy said, leaning closer, weaving the real panic of the digital ledger into his lie. "The financial movements you were looking for? They aren't a cold trail. They are live. Right now, a master account is draining a blind trust to scrub the evidence of an active operation.
I have a local police swarm heading to the coordinates to freeze the perimeter, but if we aren't there when the dust settles, whoever is running the string vanishes."

He glanced down at the folder in her arms, then back to his eyes. The ticking clock in his head was screaming—thirty-eight minutes left. "You can radio this in, wait for an OPR warrant, and let internal affairs spend six months debating who hacked who," McCoy snapped, his hand gripping the frame of her car door. "Or you can get in the passenger seat and see what's at the end of your financial trail. But we choose right now." He threw the folder onto the driver's seat and rounded the hood.

"If this is a ghost chase, McCoy, I'm personally writing the report that strips your clearance."

"Just drive," he said, throwing his weight into the passenger side before she could even hit the unlock button. The door slammed shut, sealing them inside the sterile, fabric-scented cabin of the unmarked Ford.

Dalton threw the car into drive, the tires barking against the asphalt as she accelerated away from the curb. He didn't turn on the sirens, keeping the vehicle a dark, silent shadow slicing through the midnight traffic.
McCoy didn't look at him. He leaned forward, keeping his right side pressed hard against the door panel to ensure the suppressed SIG Sauer didn't clink against the center console.

With his left hand, he fished the vibrating burner phone from his pocket, shielding the screen from her peripheral vision. A text message had replaced the scrambled call. The sender address was a string of dead proxies, but the text was plain, jagged, and precise:

SIRENS HEARD AT THE PORT. YOU BROKE THE RULES, 3304. LEAVE THE DETECTIVE BEHIND, OR HE DIES FIRST.

A cold drop of sweat traced down McCoy's spine. The local police dispatch alert he'd spoofed had worked too well—the sirens had arrived at Nash and Marbel's coordinates. But the traffickers weren't fleeing. They were watching him in real-time, tracking his exact location, and they knew Detective Dalton was sitting right next to him

"Where am I going?" Dalton demanded, his eyes darting to the rearview mirror before locking back onto the road. "Give me a cross-street, McCoy."

"I don't have one," McCoy said. He stroked his hair. Dalton slammed his hand on the steering wheel, "then find one!"

"I DON'T HAVE ONE!!" McCoy shouted. They lost track of Nash and Marbel eventually.