The coordinates led to a warehouse in Marseille that the port authority's records showed had been decommissioned in 2019, sold to a holding company that had been dissolved in 2021, and was currently owned by a parent entity registered in a jurisdiction that Cross's compliance team had described, in a memo he was not supposed to have read, as a filing cabinet inside another filing cabinet.
He went alone. This was not standard procedure. Standard procedure was a team, authorization, documentation, the institutional weight of Interpol behind you when you knocked on a door. Cross had been doing this long enough to know that institutional weight was useful until it wasn't, and that the difference between the two was usually information he didn't have yet.
The warehouse was not empty.
It contained, in careful rows beneath tarps, equipment that Cross could not immediately identify but that gave off the particular energy of things that were not supposed to be found. Scientific equipment, possibly. Heavy, modular, the kind of thing built for function rather than transport. Someone had been very careful about leaving no identifying marks.
On the floor, in the middle of the space, a single folder. No label. Cross crossed to it and opened it.
Inside: a list of twelve names. Eleven of them had small check marks beside them.
He recognized three. All three had died in the past eighteen months. All three deaths had been documented as accidents.
His own name was eleventh on the list.