Alex didn’t go dark. He didn’t vanish without warning, not in the middle of a case this loaded, not with Elias Ward circling the edges, not with Charlotte suddenly in the blast radius.
Noah opened the tracking app. Their team protocol, redundant, encrypted, always on. He searched for Alex’s ID tag.
Nothing. No GPS. No tower triangulation. No signal bounce. Not even a shadow ping. His stomach turned, cold and sharp.
A dead signal could be a glitch. But no trace at all? That was deliberate. He looked at Ruth, his eyes filled with rare panic. “Baby, grab your coat.” He picked up his jacket, already calling Brad.
“Yeah?” Brad answered, voice lighter than usual.
“Where did you drop Alex?”
Brad paused at the edge in Noah’s voice. “Conference center. He was going to talk to Charlotte. Said he needed to clear the air. Get straight on some things. He had something to unload.”
“Did he contact you after? Anything?”
“No. I figured he needed space. Why?”
“He’s off-grid.” Noah yanked open the door. “Phone’s dead. Tracker’s blank. He didn’t just shut down, Brad, he’s gone.”
A beat of silence. “That’s not like him.”
“No. It’s not.”
Noah killed the call and immediately called Charlotte. She answered on the first ring, “Noah?”
“What happened after you and Alex talked?”
She exhaled, tense already. “We talked—Ward, Elias, the visits. He was angry but calm. Focused. We were in the task force room maybe forty minutes. I dropped him at my place so he could grab his SUV. Said he was heading out.”
“Where?”
“A contact in Pierre. Some militia guy. Said if anyone knew about a black site, it’d be him. Called him harmless.”
“He took his SUV?”
“Yes. Said it wouldn’t take long. That he’d meet me at Sophie’s after. Noah, that was six hours ago. I expect him any minute.”
Noah’s stomach dropped. Cold swept in like a switch had flipped.
He didn’t say goodbye, just ended the call and dialed Ethan.
“Talk to me,” Ethan said.
“Alex is missing.”
“What kind of missing?”
“No phone. No signal. No tracker. Charlotte says he left for Pierre six hours ago. Nothing since.”
“Shit,” Ethan muttered. “No location data?”
“Scrubbed. Not failed. Wiped. No pings, no dead zones. Clean as a ghost pull. This isn’t bad reception—this was surgical.”
“He was meeting a militia contact?”
“I think I know who. I’ll start digging. Can you track the SUV?”
Silence for a beat, then Noah heard movement. Ethan was already shifting into gear.
