The detective agency was a single room above a barbershop on Market Street, with "T. REED INVESTIGATIONS" painted on the frosted glass door in letters that were already starting to flake. Webb had chosen Philadelphia deliberately—close enough to New York and Washington for coordination, far enough from both to avoid casual recognition, big enough to disappear in but small enough that a one-man detective agency seemed plausible.
The work was mostly tedious. Insurance fraud, missing persons, suspicious spouses. The kind of cases that paid the rent and maintained the cover of Thomas Reed, former police officer from Chicago (another Catherine fabrication), now making a modest living chasing other people's secrets.
But today's case was different.
Webb sat across from Mrs. Eleanor Hartford, watching her hands twist a handkerchief into knots. She was thirty-four, well-dressed but not wealthy, with the kind of tiredness that came from months of not sleeping properly.
"My husband, Michael," she was saying, her voice barely above a whisper. "He's been... different. Since February. Staying late at work, taking phone calls he won't explain. Last week I found a key in his coat pocket. Not to our house. Not to anywhere I recognize."
Webb made notes, professional and sympathetic. "Has he given any explanation for the late hours?"
"He says it's work. He's a bookkeeper at Harris Freight—that's a shipping company, they handle military contracts. He says the government paperwork is overwhelming, that everyone's working overtime." She looked up, her eyes desperate. "But I know my husband, Mr. Reed. He's lying."
"You think he's having an affair?"
"I don't know. Maybe? But it doesn't feel like that. He's not distant, exactly. He's nervous. Frightened, almost." Mrs. Hartford leaned forward. "Last night he woke up screaming. Said he'd had a nightmare. But when I asked what about, he wouldn't say. He just sat there shaking."
Webb felt something cold settle in his stomach. Nightmares. Shaking. The signs of a man carrying weight he couldn't share.
"I'll look into it, Mrs. Hartford. Discreetly. See what I can find out."
After she left, Webb sat in his small office and stared at the notes. Harris Freight. Military contracts. A bookkeeper who suddenly couldn't sleep.
It could be nothing. An affair, gambling debts, any of the usual personal disasters.
Or it could be something else.
Webb spent the rest of the day on background research. Harris Freight was a medium-sized operation, established 1928, specialized in rail and truck transport. Since Pearl Harbor, they'd picked up several military contracts—supply shipments to training bases, equipment transport for the Navy Yard.
All routine. All legitimate.
But Webb had learned to look beneath the routine.
He made some calls, cashed in some favors from his previous life. By evening, he had Michael Hartford's employment history, home address, known associates. The man was exactly what he appeared to be: a competent bookkeeper, married eight years, no criminal record, no obvious vices.
Which made the nightmares interesting.
Webb began surveillance the next morning. Harris Freight operated out of a warehouse complex near the port, a sprawling collection of buildings that handled cargo for half of Philadelphia's shipping traffic.
Michael Hartford arrived at 7:30 AM, a thin man in an ill-fitting suit, carrying a lunch pail and looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. He worked until 5 PM, emerged looking exhausted, went directly home.
Nothing unusual. Nothing suspicious.
Webb followed him for three days. Same routine, same route, same exhausted shuffle. But on the fourth day, something changed.
Hartford stayed late. Much later. The warehouse began to empty out, workers heading home, trucks finishing their deliveries. By 8 PM, only a handful of vehicles remained in the lot.
Webb watched from his parked car across the street, using binoculars to track movement in the office windows.
At 8:45, a black sedan pulled into the lot. Two men got out—suits, professional bearing, carrying briefcases. They entered through a side door, the kind marked "Office Personnel Only."
Twenty minutes later, Hartford emerged. Even from a distance, Webb could see he was shaking. The man stood by his car for a full minute, just breathing, before he got in and drove away.
Webb didn't follow Hartford. Instead, he waited to see what the two men would do.
They emerged an hour later, carrying the same briefcases but walking differently—heavier, like the cases now contained weight. They loaded the briefcases into the sedan's trunk with care, almost reverence.
Then they drove away.
Webb memorized the license plate and followed at a distance.
The sedan took a winding route through Philadelphia, clearly checking for surveillance. Webb stayed back, using techniques he'd learned in Marine intelligence work. The sedan finally stopped at a warehouse in the industrial district—a building with no signage, no obvious business purpose.
The two men went inside. Lights came on in the upper floor. Webb could see shadows moving behind drawn curtains, but nothing specific.
He waited three hours. The men didn't emerge. Eventually, Webb had to leave—staying too long would risk exposure.
The next day, he checked property records. The warehouse was owned by Meridian Holdings.
The same company Catherine had flagged. The same company referenced in Rick's father's files. The same shell corporation that kept appearing in connection with Prometheus Protocol.
Webb sat in his office, staring at his notes, feeling the pieces start to connect.
Harris Freight had military contracts. Hartford was a bookkeeper there. Hartford was terrified. Two mysterious men had visited, collected something in briefcases, and taken it to a Meridian Holdings warehouse.
It smelled like money laundering. Or weapons trafficking. Or both.
Webb encoded a message for Catherine: MERIDIAN HOLDINGS CONFIRMED ACTIVE. PHILADELPHIA WAREHOUSE. POSSIBLE FINANCIAL OPERATION. NEED SURVEILLANCE TEAM.
But he knew Catherine would say they needed more than surveillance. They needed to get inside that warehouse, see what Meridian was actually doing.
Which meant breaking the law. Crossing a line from observation to action.
Webb pulled open his desk drawer and looked at the items inside: lockpicks, a small camera, a .38 revolver. The tools of a different kind of investigation.
His hands were shaking.
They'd been shaking for weeks now. A tremor he couldn't quite control, especially in the evenings. Worse when he tried to sleep, when the nightmares came—not Hartford's nightmares, but Webb's own. Guadalcanal, Bataan, the Pacific operations he'd participated in before his medical discharge.
Men screaming. Ships burning. The smell of death in tropical heat.
He'd thought civilian work would quiet the memories. It hadn't. If anything, the isolation made them louder.
Webb closed the drawer without touching the tools. Not yet. First, more surveillance. More documentation. Build the case properly.
He spent the next week watching the Meridian warehouse. Photographed everyone who entered and exited. Documented delivery trucks—their cargo hidden, their destinations unmarked. Counted the lights at night, the pattern of activity.
And slowly, the picture emerged.
The warehouse was a hub. Cargo came in from multiple sources—Harris Freight and other shipping companies. It was consolidated, repackaged, and sent out to addresses that Webb couldn't quite trace. The operation was professional, careful, and completely off the books.
On the eighth day of surveillance, Webb saw something that made his blood run cold.
A delivery truck arrived at 3 AM—unusual timing in itself. The driver was waved through by guards who clearly expected him. The truck backed up to a loading dock, and workers began unloading crates.
Military crates. With U.S. Army markings.
Webb photographed everything with his telephoto lens, shooting from a roof across the street. The crates were medium-sized, wooden, marked with alphanumeric codes that meant nothing to Webb but clearly meant something to the workers, who handled them with extreme care.
The unloading took two hours. When it was done, the crates were moved into the warehouse's basement level—Webb could see them being carried down a ramp.
Then the truck left, and the warehouse went dark again.
Webb waited until dawn, then drove to a pay phone and called Catherine's emergency number. She answered on the third ring, her voice thick with sleep.
"It's Thomas. I need to talk. In person. Today."
"How bad?"
"Bad enough. Can you get to Philadelphia by this afternoon?"
"I'll be on the two o'clock train."
They met in a diner near the train station, sitting in a back booth where they could watch the door. Catherine looked exhausted—her Marie Chevalier performance was taking its toll.
Webb showed her the photographs. Her expression didn't change, but he saw her fingers tighten on the coffee cup.
"U.S. Army crates," she said quietly. "Being delivered to a Meridian Holdings warehouse at 3 AM."
"And stored in the basement. Whatever's in those crates, someone doesn't want it on any official inventory."
"Weapons?"
"Maybe. Or ammunition, explosives, equipment. Could be anything."
Catherine studied the photos. "We need to get inside. See what's actually there."
"I was afraid you'd say that."
"You have a problem with breaking and entering?"
Webb laughed, a sound without humor. "I have a problem with getting caught. If this is Prometheus Protocol, they're not going to just arrest us. They'll make us disappear."
"Then we don't get caught." Catherine's voice was cold, professional. "We do this properly. Scout the building, identify security measures, plan the entry point. We go in when the warehouse is empty, get photographs of whatever's in the basement, and get out. No confrontation, no trace."
"And if there are guards?"
"There are always guards. We work around them."
Webb wanted to argue. Wanted to say it was too dangerous, too risky, that they should just document what they'd seen and pass it up the chain to... who? There was no chain. No authority they could trust.
They were on their own.
"Alright," he said finally. "But we'll need a third person. Someone who can handle the technical aspects. Locks, alarms, that sort of thing."
"I know someone. From my refugee network. Former Resistance fighter, very skilled with locks and explosives."
"Explosives?"
"Just locks," Catherine amended. "Probably."
Webb smiled despite himself. "You're building quite a network, Marie."
"So are you, Thomas." She paused. "How are you holding up? Really?"
The question caught him off guard. Webb looked down at his hands—they were shaking again, the tremor worse today than usual.
"I'm functional," he said.
"That's not what I asked."
"It's the only answer that matters." Webb met her eyes. "We don't have the luxury of falling apart, Catherine. You said it yourself last time. We need to hold together long enough to finish this."
"And after?"
"There is no after. This war—both wars—they're going to last for years. We might not survive that long. So I'm just trying to survive today."
Catherine reached across the table and squeezed his hand briefly. "We're going to survive, Thomas. All of us. We're going to expose Prometheus Protocol, and we're going to live to see Hartley answer for what he's done."
Webb wanted to believe her. But he'd seen too many men die with unfinished business, too many promises broken by bullets and bombs and the random cruelty of war.
"When do we hit the warehouse?" he asked instead.
"Soon. Give me two weeks to arrange the technical support. In the meantime, keep watching. Document everything. And Thomas?" She stood to leave. "Take care of yourself. We need you sharp."
After she left, Webb sat in the diner nursing cold coffee and watching the spring rain begin to fall. Philadelphia looked grey and tired, like every American city in wartime—weighed down by rationing and worry and the endless casualty lists from North Africa and the Pacific.
He thought about Michael Hartford and his nightmares. About what the man had seen, what secrets he was carrying that made him wake up screaming.
Webb understood. He carried his own secrets, his own nightmares. The difference was that Hartford could still be shocked by what he'd witnessed. Could still be frightened.
Webb had passed frightened months ago. Now he was just tired.
He paid for the coffee and walked back to his car through the rain. Tomorrow he'd return to surveillance, to watching the Meridian warehouse, to building the case one observation at a time.
But tonight, he'd go back to his small apartment above the detective agency, pour a drink he didn't need, and try to sleep without dreaming of burning ships and screaming men and the look on Coleman's face as he'd gone down under a hail of bullets.
Coleman. The real Coleman, not the identity Winters had stolen.
Another ghost. Another debt.
Webb started the car and drove through the rain, counting the ghosts he owed, trying to calculate what it would take to balance the ledger.
The rain kept falling, and Philadelphia kept turning, and somewhere in a warehouse basement, U.S. Army crates sat waiting to reveal their secrets.