The safe house in Baltimore smelled of dust and old memories.
Three days after she met with Reeves at Union Station, Catherine arrived first, two hours before the others were scheduled to appear. She needed time to check for surveillance, to verify the location was still secure, to prepare for the moment when four dead people would gather in one room for the first time in sixteen months.
The house belonged to a French Resistance contact who'd fled to America in 1940. Three stories, narrow and cramped, tucked between identical row houses on a street where neighbors minded their own business. The perfect place to disappear.
Catherine walked through each room, checking windows, testing floorboards, looking for signs someone had been here since her last visit. Everything was as she'd left it—dusty furniture covered in sheets, blackout curtains already in place, a basement exit that led to an alley three blocks away.
She set up the documents on the dining room table. Her files. Reeves's folder. Sarah Brennan's father's information, which had finally arrived yesterday via dead drop. The complete picture, or as complete as they could make it.
Now they just needed to see it together.
Rick arrived next, looking thinner than Catherine remembered. Sixteen months of being John Martin—quality inspector, quiet bachelor, invisible man—had worn on him in ways that showed around his eyes.
"Christ, it's good to see you," he said, and pulled her into a brief, fierce hug.
"You too." Catherine stepped back, studying him. "How bad is it in Detroit?"
"FBI's been asking questions. Not about me specifically, but about workers who take notes, who seem too interested in classified production." Rick pulled off his coat. "I had to burn half my documentation last month. Too risky to keep it."
"But you remember the patterns?"
"Every number. Every shipment. Every discrepancy." He tapped his head. "It's all up here. I just can't prove it anymore."
David arrived twenty minutes later, moving with the careful precision of someone who'd spent too long being watched. His hands trembled slightly as he set down his briefcase—filled with copied War Department files that could get him executed for treason.
"Anyone follow you?" Catherine asked.
"Doubled back four times. Changed trains twice. If someone followed me, they're better than I am." David looked around the safe house. "Where's Webb?"
"Not here yet. He said he might be late—something about the Philadelphia investigation."
They waited. Catherine made coffee on the ancient stove. Rick paced. David organized his files with obsessive care, arranging them by date, by category, by connection to Hartley's network.
An hour passed. Then another.
Catherine was starting to worry when they heard footsteps on the stairs. Webb appeared in the doorway, looking worse than any of them. His eyes were bloodshot, his suit rumpled, and he moved with the careful steadiness of someone who'd been drinking but was trying very hard not to show it.
"Sorry I'm late," he said. "Had to shake a tail. Or thought I did. Hell, I don't even know anymore."
He dropped a folder on the table—photographs from the Meridian warehouse, financial records from Harris Freight, testimony he'd extracted from Michael Hartford, the terrified bookkeeper.
"Hartford talked," Webb said. "Gave me everything. Names, dates, amounts. He's been keeping a second set of books for two years—the real transactions versus what they report to the government. The man's a wreck. Thinks they're going to kill him."
"They might," Catherine said quietly. "Can he testify?"
"If we can protect him. Big if." Webb looked at the documents spread across the table. "Is that everything?"
"Everything we have. Sixteen months of investigation, all in one place." Catherine gestured to the table. "Sit. Let's see what we've built."
For the next three hours, they reconstructed the architecture of Prometheus Protocol.
Rick's production records from Detroit showed equipment being manufactured to specification, then diverted through Meridian Holdings for "modification." The modifications were sabotage—inferior materials substituted, quality control bypassed, defects engineered into critical components.
David's procurement files from the War Department showed the orders that initiated those production runs. Requisitions that looked routine but contained subtle changes—specifications altered in ways that wouldn't be caught unless you knew what to look for.
Webb's financial records from Philadelphia showed the money flow. Government payments to contractors. Contractor payments to Meridian Holdings for "services." Meridian payments to shell companies. Shell company payments back to government officials through campaign contributions, consulting fees, board positions.
A closed loop. Self-sustaining. Billions of dollars moving in circles.
And Catherine's correlation analysis showed the cost: battles lost, soldiers killed, wars prolonged. All because someone had decided that American lives were worth less than profit margins.
"Jesus," Rick whispered, staring at the timeline they'd constructed. "It's not just Kasserine. It's everything. Every major operation that's gone wrong in the past year—"
"Has a procurement irregularity two to three weeks before," David finished. "I know. I've been tracking it for months, but seeing it all together like this..."
He trailed off, overwhelmed by the scale.
Webb pulled out Hartford's testimony. "The bookkeeper says it started small. 1939, just a few contracts, a few percent skimmed off the top. But after Pearl Harbor, it exploded. War production budgets with minimal oversight. Billions flowing through the system. And Hartley's network positioned to capture a percentage of all of it."
"How much?" Catherine asked.
Webb checked his notes. "Hartford estimates they've stolen two billion dollars since Pearl Harbor. Stolen or diverted, depending on how you count it. And that's just the money he can trace. There's probably more."
The number hung in the air. Two billion dollars. More than most countries' entire war budgets.
"But here's what really terrifies me," Webb continued. "Hartford says the money isn't being spent. It's being invested. In facilities, in personnel, in infrastructure for something that comes after the war."
Catherine pulled out Reeves's document—the post-war planning memo. "This is what they're building."