"Have you told the federal team?" Rhett asked. "Yes," Foley replied. "They are moving, but the nearest coordinated response group is still on the road. Hale has accelerated the transfer.
They're loading people tonight." He paused. "Rhett, I need you to understand something. She sent me one last message before they found her. There are fifteen people inside, and several may be transported before midnight."
Rhett leaned against the handlebars and looked at the building. Fifteen was a number that refused to remain abstract now that he had seen the photographs on Caleb's screen. There were names attached to some of those people, families waiting for answers in places far beyond Cotter County, and others whose absence had not yet reached any official database. He pictured Eli noticing each frightened face and trying to carry them all back in his notebook because he had nothing else with which to help.
"I'm not going to start a fight," Rhett said. "But we're not leaving them there if the trucks move before help arrives." Foley was quiet for a moment. "I know what kind of man you are," he replied. "I also know those people need living witnesses, not another dead friend. Keep the authorities informed of exactly what you see."
Inside the warehouse, Norah Mercer sat in a small office beneath lights that gave everyone the color of old paper. Her wrists had been restrained during the first few minutes after she was confronted, then freed when a supervisor decided she was less trouble sitting behind a desk than struggling against a chair. Two men stood near the door, and a third examined her employee file with the theatrical concentration of someone pretending a decision had not already been made. Norah kept her breathing controlled and focused on details she could describe later if she survived to describe anything at all.
She had entered Hale's organization six weeks earlier under a genuine temporary employment contract and a shortened form of an older family name. The work had consisted of scheduling freight appointments and reconciling delivery invoices, ordinary tasks that placed documents in front of her without requiring her to steal a single file. She had copied only information she was authorized to access in the course of her duties and preserved observations separately when she saw discrepancies. What she had found was enough to confirm the existence of a trafficking network reaching into other states.
The human cost of that confirmation had been almost unbearable. Workers spoke of passengers as though they were inventory; supervisors worried more about transport delays than about people asking for their families. Norah had glimpsed people waiting behind locked partitions, and some had looked at her with the desperate expectation that anyone carrying paperwork might have the authority to open a door. She had forced herself not to act recklessly, knowing a failed attempt might leave them more heavily guarded and her evidence destroyed.