Service dog urgently barks at Pregnant Woman… But when officers Discovered the Reality, it was far too late…

Back at Security HQ, Thatcher pulled the footage from the clinic hallway. And there it was. 11.46 PM.

Two men, dressed as paramedics, pushing a gurney. Come. Professional.

Marlowe, unconscious, strapped in. No struggle. They even nodded at the night staff.

Fake credentials. Real uniforms. And gone in less than 90 seconds.

He paused the screen. Zoomed in. A patch on the gurney bag.

Barely visible. Rion. A name from a past he’d hoped was buried.

A name tied to operations he was ordered never to speak of. Thatcher stared at the screen, jaw clenched, heart racing. They hadn’t just predicted she’d come.

They were waiting for her. Some files are never meant to be opened, unless you’re the one they buried them for. Thatcher sat in the dim light of his kitchen, a steaming mug of black coffee untouched in front of him.

Bishop lay by the door, alert but still. The name R-A-E-O-N echoed through his mind like a war drum. That was no ordinary group.

R-A-E-O-N had been a black cell, a shadow operation that technically didn’t exist on paper. Born out of a post 9-11 intel initiative, dissolved publicly in 2011, but rumored to still operate under deep cover. Hollis had hinted at them once, in whispers, during a patrol in Helmand.

They don’t extract people, Hollis had said. They erase them. Thatcher needed intel, and he knew only one person crazy enough to still keep an off-grid archive of declassified dirt.

Albie Crane, a conspiracy theory junkie and former NSA analyst who’d gone rogue years ago. He lived off the grid in an old trailer in the hills outside Columbus. Thatcher hadn’t seen him in over a decade, but if anyone still had something on R-A-E-O-N, it’d be Albie.

Driving through the night, Thatcher kept replaying the footage in his head. The calm precision of the imposter medics. The badge.

The message. They weren’t improvising, they were executing a plan that had probably been in place for years. If Hollis left behind something powerful enough to wake up R-A-O-N again, it had to be more than just a list of names.

It had to be proof of something they’d kill to keep hidden. Albie’s trailer looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. Solar panels, wires hanging from satellite dishes, and a sign on the door that read, smile, you’re already compromised.

When Albie opened the door, barefoot and wearing a t-shirt that said, I don’t trust me either, he didn’t even flinch at the sight of Bishop or Thatcher. Told you this day would come, he muttered. I’ve got two backups of the ghost file.

But if you’re here, it means one of them is already in motion. Thatcher raised an eyebrow. You knew about Hollis? Albie grinned grimly.

Didn’t know him. But I tracked the operation. The asset extraction gone wrong.

The sudden blackout in comms. That wasn’t just a mission. That was a cover-up.

And your friend? He wasn’t just a soldier. He was the last man standing between that file, and the world. Inside, Albie slid open an encrypted hard drive and pulled up a folder marked with a skull icon.

The screen flickered before revealing a single video file. This is what they buried, Albie whispered, and what they’ll kill to bury again. Thatcher leaned in.

The screen showed a dark interrogation room. A shadowy figure sat across from a man bound to a chair, bruised, barely conscious. Marlow’s eyes.

Hollis’s face. And a voice off camera. Tell us where you hid it, or your child disappears.

Some rescues aren’t planned on maps, they’re built on regret. The grainy footage from Albie’s monitor played over and over in Thatcher’s head as he drove back toward Red Hollow. Hollis, battered and broken, refusing to give up the location of what they wanted.

The man off camera never showed his face, only his voice, cold and commanding. But what haunted Thatcher most wasn’t the violence. It was the moment Hollis looked up and whispered, She’s innocent.

You don’t touch her. Ever. That single phrase told him everything he needed to know.

Hollis had planned for this. He knew they’d come, not for him, but for his daughter. Thatcher had seen enough covert ops to know the signs.

RAON hadn’t just resurfaced. They had rebuilt. And Marlow’s appearance, pregnant, vulnerable, searching for answers, had triggered something.

A protocol. An alert. Something buried deep within systems that no longer had names.

And now she was in their hands. What they wanted was either still inside her, or worse, they believed she was the key to finding what Hollis hid two decades ago. Back at the airport security hub, Thatcher pulled in favors.

Accessed closed flight logs. Surveillance records. Vehicle exits.

In less than six hours, he traced the van that took Marlow to a decommissioned military warehouse 14 miles outside the city. It was listed under a dummy logistics company, Cerberus Solutions, which, according to Albi, had been linked to RAON Black funding during the early 2000s. Everything lined up.

The trap was built. And Marlow was at the center of it. He couldn’t go through official channels, not with RAON involved.

They had reach. Influence. Possibly even moles inside law enforcement…