Nobody answered immediately.
Then he said, “That is what I intend to find out.”
He asked me to stay.
I almost laughed.
Twenty minutes earlier, his men had dragged me from my car.
Now the most feared man in the city wanted my help.
“I’m not part of whatever this is,” I said.
“No,” he replied.
“That may be the only reason I trust what you saw.”
That sentence kept me in the house.
Not because I trusted him.
Because Eli still stood beside me.
His father moved us into a smaller room off the entrance hall.
No weapons were visible there.
No raised voices followed us.
Someone brought Eli a towel and hot chocolate.
I refused the coffee offered to me.
My hands were shaking enough already.
Eli’s father placed his phone on the table.
“For several weeks,” he said, “information meant for a small number of people has reached people outside that circle.”
He did not explain what information.
He did not need to.
“You have a leak,” I said.
His mouth tightened.
“I thought I had one.”
“And now?”
“Now I think I have several.”
The hidden war had not started that night.
It had simply reached his son.
The man on the phone had been part of the security detail trusted with Eli’s movements.
According to his father, only a handful of people should have known the boy’s route.
Someone had changed it.
Someone had diverted the child into a public library.
Someone had then lied directly to his father and claimed Eli was safely asleep in a vehicle.
The obvious explanation was kidnapping.
But something about it felt wrong.
“If they wanted to take him,” I said, “why leave him somewhere he could ask for help?”
His father leaned back slightly.
“Exactly.”
I looked at the clock.
“What time does the man think the library closes?”
His father looked at me.
“Why?”
“Because we officially close at 8:30.”
Eli’s eyes lifted toward me.
I continued.
“He was told to wait near the children’s shelves.
If whoever left him planned to come back after the building emptied, they expected him to be alone near closing.”
The room went silent again.
His father reached for his phone.
“Exterior footage,” he told one of his men.
“Check the alley and staff entrance from 8:20 onward.”
The answer came several minutes later.
A second black SUV had entered the alley at 8:27.
Two minutes before I found Eli.
It remained there until 8:33.
