At dawn, she slipped the photo into her bag and boarded the discreet bus that Baste used for his secret journeys.
The driver, a slim man with a scar on his cheek, nodded wordlessly and turned into a narrow street.
They stopped in front of an unassuming brick building with boarded-up windows and a rusty sign hanging crookedly that read “Mendoza Charity Center.”
Inside, the smell of incense and old paper wafted through the air.
Clara’s footsteps echoed as she followed the faint buzzing sound toward the back room.
There, engineers monitored banks of screens displaying diagrams of factories, illegal gambling operations, and corrupt officials.
In the center, on an elegant table, lay a stack of envelopes, each marked with a name she recognized: “Mayor Ramos,” “Luz Corp,” “The Gómez Family.”
